Student's tech promises 12x the battery life in your iPhone, BlackBerry
By Laura June 
posted Dec 19th 2008 8:12AM
posted Dec 19th 2008 8:12AM
Feeling the hurt of endlessly dying batteries on your BlackBerry (or iPhone, if that's what you're into)? Atif Shamim, a PhD student at Canada's Carleton University might have the medicine for that pain of yours. He's cleverly hacked such devices, removing all the wires that connect the electrical circuits to the antenna, and developed a module for the connection to operate wirelessly. The result, he estimates, is that his modified devices use almost 12 times less power than they normally do -- which of course means longer battery life. A paper about the device has won an award at the European Wireless Technology Conference, and Shamin has filed for a patent in both the US and Canada. There's no indication of when we might start to see tech like this on actual commercial devices, but we're pretty sure plenty of companies are going to want to get a hold of this technology like, yesterday. 
I hope it works on Sidekicks!
They-re writing about a technology, not about actual devices. The iclone and blackcherry are just examples, because everyone uses them and therefore reads the article.
To get it for your sidekick, you would have to wait until they sell an upgrade kit for outdated devices ;)
Bravo!
Do want.
Billionaire.
Did you read the article or just the headline?
"He estimates his module consumes 12 times less power than the traditional, wired-transmitter module."
That is, 1/12th the power consumption for the antenna alone...NOT the entire device.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how does that picture relate to the story?
I was going to ask the same question. Sound proof room relates to less power consumption how?
Haha yeah I was wondering about the picture as well. But i gues any increase battery effeciency is going to help. And hopefully this inspires more independet guys or gals to start really working on solutions like this. Because like KG said, this cat is gonna make some cash.
RE:PICTURE...
Atif Shamim, a Carleton electrical engineering student, sets up his equipment in the anechoic chamber at a university lab.
12x is the claim only for specific portions of the phone related to radio, not the phone overall. And even that is not directly in the original paper, here:
http://www.mwjournal.com/2008/EuMW/PDF/euwitbestpaper.pdf
Essentially this packages the chip in a ceramic pack where the ceramic pack includes the antenna and the chip couples with the antenna capacitively, in a resonant L-C series configuration. Clever, but not clear it is close to use for production device as designed since the antenna doubles as resonant frequency generator (how does it suppress radiating the carrier?), and one frequency per package...
Don't get too excited.
RE: The Picture
Don't assume this is a "sound proof" room just because it looks like one. Sound travels in...waves. What else travels in waves? RF? Bingo. The room is anechoic to radio waves, whether it is also soundproof doesn't matter to this particular researcher.
Lots of RF development takes place in rooms like this. Assume that the room is also a Faraday cage, which prevents external RF from entering.Thus, researchers can test radio equipment without the random effects of external RF noise, and internal multipath RF reflections. This is good.
But it's also bad. Test rooms like this are why industry watchers often say "It works up to xxMbps in the lab." Wireless solutions that work well in a lab like this often perform much more poorly outside of that room and in the real world.
Derek Kerton
http://www.kertongroup.com
just wanted to re-iterate what an above poster said. This module consumes 12x less power than current technologies used to connect modules to the antenna.
that's not the same thing as 12x less power for everything - and that is an ABSURD inference.
You people at engadget really are morons, this just put me over the top, i can't read your blog anymore.
The article reprinted by the University seems to suggest otherwise, hence their headline -- and the information in the body of the piece would also indicate that this could be put to use for all sorts of connections, not just the radio.
Your use of the term "morons" is interesting, as well as offensive. Feel free to read any other site you like -- we'd prefer you did, in fact.
I want one of those rooms for my house. I don't really have a use for it, but seriously...how cool does that thing look?