How heavy of a smartphone user are you: light, average, heavy, dear god slow it down? For me, I’m always doing something on my phone. It’s the nature of the geek no doubt. At any given point, I’ve got at least half a dozen conversations going on, moderating comments, looking for new topics for articles, and whatever else tickles my fancy at that moment. It is those data intensive tasks and constant pinging of the network that kills smartphone batteries relentlessly. For some time, various groups and scientists have claimed that the next generation battery would save us from the wall outlet situation we face every day. But then it got me thinking, why is it always the batteries fault? Couldn’t the network be made more efficient?
Nokia Siemens Networks thought that very same thing. And when a bunch of scientists/developers/engineers clutter together in a room for long hours, pure geniusness is bound to come forth. And come forth it did.
CPC, or “Continuous Packet Connectivity” as it is called recently celebrated it’s first successful phone call between Nokia Siemens developers. The most interesting point of CPC is that once it’s integrated into a carriers HSPA+ network, battery life for end users on phones has been claimed to increase as much as 100% for data related tasks and up to 50% for voice related tasks.
The way it works is pretty simple and honestly I don’t know how or why it’s taken so long. As most of you know, even when your phone isn’t in the process of sending/receiving a call/voice traffic or any type of data traffic, the radio inside still beams out signals constantly telling itself where it’s at etc. etc. With the use of CPC’s 3GPP Release 7 protocol, (the “discontinuous transmission and reception method”) the device’s transmitter and receiver are shut off to preserve battery life. Supposedly, the end user won’t be able to tell any difference. Read that as basically saying you’ll still get calls, texts, twitter notifications, and so on instantly just as before. Except now your battery will last longer than three hours.
Sign me up! Hopefully cellular carriers see the huge benefits CPC can provide them as well as customer sand integrate this into future network upgrades.
Doesn’t 100% battery life increase without changing a single thing about you, your phone, or mobile habits sound nice?
More information on CPC available at WirelessTechBites.
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