Where’s WALDIO? Innovative Tech Extends Smartphone Battery Life By 39 Percent

It's pretty much an inevitability: our out-of-the-box smartphones are nice and fast, but before too long, they demand a refresh for a slight taste of the original performance parameters. This is especially true on Android, both for smartphones and tablets (both of which I have a lot of experience), and there are many excuses for it. A poor file system, "bit rot", too much bloat, and so forth.

If a research team out of Seoul has its way, we could see some dramatic improvements to both performance and battery life in the future. The tech is called WALDIO, an interesting acronym that stands for "Write Ahead Logging Direct IO". Where's WALDIO? Under the hood, taking on the role of data handler.

Flash memory can become well-worn over time

There are a number of different things WALDIO does to achieve its goal, but it ultimately cuts down on writes to the flash memory, preserving its life and performance, while at the same time improving battery life as a direct result of the eased I/O load. The tech utilizes both the standard ext4 file system and SQLite database system, so it's a top layer that's responsible for these improvements.

WALDIO's creators claim that over time, the speed of smartphones can be improved by 14x (versus well-worn devices), while devices with a built-in battery could see improvements of up to 20x. Because of all the saved writes, battery life can be improved by upwards of 39%.

If WALDIO can do all that it says it can, and doesn't impact the integrity of our data at all, it looks like a good bet. Whether or not the market will pick it up is another story.