The worst thing about your iPhone or Nokia or Blackberry? Okay, besides the cost and carrier?
Battery life.
Near as I can tell, our most advanced personal technologies still rely on 19th century notions of chemistry and physics. And there's nothing magical and revolutionary about that.
Hydrogen doesn't work. Fuel cells haven't worked. Can we possibly extract more life out of a lithium-ion or ni-cad battery? Probably not much more. Beyond this, no one cares more about the personal smartphone experience than Apple. So I continue to believe they will acquire or financially support innovative battery technology. Maybe they should consider this dark silicon stuff:
It may sound like a mineral used in an evil scientist’s death ray, but ‘dark silicon’ actually refers to underused transistors found in modern microprocessors — and scientists believe that this resource can be tapped to improve the batteries of everyday smartphones. A team of researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new prototype chip called the GreenDroid that harnesses dark silicon to improve energy efficiency by up to 11 times compared to standard mobile application processors.
UC San Diego’s GreenDroid prototype delivers improved performance through specialized processors that take advantage of dark silicon. These processors are specially designed to run heavily-used chunks of code, called “hot code,” in Google’s Android smartphone platform. The chips can respond to instructions using 11 times less energy than typical mobile application processors, and even while running code outside the conservation core, the GreenDroid is still 7.5 times more efficient that a standard mobile application processor
The use of ‘dark silicon’ is an instance where the over-use of certain elements in computer construction can lead to waste. In standard microprocessors, a large amount of transistors are left offline most of the time due to lack of power, leaving these areas of ‘dark silicon’ obsolete.
