Simply dubbed the Wii U “GamePad,” this tablet-esque controller will have dual thumb sticks, along with standard d-pad, L/R shoulder buttons, ZL/ZR shoulder buttons, A/B/X/Y face buttons, start, select, TV control, power, home, and a 6.2-inch 16:9 LCD touchscreen. There’s also motion control (accelerometer, gyroscope, geomagnetic sensor), a front-facing camera, a microphone, stereo speakers, rumble, a sensor bar, a stylus, and NFC support.

While we haven’t heard anything concrete about price yet, we have learned that having all that tech in a controller is going to cost you in battery life. You can expect to only get three to five hours per charge. Given many people’s propensity towards marathon gaming sessions, this could prove to be a huge problem. Can you imagine being in the middle of an awesome session of Zelda or Mario Kart, only to have your controller die on you? Not good. And it takes about 2.5 hours to fully charge it.

As far as other major highlights about the Wii U, it’ll use an IBM Power-based multi-core processor, AMD Radeon-based high-definition GPU, internal flash memory, SD card slots, USB storage, Wii U and Wii optical discs, 802.11/b/g/n Wi-Fi, four USB 2.0 ports, legacy support for Wii controllers and accessories, up to 1080p video (including HDMI), video chat, Internet browser, and video entertainment (Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, etc.). There’s also something called Miiverse, which is like a Mii social network to post messages and challenge friends to games.

What do you think? Are you buying a Nintendo Wii U when it launches this holiday shopping season?

[Source]

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The outside packaging, exterior shell, and just about every other component has gone untouched, but there is one very important difference. The original iPad 2 made use of a 45nm A5 processor, whereas the newer version is equipped with a 32nm A5 processor. It’s just as powerful, but it happens to be smaller and more power efficient.

Apparently, this reduction in power draw allows the “new” iPad 2 to enjoy up to 16% bettery battery life while web browsing and up to 30% better battery life when playing games. That’s pretty substantial. The trouble is that you have no way of checking which iPad 2 you’re getting unless you either crack open the shell or start running some benchmarks.

[Source]

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Now, replace your car and its gas tank with your iPhone and its battery pack. That’s exactly what seems to be happening with the iOS 5.1 update to some users in Japan. The battery reading on the iPhone has become wildly unreliable, making huge jumps in percentage in a matter of moments.

The guys at Rocket News did a test where they topped up the iPhone to 100% and proceeded to play a saved video without stopping. After letting the video play for about an hour and a half (1:15pm to 2:43pm), the iPhone showed it still had 93% battery life. That would be impressive, except that the battery reading then proceeded to flip to 50% mere moments later.

Considering how much we’ve come to rely on our smartphones, having a fairly reliable reading of the remaining battery life is pretty paramount. After all, it doesn’t matter that Siri can speak Japanese if she unexpectedly becomes unavailable because of a dead battery.

[Source]

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Kang Shin, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Michigan along with Xinyu Zhang, a doctoral student will be presenting their new power management strategy on September 21 at the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas. The strategy is not yet available commercially because it is still in the proof-of-concept stage.

According to Shin, even if smartphones are in power-saving modes, they are still on alert searching for clear communication channels and awaiting incoming information. They have discovered that this type of energy-taxing (known as “idle listening”) can occur within a huge amount of time cell phones spend in power-saving mode. On busy networks, this translates to around 80 percent.

The new approach to saving battery life is called the E-MiLi, which stands for energy-Minimizing Idle Listening. Shin and Zhang state that this could make smartphones perform idle listening in a more efficient manner.

Researchers have conducted an extensive trace-based analysis of real Wi-Fi networks to learn how much time a phone can spend in keeping a part of it active. In the end, Shin and Zhang discovered that devices in power-saving modes consume around 60-80 percent of their time in idle listening, and this depends on the amount of traffic in the carrier or network. They also stated that phones which are active and those which are in power-saving mode roughly use the same amount of battery power. Now, that’s one mind-boggling piece of information!

Are you curious about how E-MiLi works? First, it slows down the Wi-Fi clock by up to 1/16 of its normal frequency, but once the phone notices incoming information, it gets back to its normal frequency. Shin emphasized that it is well-known that people can slow a device’s clock in order to save energy, but the difficult part is to get the smartphone to recognize incoming messages while it is in the slower mode.

Shin explained that messages come with a header, and that phones could be enabled to detect these headers. This way, the gadget will be able to recognize the message coming in even if it is set in the subconscious mode. In addition to this, the researchers found out that the E-MiLi, when used with the power-saving mode, can reduce energy consumption by approximately 44 percent for 92 percent of the mobile devices when it comes to the wireless networks.

The E-MiLi is compatible with the recent phone models, so you can use it on your smartphone to boost up your battery’s life.

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The Hercules brand isn’t exactly a household name, but it is better known for the line of speakers than “real” computer equipment. Even so, they’re already onto the next generation of computing with two new eCAFE netbooks.

The EX HD eCAFE netbook is the one that boasts a “real world” battery life of “at least” 13 hours. That should be more than enough to keep you Skyping and Twittering all day long. The Slim HD eCAFE netbook, on the other hand, has a claim to fame with its less than one-inch profile.

To keep the battery life optimal, the Hercules netbooks use a ARM Cortex A8 800MHz low-power processor, solid state storage, 512MB RAM, and a fanless design. This sounds awfully gutless, but the custom Linux-based operating system is optimized for this environment. Then again, you can easily find a lot of smartphones with more juice than this.

Running through the rest of the specs, we find a 10.1-inch 1024×600 LED screen with 720p video support, a trio of USB ports, Ethernet, card reader, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and 80GB of online storage. The slim starts at an affordable $229 and the EX HD lists at $269. Expect both to ship this month.

[Read via Hercules]

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We originally heard that RIM was trying to get the PlayBook ready in time for Santa to make his rounds, but that a Q1 2011 release was considerably more likely. This was later “confirmed” by Jim Balsillie that the PlayBook would go on sale in the first quarter with a sub-$500 price tag. However, it seems that some battery concerns could push the date a little deeper into 2011, according to Shaw Wu of Kaufman Brothers.

Apparently, RIM is trying to “improve its relatively poor battery life of a few hours compared to the 6 hours for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and 10 hours for iPad.” Enterprise users certainly need some extra juice on the go, and low battery life is going to be a big no-no in this market. As such, Wu is saying that RIM won’t be ready with a commercially-viable PlayBook until May 2011.

By then, the market will have already been flooded with a series of Android tablets, not to mention the distinct possibility of an iPad 2 around the same time. RIM already missed some opportunities and if a May launch is indeed for real, they could be really late to the party. They’d need a PlayBook 2 by the time PlayBook (1) is ready.

[BGR]

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“One example of a conservation core. The small boxes in the image are the pattern of logic gates that are spatially placed over a small portion of the GreenDroid chip.” - Physorg

No, this has nothing to do with some mad scientist in an epic sci-fi action movie out of Hollywood. It has nothing to do with Dr. Evil and his “laser.” Instead, dark silicon refers to the “underused transistors found in modern microprocessors.” A prototype chip has been built by the University of California San Diego and it seems to harness this “dark silicon” to improve energy efficiency up to 11 times compared to standard processors.

The so-called GreenDroid prototype does this through “specialized processors” that make use of the dark silicon, running “hot code” (heavily used pieces of code) under the Google Android platform. When running code outside of this “conservation core,” the prototype is still 7.5 times more efficient than a standard chip.

“Smartphones are a perfect match for our approach, since users spend most of their time running a core set of applications, and they demand long battery life,” said computer science professors Michael Taylor and Steven Swanson. “As mobile applications become more sophisticated, it’s going to be harder and harder to meet that challenge. Conservation cores offer a solution that exploits a resource that will soon be quite plentiful – dark silicon.”

‘Dark silicon’ to improve smartphone battery life [PhysOrg]
‘Dark Silicon’ Could Boost Smartphone Battery Life 11 X [inhabitat]

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Open Peak OpenTablet design based on the new Intel Atom Processor Platform

As great as the newest smartphones may be, most of them suffer from poor battery life. It’s not uncommon to see iPhone and Android users reach for a wall plug every 24 hours. Intel wants to change that. That’s why the chip maker is developing a version of its Atom processor specifically for mobile phones.

Set to be a part of the Moorestone processor line, the proposed upcoming Intel Atom processor will be small enough to fit in a variety of mobile devices. This includes cell phones, mobile internet devices, tablets, and the like. So, how much more battery life can you expect?

Atom processors for netbooks help those units last longer than their larger notebook counterparts, but the smartphone jump seems even more impressive. It’s saying that these Atom-powered smartphones can last up to 10 days on a single charge. Ten days! That sure beats the two days I usually get out of my Nokia E71.

That’s ten days of standby, of course, so your mileage will naturally vary based on your individual usage patterns. Intel is saying that you can expect six hours of 3G talk time and two days of music playback, for instance.  For some reason, I’m taking these claims with a huge grain of salt. I expect the Intel Atom Z6XX series to be better than the status quo, but pushing it to over a week will be a stretch for a high-powered smartphone.

“After we delivered the first-generation Intel Atom processor with 10x thermal power reduction, we challenged ourselves to achieve 50x power reduction at the platform level,” said Belli Kuttanna, chief Intel Atom processor architect. “We are delighted to have exceeded this goal while increasing performance and are proud of the architects and designers who consistently reinvent the possibilities of Intel Architecture.”

It may work out in our favor after all. The new chips are so efficient that Intel has tweaked the three main power use components of the processor, including >50x reduction in idle power, >20x reduction in audio power, and 2-3x reductions across browsing and video scenarios . This all translates in to a superior performing device when playing HD content.

The post Intel “moorestown” now the Atom Z6XX, smartphones and tablets rejoice appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Even though I have a notebook as my primary computer, I still have it set up like a desktop when I’m working from home. I have it connected to an external LCD monitor and I make use of a wireless mouse and keyboard. This means I have to deal with batteries. With the newly announced Logitech Wireless Desktop MK710, that concern won’t come up nearly as often.

For many wireless combos, you’ll find yourself reaching for another set of batteries on a fairly regular basis. The Logitech MK710, on the other hand, touted as the “first keyboard-and-mouse combination to feature up to three years of battery life.” Three years!

Both the keyboard and the mouse connect back to your computer via the Logitech Unifying receiver, which operates over the typical 2.4GHz wireless frequency. This receiver is small enough to stay in your laptop all the time. You’ll also notice that the keyboard and mouse hop out of active mode more quickly when left idle compared to some other wireless desktops.

The Logitech Wireless Desktop MK710 will be priced at $99.99 when it launches in Europe this month. The American release follows shortly thereafter in April.

The post Logitech Wireless Desktop MK710 last three years on one set of batteries appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Lifehacker has put together a comprehensive guide to saving your smartphone’s battery. Some of the tips work universally across all smartphone platforms, whereas other tips are platform specific.

For example, you’ll want to turn off any wireless radios that you aren’t using. As you can expect, leaving the Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi on all the time can be a huge battery draw. If you can, it’s probably a good idea to shut off the 3G until you need to use it too. Other tips include keeping background apps to a minimum and using dark wallpaper images.

For the BlackBerry, you’re better off using shortcuts rather than Java-based menus. For the iPhone, use Fetch instead of Push for email and try to minimize play of games that use vibration or 3D graphics.

For more tips and exhaustive explanations, including tips specific to the Palm Pre and Google Android, hit up the Lifehacker source link below.

Source: Lifehacker

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