PowerManagement
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Apple boosts in-house chip program with $600 million acquisition
Apple has signed a licensing deal with its long-time supplier Dialog and acquired assets including 300 employees, the two companies announced. Apple will pay the UK-based firm $300 million now plus another $300 million in the future for delivery of products. It also awarded Dialog a number of new contracts for power management, charging and audio subsystem chips.
Latest iOS beta shows how battery health settings will work
In a letter to Senator John Thune, Apple confirmed that it would bring transparency to the way its iPhones handle CPU slowdowns due to aging lithium-ion batteries. If you have an Apple Developer account, you can check out the solution the company has baked right into its upcoming iOS 11.3 release. As first noticed by 9to5Mac, the iOS 11.3 beta has a new "Battery Health" system preference screen, with a "Performance Management" section.
Apple may improve your iPhone's battery life by understanding your habits
Battery-saving software on a phone tends to have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer -- it either waits until you're low on power to do anything, or limits functionality at all times. Apple may eventually take a smarter approach, if a newly published patent application is any indication. The technique would optimize your mobile device's power consumption based on both your daily activities and charging patterns. If your iPhone doesn't get much use during working hours, for instance, it could automatically throttle down for that period. The technology also adjusts power for specific events; check into a long flight and your phone will conserve battery while you're in the air. We don't know if Apple will ever use this energy-saving technology, but the patent is grounded more firmly in reality than others we've seen.
HTC One X gets unofficial power management fix, boosts battery life 10 to 20 percent
Somewhere along mike1986's development of Android Revolution HD, a custom ROM for the HTC One X, he found that something amiss with the smartphone's stock system -- its Tegra 3 power management software didn't function properly. According to the developer, an app known as NvCPLSvc.apk was misplaced in the /system/bin folder, rather than its proper destination of /system/app. Along with the custom ROM, mike1986 has released the fix as a separate bundle, which is detailed in the source below. To apply the patch, users must push the new APK to their handset via ADB, and then alter the file's permissions. Unless you're seriously hindered by your phone's battery life, however, it seems safe to wait for an official update from HTC. On the upside, users report an battery life increase in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 percent once with the fix in place, and we can only hope that all users will soon benefit from similar gains.[Thanks, Nitin]
Study: free apps drain 75 percent more power, badly built advertising to blame
It's often said there's no such thing as a free lunch and that's doubly the case for free apps. A team from Purdue University found that nearly three quarters of the power used when you run an app like Angry Birds is actually used for adverts. It developed eprof, an app that investigates what processes are draining from your battery. Loading it onto the very old-school Android-powered myTouch 3G and Nexus One (not to mention a HTC TyTn II running Windows Mobile 6.5). Drilling down into those Angry Birds figures: the game itself only consumes 18 percent of the power, while advertising platform Flurry has 45 percent and GPS location tracking a further 15 percent. Project leader Abhinav Pathak lays the blame at the feet of poorly coded apps that need to be made significantly more efficient. He's now working with Microsoft to bring his software to Windows Phone and will present his findings at the EuroSys conference in Bern next month. If you don't think you'll be able to give up free apps, just remember to shut down GPS before you start smashing those pigs.
SleepWell forces WiFi to wait its turn, keeps gadgets well-rested (update)
Ever feel like your WiFi devices' battery-lives are better off when not surrounded by peers and passersby? According to Duke University grad student Justin Manweiler and assistant professor Romit Roy Choudhury, this phenomenon is due to gadgets constantly fighting to retrieve the same data. Their Systems Networking Research Group has created a program dubbed SleepWell to alleviate the congestion; it puts WiFi to rest until the path is clear for accessing the specific data it needs, and provides improved power management all the while. The tech was shown off at MobiSys 2011 this past week and reportedly works well "across a number of device types and situations." Notably, Microsoft and Nokia (amongst others like Verizon) are backing up the project, which makes us cautiously optimistic that it could be headed for WP7 (or Windows 8, for that matter) in due time. There's no info on whether SleepWell will ever be distributed commercially, but may we suggest an LTE version to help out big V's poor ol' T-Bolt? Update: We'd like to clarify that this software currently works from the accesss point side rather than the individual devices. You'll a find an additional PDF about the project in the source links below. [Thanks, Daiwei Li]
Google 'retires' Health and PowerMeter, lets you save your vitals through 2012
Remember that Withings blood pressure monitor for iOS that we went hands-on with last week? It integrated with Google Health. The search giant's health management portal also paired with dozens of other services (a heaping handful can be seen in the image above) to aggregate and track all of your data, and share it with family members, friends, and doctors. The service didn't have the widespread impact that Google expected, however, so it's taking Health offline after the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2012. You'll have another year to download your info, or send it directly to competing services. Also on the chopping block is PowerMeter, a free energy monitoring tool that pairs with smart power meters and other energy monitoring devices to help users better understand consumption habits and ultimately reduce costs. That project will get the boot from Mountain View on September 16th, but you'll be able to log in to your account to download a CSV file. We imagine Health and PowerMeter are already plotting their trip down south, to get in a few thousand rounds of golf with Video Store at Pebble Beach. Perhaps to be joined by Buzz and Wave, in the not-so-distant future?
ST-Ericsson's PM2300 will charge smartphones and tablets twice as fast, speeding to market this fall
We can't say the methods for charging mobile devices have been top of our agenda lately, but when you're talking about speeding anything up by 100 percent, our interest is inevitably piqued. ST-Ericsson has come up with a new charger, tailored specifically for servicing tablets and mobile phones, that can juice them up at the brisk rate of 3 Amps. Efficiency is touted all over the place with this accessory, from the 60 percent improvement in PCB utilization to the 92 percent maximum power throughput rating, bringing the drably titled PM2300 dangerously close to a state of desirability. Best of all, tablets featuring its promised double-speed refilling capabilities are expected in the fall of this year, so the wait won't be long, however you look at it. [Thanks, Ola]
Intel and Capgemini to develop tablet for home energy management
If Google and Microsoft can get in on the home energy management wave then hey, why not Intel? Chipzilla is teaming up with Capgemini SA to create a "tablet-style computer" that lets humans control the power consumed by their appliances. Later, presumably when there are enough of these smart devices on the grid, it could allow utilities to more intelligently manage its electricity allocation. According to Intel's Joe Jensen, general manager for low-power embedded processors, "energy is a big part of our project to extend the fringe of computing out to the next thing." Indeed, under Paul Otellini's lead, Intel is targeting fuel pumps at the corner gas station, advertising signs, and even exercise equipment as it seeks opportunities beyond traditional computing devices -- a market Intel believes to be worth about $10 billion. The goal of the Intel / Capgemini initiative is to offer a full-service smart-grid solution, according to Steven Harris, head of smart home services at Capgemini. Mind you, Intel's involvement shouldn't come as a total surprise here, seeing as how it was showing off wall panels for real-time utility management in the -- groan -- "digital crib" way back at CES in 2010. That's one such device, pictured above. Update: Corrected spelling from "Cap Gemini" (as Businessweek presented it) to "Capgemini" -- this isn't 2004 anymore. We also managed to unearth the official press release announcing Intel's Home Energy Dashboard reference design built around the Atom processor. You'll find that after the break.
Editorial: bugs on unreleased phones don't matter (update: Motorola says phones will 'ship as scheduled')
There's a story going around today about an alleged problem in the power management unit affecting Motorola's first two dual-core smartphones -- AT&T's Atrix 4G and Verizon's Droid Bionic -- that leads to a hodgepodge of issues: overheating, weird RF fluctuation, the list goes on. Sounds like a tragedy in the making, doesn't it? Worst yet, the PMU problem is said to be a "major unfixable flaw that will plaque [sic] it forever." Bummer! But let's back up and consider the facts here. First, as best we can tell, the sources are two posters in a HowardForums thread, one of which doesn't even have the information firsthand -- he was allegedly given the news "by someone who is testing the devices." Furthermore, there's really no such thing as an "unfixable" bug; you might need to peel away several layers of software and hardware to fix an issue depending on how fundamental the flaw turns out to be, but engineers have proven time and time again that "unfixable" isn't really in their vocabulary (white paint aside, of course).
There finally piloting Nokia's Home Control Center in Finland
It sure started out as something promising. When Nokia spun off its Home Control Center technology to There Corporation last year it seemed that easy DIY home automation and power management was just around the corner. Yet here we are, almost two years after first hearing about the effort with nothing but a convoluted mess of unfriendly ZigBee and Z-Wave (to name just 2 "standards") home automation products to choose from. There is hope, small as it may be. There Corporation just announced that it's working with Mitox Oy to conduct a pilot in Finland for customers of Helsingin Energia (Helen) using a There-provided web-based solution built around the ThereGate. It allows individuals to monitor their total power consumption in real time as well as the individual devices and systems that consume energy. Better yet, There Corp employs a "rate control concept" that automatically adjusts power usage to hours when energy costs less based on simple guidelines programed by the user. Unfortunately, There Corporation's focus is on Nordic countries until 2012 before looking to dominate European home energy management in 2015. Call us crazy, but this market seems ripe for domination by a major consumer electronics company right now, not in 5 years.
PEGA Look@Me emoticon keyboard and other ASUS-funded product concepts
Asus' R&D design studio, PEGA, looks to be coming up with some surprising product concepts as part of its Between On & Off exhibition. We're betting that none of these will ever see the light of day, but we're intrigued -- and prematurely annoyed -- by the Look@Me emoticon keyboard. Stocked with 40 emoticon bits (eyes, mouths, noses), the keyboard allows users to express their emotions on a more regular basis, if that's possible. Other concepts include Embrace, a night light that emits as much light as you have opened the book; JustDrawIt!, a power management device that visualizes on / off settings for appliances with a pen; and the On&On bench that doubles as a solar charger. Sadly, the exhibition is over, but check the gallery below for some of PEGA's other concepts.%Gallery-23787%[Via OhGizmo]
Terminal Tip: Keep your Mac portable from waking when the lid is opened
Although I'm a Mac Geek by trade, I tend to avoid the terminal unless I'm out of other options. I'm a GUI kind of girl. It's the Mac OS that I love, not its Unix underpinnings. I appreciate the power of the command line - I just don't want to spend all day there. Still, once in a while I come across a tip like the one, which Glenn Fleishman posted in the most recent TidBITS, and I find myself unable to resist the urge to fire up the Terminal. This tip solves a problem that I've experienced myself and many of my clients have complained about - laptops waking from sleep while in their cases because the latch won't keep the lid closed. This can cause overheating, which can lead to a variety of other problems, like hard drive failures, etc. My solution is, of course, to fix the latch! But there are times when that isn't convenient and even if it's convenient it doesn't happen often enough for some people to even bother stressing about it. By harnessing the power of pmset, the command line app that controls power management settings, you can fix it so that your sleeping beauty stays asleep, even when the latch isn't doing its job.The command is an easy one - a single line. Ready for it? sudo pmset lidwake 0 By setting the lidwake value to 0 you prevent the machine from waking until you tap a key on your keyboard, and since the value gets written just to a plist file, it takes hold right away. Of course you'll need administrator privileges since you'll be asked for an admin password before the command is executed.For more pmset options, have a look at the "man" pages at Apple's Darwin Reference library, or open your Terminal and type "man" (without the quotes), hit return and then type "pmset" (without the quotes.)
