Juicing Up Cell Phones
Some researchers in Australia are working on extending the battery life of mobile phones in a way that could make them more useful on 3G networks. The idea is to power the battery in a variable way. Thus, depending on what the person is doing, different amounts of battery power will be used, making the battery much more efficient. This is, similar, I guess, to newer laptops that have different settings for how you want to use the battery. This all sounds useful, but the article seems to focus on 3G without actually explaining why, specifcally, this is valuable for 3G. They seem to indicate that with the variable battery life, it'll be easier to boost data transmission rates, though it's unclear how that actually works. While I can take some guesses, the real reason is probably that it really has almost nothing to do with 3G networks, but it makes a better story to throw in some buzzwords. Now, it's not just a story about longer battery life, it's about those fancy "next generation" wireless networks.
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