Music phones are all well and good, allowing you to cast away your MP3 player and only carry a single gadget for both your communications and tune-jamming needs, but we all know how much of a battery drain listening to music can be on your mobile handset.

NEC Electronics America has developed the single-chip uPD99910 audio processor, putting the CPU and DSP in a single unit dedicated to music playback, and in effect, adding an extra 50 hours of music playing goodness. This is said to be a ten-fold increase over what is currently plausible.

The technology is designed to accompany an application processor, and by separating the music playing from the regular application processor, a smaller power draw is needed, while still being able to make use of the default user interface. The uPD99910 audio processor is capable of quickly and easily accessing the handset’s internal flash memory, as well as expansion via SD. In addition to the latter is support for Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), a form of DRM most likely without such juice sucking capabilities.