Wi-Fi a Bigger Battery Drain Than Thought

With smartphones doing more and more, the race is on to save as much power as possible in every way possible. That means looking at each piece of hardware in the phone and finding new ways to be as miserly with power as possible.

A lot of designers and engineers probably didn’t think the Wi-Fi radio would be a problem, since it spends most of its time in sleep mode, but a PhD student, teaming with Microsoft researchers, found that Wi-Fi is in fact one of the biggest drains on the battery. Enterprise Mobile Today explains why.

Battery life is the chief obsession of smartphone makers these days, with companies making news either for improving it (Apple claims the iPhone 4 battery lasts 30 percent longer than previous models) or doing an especially bad job of it (according to criticism leveled at the EVO 4G).

Vendors have targeted a variety of phone components as being the chief culprit for energy drain, but now a study by university researchers in partnership with Microsoft Research India have found the real guilty party may be a phone’s Wi-Fi radio. To be more precise, the actual culprit manifests itself in how the Wi-Fi radio interacts with an access point.

Read the full story at Enterprise Mobile Today:


Your Smartphone Battery’s Worst Enemy? Wi-Fi Radio