Daniel BuenoA smartphone battery doesn’t last long. Anyone who has one knows it has to be recharged almost daily. Technology developed by researchers at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) may cut power consumption on smartphones by up to 20% and limit the need for frequent recharging. “The solution doesn’t require any changes to the telephone hardware or to networks. This is a software innovation,” explains physicist Varese Salvador Timoteo of Unicamp’s School of Technology (FT). According to Timoteo, what makes smartphones drain their batteries so fast is the steady flow of data traffic, including unwanted data packages that circulate on the network. “Our solution is to launch a prediction model on the device so it can ‘observe’ traffic and ‘learn’ when to activate channels for broadband traffic,” the researcher says. The program has been successfully tested on devices that use the Android operating system. This innovation, which has already earned a patent, works on devices that use 3G or 4G technology. Edson Luiz Ursini, also from FT, and Tito Ricardo Bianchin Oliveira, a masters candidate, worked with Timoteo to develop this software.
