Items tagged with Battery Life
Google is continuing to develop new ways to preserve the battery life of your laptop. Google’s new Battery-Savings Meta Tag would allow websites to ask that Chrome enable various battery-saving features. The Battery-Savings Meta Tag will likely make an appearance in Chrome v86 and v87. Users can currently experiment with this feature through the Origin Trials platform for developers. Some websites can be very resource-intensive, including video or video-conferencing websites that have become especially popular during the current COVID-19 health crisis. Google Chrome in particular has a reputation for being power hungry (many users will even avoid using Chrome if their device is low on battery...
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Motorola’s newest Razr phone lately has been making waves, with a foldable design reminiscent of its mid-2000s predecessors. However, Motorola just recently dropped another smartphone that is more similar to the devices we have become accustomed to. The Motorola One Hyper is a smartphone that is intended to “enhance your next great adventure.” The Motorola One Hyper includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 octa-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, and up to 1TB expandable storage. The device is Motorola’s first one to have an edge-to-edge screen (6.5 inches, 2340x1080), with a 90% screen-to-body ratio. The One Hyper also ships with Android 10 and even includes a 3.5mm...
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Have you noticed your Android handset depleting its battery at a faster clip than usual? If so, the culprit could be a recent update to Google Play Services. There have been multiple reports of unusually fast battery drain on various Android phones running Google Play Services 18.3.82, suggesting there is a bug with the software. This does not appear to affect any single make or model Android phone—any Android device running the latest version of Google Play Services is prone to shortened battery life, compared whatever the normal run time might be. Source: Artem Russakovskii (via Twitter) APKMirror founder and Android Police writer Artem Russakovskii noted the disparity on Twitter, as...
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By all accounts, the Galaxy S10 is an excellent smartphone. It has one of the best displays—if not THE best, based on DisplayMate's testing—on the market, it is plenty fast, and the phone's camera performance is worthy of a flagship handset. But like anything else in this world, it's not perfect. One of the phone's imperfections is due to an apparent bug that is messing with battery life under certain conditions. In our own hands-on testing of the larger Galaxy S10+, we found battery life to be excellent overall, coming in well ahead of the previous generation Galaxy S9+, and handsets like Huawei's Mate 10 Pro and the Moto Z2 Force. It wasn't able to burst ahead of the Galaxy Note...
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Perhaps in the future, smartphones and other battery-powered gadgets will run indefinitely, never needing to be recharged (or manually recharged anyway). Until then, battery life is a primary concern. Unfortunately for some Android users, a massive ad fraud scheme could have been making their devices run out of juice way shorter than they should have been. The scheme takes advantage of in-app advertising, but in a sneaky and nefarious way. As anyone who has ever owned a mobile gadget knows, there are tons of free apps that generate revenue through banner ads and things of that sort. It's fair game—the user gets to download an app for free, and the developer gets paid for his or her time...
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Microsoft may have hoped that its Edge browser for Windows 10 would come to dominate Chrome and Firefox, but that never came to be, and never will, at least not in its current form. Instead, the Redmond outfit recently announced plans to overhaul Edge and rebuild it around Chromium, the same platform that powers Chrome. Interestingly, however, Microsoft can (and does) claim a victory over its rivals in the browser space. It has nothing to do with market share, as Firefox and especially Chrome are both more widely used than Edge, according to data collected by places like Net Applications and Stat Counter. Where Microsoft claims its victory is in battery life. "The Microsoft Edge team measured...
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Maybe one day laptops and other electronics devices will run on an endless supply of hopes and dreams. In the meantime, good old fashioned electricity is still required, and that means balancing performance with battery life. To help with that, Intel says it has come with a display technology that could extend the battery life of some laptops to a whopping 28 hours, a bold claim to be sure. But is it actually feasible? That depends on how well Intel's new 'Low Power Display' technology actually works, and how it's implemented by hardware makers. As Intel briefly explained at Computex, one of the keys to this tech is using one-watt panels made by Sharp and Innolux. This along can cut LCD power...
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Looking ahead to the next generation of wireless technology, 5G is expected to usher in much faster download speeds, allowing for higher quality streaming and potentially online gaming with less lag. The speed bump is reason enough to be excited for the eventual 5G roll out to the masses, but it's not the only one. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam thinks a side effect of 5G's benefits will be vastly improved battery life, with mobile devices lasting a month before needing to be recharged. McAdam made the surprising (and bold, quite frankly) prediction during a chat IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at IBM's Think 2018 conference this week. His reasoning for thinking that smartphones will be able to last up to four...
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Windows 10 laptops powered by Qualcomm's flagship mobile processor, the Snapdragon 835, are eventually coming. Microsoft announced as much way back at the end of last year, and talked a little more about these laptops this week at Qualcomm's annual 5G Summit in Hong Kong. One of the more interesting tidbits to emerged involved battery life—apparently these laptops will last longer than a day before needing to be charged. As it stands now, all-day battery life is not super common in the laptop world, though there have been gains made in the past couple of years. Take Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon, for example. It lasted nearly 9 hours in our home brewed video loop test that we use to test the battery...
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If you own and iPhone or iPad device and have not yet upgraded to iOS 11, you may want to hold off for the time being. A new study by researchers at Wandera, an enterprise mobile security and data management outfit, indicates that battery drain on mobile devices running the latest version of iOS is significantly higher compared to iOS 10 and earlier versions of Apple's mobile operating system. The report show that on average an iPhone or iPad running iOS 11 runs out of battery life in just 96 minutes, whereas the same devices running iOS take 240 minutes to drain the battery from 100 percent to 0 percent. Those averages are based on 50,000 moderate to heavy iPhone and iPad users in Wander's network,...
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You can browse cute cat pictures for longer than ever before, now that Opera has released a new battery saver that claims to increase battery life by about 50% compared to other browsers like Google Chrome. So far the feedback from Twitter has been positive with comments from users like @jonathanhaslett exclaiming “Somehow @opera became the best desktop web browser without anyone noticing.” Opera started testing this update in May via its developer channel. Opera Software stated, “It took us quite some time to normalize our test environments, but still the challenge was to be able to repeat the tests multiple times in order to get statistically meaningful results. Draining battery fully...
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Qualcomm is promising faster phone charges by way of Quick Charge 3.0, the next generation of its fast charging technology. What's different about Quick Charger 3.0 versus the first two iterations is the ability to employ something called Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage (INOV). In plain English, INOV is an algorithm that allows portable devices to determine the exact power level needed for optimal power transfer at any point in time rather than rely on a predetermined voltage limit across the board. It also supports wider voltage options -- a mobile device can dynamically adjust the ideal voltage level supported by that specific device from 3.6V to 20V in 200mV increments. It essentially...
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In setting up a new lab, a group of research students at Purdue University were inspired to come up with a way to put the huge amount of packing peanuts they were receiving to good use. At the suggestion of Professor Vilas Pol, the researchers developed a potential new eco-friendly application for rendering the packaging waste into lithium-ion battery anodes.Lithium-ion batteries have two electrodes, a cathode and an anode. The anode harnesses the lithium ions (which are contained in an electrolyte solution) during recharging. Today most lithium-ion battery anodes are made of graphite, however the Purdue researchers have demonstrated a means for using packing peanuts to manufacture carbon-nanoparticle...
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When Nvidia unveiled its new GeForce 800M mobile family a few weeks ago, it talked about a new set of improvements and innovations coming to laptops with through the GeForce Experience program. In the future, applications would have the option to dramatically improve battery life by limiting in-game frame rates as well. Nvidia claims that its upcoming profiles will do more than simply limit a game's frame rate, but it identified that option as one of the most useful ways to squeeze better battery life out of a system while gaming. We decided to test the idea and see just how much of a difference it could make. In this case we used an Alienware 17 laptop equipped with an AMD GPU (the R9...
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Apple iPhone 4 and 4S owners haven't much time to celebrate the release of iOS 6, which introduces a bazillion new features, along with a nifty panoramic picture mode. Unfortunately, for some users, all the goodness of iOS 6 has come at the expense of battery life. Yep, here we go again. It seems like shortened battery life is always an issue with an Apple product at any given time, and in this particular case, iPhone 4 and 4S owners have taken their complaints to the Cupertino company's support forum. "Some is massively eating battery life in 6.0. I have a 4S, and I had great battery life. 8AM-5PM workday and I would have 50 percent life left," Apple forum user Chris Howard explains. "I just...
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Intel has selected Integrated Device Technology (IDT) to develop an integrated transmitter and receiver chipset for the company's Wireless Charging Technology (WCT) based on magnetic resonance technology, it was announced today. In other words, WCT is one step closer to becoming a reality, which is exciting news whether you're hardcore geek or just a fan of gadgets. Yes, there are wireless charging platforms out there, but as Intel's Dan Snyder explains in his blog post, WCT isn't limited to inductive charging. You won't need to plop your smartphone or other gear on a special charging mat, but you will be able to wirelessly charge your devices from your notebook. No cables, no power cords,...
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When Apple rolled out Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the company claimed the operating system introduced over 200 new features to the Mac platform, but reduced battery life wasn't supposed to be one of them. Nevertheless, a large number of users have taken to Apple's support forum to complain about major dips in battery life after installing Mountain Lion. "I upgraded to Mountain Lion and now my battery life is about half of what it was before upgrading," the opening post reads. Others quickly chimed in with the same complaint. One Mac user said he used to "easily" get a full day of use on his 13-inch MacBook Pro before the battery would give up the ghost, but with Mountain Lion installed, he's...
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Developers have access to a new beta version of iOS 5 -- version 5.0.1 -- that's supposed to fix battery life issues reportedly plaguing some iPhone and iPod touch users who installed Apple's latest and greatest mobile OS. iPhone 4S owners have been particularly vocal in voicing concerns that their shiny new smartphone is giving up the ghost well before their previous iPhone device used to, even though their usage habits are the same (we haven't run into this issue ourselves). What gives? According to the release notes, Apple discovered and fixed a bug affecting battery life. What exactly that bug is, Apple didn't elaborate, but the Cupertino company did outline other changes included in iOS...
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You know, processing speed seems to be skyrocketing, but is anyone stopping to think about the impact on battery life? When it comes to notebooks and mobile phones, speed is clearly king, but only if that speed doesn't totally murder one's battery life. Some of the newer LTE phones can barely last an entire day with average use, and that's upsetting some folks at the University of Michigan. Big Blue scientists have developed a new subconscious mode for smartphones and other WiFi-enabled mobile devices could extend battery life by as much as 54 percent for users on the busiest networks. University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang...
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At the end of February, Nintendo will finally launch its 3DS handheld console in Japan, followed by a worldwide release in March. As those release dates near, Nintendo has begun serving up additional details about its 3D-capable gaming device, including battery life. According to Nintendo's recently updated product page, you can expect just 3 hours and 30 minutes of run time in 3D mode. If you're playing regular DS titles in 2D mode, things are a little better with 5 to 8 hours of rated run time, but both of these figures are approximate values and will vary "depending on the brightness of the screen," Nintendo says. We don't want to make a mountain out of a mole hill, but we can't help but be...
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Is the battery revolution upon us? Based on all the broken promises we've seen of revolutionary advancements over the past decade, we're guessing not, but we're certainly hopeful that EcoloCap Solutions is onto something. We've said for years now that battery life needs to improve in a big way on notebooks, and PC makers just need to be more honest about real-world figures from the start. But really, we just need better batteries overall--batteries that last longer and cost less. EcoloCap has just received preliminary results of the independent tests of it Nano Lithium Battery conducted by Exponent, an engineering and scientific consulting firm of Phoenix, AZ, and things are looking good so far....
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If you upgraded your old notebook to Windows 7, you may have seen a new message surrounding the battery life meter that never appeared in Vista or XP. Many users began to think that Win7 was incorrectly reporting that their battery needed replacing, and the noise got so loud that Microsoft had no choice but to investigate on their end.The message that users were seeing alerted them that they should "Consider Replacing Your Battery," and many felt that their battery was perfectly fine before upgrading to Windows 7. Of course, it's hard for anyone to swallow the fact that their battery may in fact need changing as it has degraded over time, and we guess that this scenario caused most of the uproar.After...
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