Lithium ion batteries are nearing the limits of their possible power capacity, while the power requirements of mobile devices are increasing quickly. Something’s got to give.
If your awesome new smartphone is to have any hope of lasting longer than a day on one charge, it's going to need more power than a typical lithium ion battery can deliver.
Used to be, you could forget your feature phone’s charger at home, go on a long-weekend vacation, and--assuming that you didn’t use it to play hours of Snake--still come home with enough battery life left on it to call a cab.
Today, though, we’re wedded to our chargers, and glare hawkishly at people who hog airport and coffee-shop outlets for too long. Switching over to superfast 4G networks, as many smartphones will in 2011, is only going to exacerbate this problem; and reports already indicate that 4G devices tend to have pitiful smartphone battery life. In fact, the power requirements of the technology being built into mobile devices is growing at twice the pace of battery-capacity increases, according to one Verizon executive.
But catching up with mobile power requirements won’t be quick or easy for the battery industry, and continuing difficulty may discourage public adoption of new 4G devices. Unfortunately, the problem isn't a simple matter of mobile battery R&D falling behind. It extends to the chemical nature of batteries, the way research and development is funded in the global market for mobile tech, and the many different demands users place on our phones and tablets.
Constrained by Chemistry
Battery technology and smartphone technology are at two very different stages in their lifespans. “Unlike smartphones, battery technology has been evolving for over a century, and is much further down the development curve, meaning that improvements in htc battery technology, while steady, no longer happen at the breakneck speed of younger technology like smartphones,” says Keith Nowak of phone and tablet maker HTC.
But aside from tiny incremental improvements in solid-electrolyte efficiency, lithium ion polymer batteries for handheld tech products haven't changed drastically in more than 15 years. Almost all of the batteries that power today's smartphones and tablets run on some variant of the lithium ion polymer battery--a cell in which the anode and the cathode are packaged with a solid, gel-like electrolyte (the substance that makes the battery conduct electricity). This solid-electrolyte design was developed commercially in 1996 as manufacturers sought a sturdier battery for mobile tech products. Previously, cell phones had run on lithium ion batteries with liquid electrolytes, which were bulky and relatively unstable.
Today, mobile phone battery researchers continue to increase the capacity of lithium ion polymer batteries. Since a battery’s power comes from its transfer of electric-charge-bearing electrons between the anode and the cathode, battery researchers focus primarily on optimizing the multitude of mini-transfers. “A lot of chemical reactions can take on a life of their own, and battery scientists try to control that,” said Irving Echavarria of Gold Peak Industries, a company that manufactures all types of consumer batteries, including lithium ion variations. Echavarria estimates that 80 percent of the processes in a battery can be accurately harnessed. And the smaller the battery’s window of errant chemical reactions, the more efficiently the battery will provide power. Battery makers continue to achieve capacity gains by pushing closer to that 80 percent efficiency limit.
But the incremental advances in efficiency aren’t keeping pace with the increasing energy demands of smartphones and other mobile devices. Frustrated by the chemical and physical limits of batteries, developers who want to get longer run times out of smartphone batteries must either add active material to the battery by making the inactive parts of the battery smaller (a technique that has already reached limits of its own) or move from lithium ion polymer to a different, as yet not fully researched material.
Venkat Srinivasan, a battery technology researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, notes that, “the physics that dictates evolution in batteries is different from the physics that dictates evolution in smartphone electronics.” It seems that batteries are doomed to drag along behind the wagon train until a Eureka moment happens occurs with a better material.
New Ideas Coming, Slowly
Small signs of innovation are visible on the nokia battery-life horizon. The unanswered questions are how quickly they’ll emerge, and whether the technology involved will be scalable to serve the entire mobile world.
Lithium ion research continues in the R&D labs of many consumer-battery makers. And university labs across the country have churned out paper after paper on the possibilities of graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite that has the potential to store and transmit energy (though any use of graphene for consumer batteries is still a long way off). But the U.S. government (like many other national governments) has provided almost no funding for consumer battery research, instead putting money into research for vehicle and military-use batteries.
It’s Not Just the Battery, Though
Designing a mobile device is no longer just about perfecting its computing power, design, and user interface; it’s about doing all those things with far less power. At some point, consumers’ desire for faster data plans and monster multitasking capabilities will be overtaken by the simple need for a device that can remain in operation for at least one full workday.
Smartphone screens are getting larger and supporting higher resolutions, both of which suck power like crazy. Lowering your screen's brightness might help eke a few extra minutes out of your battery, but Apple, HTC, Motorola, and other major phone manufacturers are unlikely to move to smaller or duller screens anytime soon. Nevertheless, some (including Samsung and LG Electronics) are focusing on making new types of displays that are no dimmer but use less power.
Another major power drain relates to increasingly complex apps, which impose ever-steeper processing requirements. Most smartphones contain Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS radios inside, and in many instances these components operate simultaneously. The GPS radio, in particular, is a notorious battery killer: You can see the battery bar getting shorter as you run your navigation app. Newer phones add a 4G radio chipset, which requires a lot more processing power to decode far greater amounts of data encoded in the LTE wireless spectrum. On top of all that, new 4G phones have two different chip sets, to connect with a 4G spectrum and with the carrier’s older 3G network. As a result, you can count on your samsung battery to deliver only about a day of juice to your phone, if you're lucky.
One consequence of runaway power consumption is that the makers of mobile processors are feeling a lot of pressure to produce more-efficient chips for phones.
James Bruce, an executive at ARM, which develops and licenses processors for almost all mobile devices in the world, explains that phone hardware is much more battery-efficient today than it was when phones lasted longer, but "the difference between a Nokia [feature phone] and a smartphone today is that there just wasn’t enough there for people to keep using their phones all day."
Dual Cores Will Help
The dual-core processors (made by ARM) that have shown up in a few 2011 smartphones (auch as the HTC Droid Bionic and the Motorola Atrix 4G) may offer some hope. According to Bruce, "dual-core” phones can delegate simple tasks to one core, while directing more-complex (and more-power-hungry) tasks to the other core. As Bruce explains, if the phone is doing only simple tasks--such as sending text messages or running the calculator--on one core, the other core can power down, thereby saving battery life.
The idea that more cores could be the secret to using less battery power may seem a little counterintuitive, but ARM isn’t the only company trying to solve the problem of too-short sony ericsson battery life in that way.
At the beginning of May, a company called Adapteva announced their new "Epiphany Microprocessor," which they hope to place in smartphones and tablets alongside ARM dual-core processors.
Adapteva’s new processor can accommodate up to 64 cores on a smartphone chip. While planting a 64-core chip in a smartphone sounds like the opposite of a power-saving measure, Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of the company, says that most smartphones today run a scaled-down, power-hungry version of a desktop processor to connect to the Internet, run games, and play music.
The Epiphany processor, on the other hand, is a chip optimized for performing specific parts of general commands in tandem with the phone’s CPU (which does all of the phone’s general processing). The processor can streamline the offline duties of the phone to make gesture and facial recognition faster, for example. Olofsson says that this design could "put the power of a laptop in a smartphone today."
It’s the Apps
Smartphone apps are the final culprit in our rogues' gallery of smartphone battery killers (with the physical limits of batteries ranking as the first culprit). An app's power usage is one of the things Apple examines when deciding whether to approve an app for sale at the App Store. “[Apple] wouldn't let you intentionally ruin battery life, like if you were running a game that didn't require GPS, they would reject the app if it was pinging a GPS signal every 10 seconds,” says Cameron Vanga, a developer with iPhone app maker 9magnets.
Though the Android app market might harbor a larger number of potential power-sucking apps, more-established developers usually make an effort not to use more battery life than they need to get the app to function properly, for fear of receiving low ratings or having users delete the app. “Beyond maybe GPS applications, most users are good at correlating which apps are going to kill battery,” Vanga notes.
Most smartphone users are okay with taking their phones out for the day and then plugging them in to a charger each night, but battery makers are going to have to step up soon to deal with the voracious appetites of the miniature computers that everyone is relying on more and more every day. If innovation in computer battery technology doesn’t pick it up a little, the breakneck speed at which mobile tech innovation has been racing along could come crashing to a halt against a usability wall.
2011年5月19日星期四
2011年5月18日星期三
Environmental Concerns
Besides dwindling resources, we also have environmental issues. Concerns relating to burning fossil fuel were first published in the early 1970s, governments acknowledged the possible environmental impact in 1991, and 20 years later global warming is continuing at an alarming rate. The 39 percent increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) since 1900 may have appeared harmless at first, but scientists are beginning to worry about the most rapid changes in temperature patterns in recorded history. Thousands of initiatives have been discussed, some have been implemented, but few slow the production of greenhouse gas and the imbalance continues to grow. We have gotten into whitewater rafting — we are all in it and it’s too late to get out. Everyone hangs on for the ride, lest we drown!
To reflect on our frivolous energy consumption, let’s step into a time capsule and fly 500 years into the future. As we mingle with the crowd in the new world, we hear folks grumbling about the boisterous oil pow-wow that started in the early 1900s and lasted until the end of 2000. We learn that these future generations despise the lavish lifestyle of the past. They say, “Our forefathers burned the vast global oil reserve virtually overnight, built cities with only the car in mind to satisfy adult pleasures, and gave little consideration to children, future sustainability and quality of life.”
No one likes changes, and when the medical associations realized in the 1970s that smoking tobacco is harmful to human health, US president Ronald Reagan hinted, and I paraphrase, “Yes, we must tell citizens to smoke less, but let’s not hurt the tobacco industry.” In newspapers we read how governments spend billions of dollars to reduce the dependency on oil through subsidy, and on the next page we are bombarded with full-page ads promoting monster SUVs and trucks offering larger engines and more horsepower than last year’s models. Governments must work with the private sector to achieve energy sustainability and prepare for alternate energy resources. Opposing the objective is like putting one jet engine on reverse-thrust while flying mid air.
Will our politicians have the strength to lead the world after the peak-oil era? Giving subsidies to encourage old habits for the sake of short-term economical and political gains will not prepare us for the future. Instead of racking up debts to hide from the true cost of energy, a strong government should build reserves to prepare for the higher energy costs. Biblical Joseph did this in Egypt 3,000 years ago. Foretold in a prophetic dream about seven prosperous years followed by seven meager years, Joseph stored grain during the bountiful seven years to bridge the famine years that followed (Genesis 41). It seems as if our Creator has given man enough intelligence to restrain nature but not enough to prevent destruction. Energy, the servant that brought much prosperity, may one day turn back and demand its wages.
To satisfy the hunger for energy, we devour more resources than the Earth can provide. Our consumption is one-and-a-half times what the Earth can produce in a sustainable continuum. Governments are hesitant to educate citizens to live with less, lest the economic will suffer. Yet, while energy is still abundant and cheap, we must begin reducing consumption and switch to renewable resources, an exercise that will gradually replace oil. Scientists have made several attempts at this in the past, but the results have been mixed.
In the 1990s, we put faith in the fuel cell using clean hydrogen. Technical hurdles and high costs still stand in its way as an alternative to the internal combustion engine. The first decade in the twenty-first century drew the world to renewable energies such as solar power, wind energy and bio-fuels. While this is a positive more, these energies cost several times more than fossil fuels, and to compensate governments provide subsidies. An installed solar system costs.
$10–12 per watt; generating one kWh is $0.40. Wind power comes in at roughly half this. Meanwhile, electricity from the gird is only $0.10kWh in many parts of the world. It costs $9 to produce 10 liters (2.6 US gallons) of ethanol. The limitation of ethanol production is availability of land and sufficient water.
We cannot afford another miscalculation, especially when our governments have spent billions of tax dollars to develop a laptop battery for the vehicular powertrain. This outlay comes at a time when our countries are already in deep debt and citizens are not prepared to change their way of life. Nor are cities being planned for efficient transit and fewer cars.
The battery of the future should do more than provide transportation. It must solve our future energy needs by capturing electrical energy from renewable sources and delivering it to the people for consumption. This super battery must store energy when it is available in abundance and distribute it when the demands are high. Such a cycle would be sustainable and do minimal harm to our environment.
No battery exists today that is capable of substituting for fossil fuel. Science may one day discover a power source that lies outside the electrochemical dell battery and works on the law of physics, producing energy in a continuous form much like our sun. Once we shift our minds away from oil, such an achievement might be possible.
Pledge to Humanity
The goal for humanity is to attain an environment that is sustainable, find spiritual fulfillment and provide social justice. Rich nations may not reach this objective without the help of poorer countries. The developing world might one day come forward to teach the well established that material possessions do not satisfy and that the deeper meaning of life lies in love, relationships and spiritual fulfillment. These caring people will tell the rich nations to go back to the basics and rediscover the bounty of this earth by letting go of excess baggage. Individuals who find the virtue of simplicity will enjoy life more with fewer material possessions than those who have plenty and strive for more.
To reflect on our frivolous energy consumption, let’s step into a time capsule and fly 500 years into the future. As we mingle with the crowd in the new world, we hear folks grumbling about the boisterous oil pow-wow that started in the early 1900s and lasted until the end of 2000. We learn that these future generations despise the lavish lifestyle of the past. They say, “Our forefathers burned the vast global oil reserve virtually overnight, built cities with only the car in mind to satisfy adult pleasures, and gave little consideration to children, future sustainability and quality of life.”
Folks in the new word fret over the environmental damage that forced millions of farmers in water-starved territories to flee the land because of encroaching deserts. School textbooks describe how during the time of cheap oil, wealthy businessmen lined their pockets while politicians sank the countries into debt so deep that it became impossible to repay the money borrowed. Folks wonder why educated government leaders could not predict the end of cheap oil.
Will our politicians have the strength to lead the world after the peak-oil era? Giving subsidies to encourage old habits for the sake of short-term economical and political gains will not prepare us for the future. Instead of racking up debts to hide from the true cost of energy, a strong government should build reserves to prepare for the higher energy costs. Biblical Joseph did this in Egypt 3,000 years ago. Foretold in a prophetic dream about seven prosperous years followed by seven meager years, Joseph stored grain during the bountiful seven years to bridge the famine years that followed (Genesis 41). It seems as if our Creator has given man enough intelligence to restrain nature but not enough to prevent destruction. Energy, the servant that brought much prosperity, may one day turn back and demand its wages.
To satisfy the hunger for energy, we devour more resources than the Earth can provide. Our consumption is one-and-a-half times what the Earth can produce in a sustainable continuum. Governments are hesitant to educate citizens to live with less, lest the economic will suffer. Yet, while energy is still abundant and cheap, we must begin reducing consumption and switch to renewable resources, an exercise that will gradually replace oil. Scientists have made several attempts at this in the past, but the results have been mixed.
In the 1990s, we put faith in the fuel cell using clean hydrogen. Technical hurdles and high costs still stand in its way as an alternative to the internal combustion engine. The first decade in the twenty-first century drew the world to renewable energies such as solar power, wind energy and bio-fuels. While this is a positive more, these energies cost several times more than fossil fuels, and to compensate governments provide subsidies. An installed solar system costs.
$10–12 per watt; generating one kWh is $0.40. Wind power comes in at roughly half this. Meanwhile, electricity from the gird is only $0.10kWh in many parts of the world. It costs $9 to produce 10 liters (2.6 US gallons) of ethanol. The limitation of ethanol production is availability of land and sufficient water.
We cannot afford another miscalculation, especially when our governments have spent billions of tax dollars to develop a laptop battery for the vehicular powertrain. This outlay comes at a time when our countries are already in deep debt and citizens are not prepared to change their way of life. Nor are cities being planned for efficient transit and fewer cars.
The battery of the future should do more than provide transportation. It must solve our future energy needs by capturing electrical energy from renewable sources and delivering it to the people for consumption. This super battery must store energy when it is available in abundance and distribute it when the demands are high. Such a cycle would be sustainable and do minimal harm to our environment.
No battery exists today that is capable of substituting for fossil fuel. Science may one day discover a power source that lies outside the electrochemical dell battery and works on the law of physics, producing energy in a continuous form much like our sun. Once we shift our minds away from oil, such an achievement might be possible.
Pledge to Humanity
The goal for humanity is to attain an environment that is sustainable, find spiritual fulfillment and provide social justice. Rich nations may not reach this objective without the help of poorer countries. The developing world might one day come forward to teach the well established that material possessions do not satisfy and that the deeper meaning of life lies in love, relationships and spiritual fulfillment. These caring people will tell the rich nations to go back to the basics and rediscover the bounty of this earth by letting go of excess baggage. Individuals who find the virtue of simplicity will enjoy life more with fewer material possessions than those who have plenty and strive for more.
2011年5月2日星期一
MSI A6200 review: A basic laptop for users who are on a budget
MSI's A6200 is a 2.4kg, 15.6in laptop with a simple configuration and run-of-the-mill features. It's a budget model that's aimed at users who want to spend less than $600 on a computer that can be used for office tasks, Web browsing and even for managing music and video files.
Specifications and performance
The A6200 runs an Intel Pentium P6100 CPU, which has two cores and a frequency of 2GHz. While it was released in 2010, it's not as fast or as efficient as an Intel Core i3 CPU, but it's nevertheless competitive when performing office and multimedia tasks. This was shown in our Blender 3D rendering and iTunes MP3 encoding tests, in which it recorded 1min 39sec and 1min 23sec, respectively.
Its Blender score is around 40sec slower than a typical Core i3-based notebook at a similar price point, such as the Medion Akoya E6224 (MD 98630), and its iTunes time is only 7sec slower. This means it will be a little slow to perform taxing tasks, but not painfully slow. Its time to convert a DVD file into a 1.5GB Xvid file was 1hr 26min, which is only 13min slower than the Core i3-based Medion. Compared to other Pentium-based notebooks we've seen, such as the HP Pavilion G62, the MSI proved to be slightly faster overall.
In 3DMark06, the MSI's integrated Intel graphics recorded a score of 1747, which is faster than the HP's 1434. You can't use the MSI for gaming, but it's fine for viewing high-resolution photos and high-definition videos. You can even plug it in to your TV using HDMI to watch videos and view photos at Full HD as opposed to the screen's native 1366x768-resolution.
The rest of the A6200's configuration is solid: you get 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM and a 500GB hard drive. It's good for multitasking and it has plenty of space for photos and Internet downloads. You can add external hard drives via any of its three USB 2.0 ports, although the location of two of these ports at the back of the notebook is inconvenient. The rear of the notebook also has HDMI and VGA ports. You get a DVD burner on the right side, while the left side has a 10/100 Ethernet port, microphone and headphone ports, an SD card slot, and also an ExpressCard/34 expansion slot — it's rare to see this type of slot on a cheap laptop. You also get 802.11n Wi-Fi and a webcam.
Build quality and user comfort
The A6200's built quality isn't stellar, but for $599 that's hardly surprising. There is some movement along the edge between the top and bottom pieces of the chassis and this is noticeable when you rest your right hand on the palmrest. The hinges are a little too soft, but they are able to hold the screen in place without any problems. The keyboard is decent, but it does bounce a little as you type — after a while you get used to it. It comes with a number pad that has full-sized keys, but the right arrow key is located under the one key, which can be off-putting if you're used to hitting a proper number pad.
We're not fans of the touchpad, which sometimes felt very resistive in our tests and it also doesn't support gestures. Its left- and right-click buttons share the same button molding, which we don't like — if you press it too close to the middle, it will sometimes invoke the wrong button.
Like almost all cheap laptops we've seen recently, the MSI has a glossy screen that's very susceptible to reflections. Its vertical viewing angles also aren't great, and this can be annoying when watching videos. It has decent brightness and contrast though and it's fine for viewing photos and doing office work — as long as you angle it so that lights don't reflect off it.
Battery life
A 6-cell battery sits in the spine of the A6200 and it performed almost as expected in our rundown test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video. It recorded a time of 2hr 25min in this test, which is only 1min off the 2hr 26min that the HP Pavilion G62 recorded in the same test. However, the G62 uses a slightly faster CPU. You can get more battery life out of the MSI if you dim the screen and perform tasks that don't require too much CPU time (such as Word processing and basic Web browsing).
Conclusion
While the A6200 doesn't make use of Intel's Second Generation Core (Sandy Bridge) CPUs, its Pentium P6100 is still a decent processor and it will handle basic tasks without being sluggish. That said, you should only consider buying this laptop if you are on a strict budget and can't afford a Sandy Bridge-based model. Otherwise a Core i3-based Sandy Bridge model is preferred as it will give you better performance and laptop battery life.