Droid Razr Maxx (long name, long battery)

No excuses for not calling the wife now.

At CES the new Droid Razr Maxx was introduced. It’s similar to the standard model, a stunningly designed android smartphone, though it’s not quite as slim. However, the selling point is the battery; it’s twice as big at 3300mh – a massive increase!

Most phones now have battery sizes of around 1200mh, with a talktime of 8 hours or so. The Razr Maxx (still a ridiculous name, no matter how many times you say it) claims 21 hours of talktime, 7 hours of web browsing, 15 hours of video viewing and a full two and a half days of music playback! This makes it the largest 4G phone battery in the world, and by quite a sizeable margin. You could probably combine my entire life’s phone calls into that with room to spare. Well, I am a guy.

Smart and sexy: I need a girlfriend.

As phones (and tablets too) become ever more sophisticated and run more demanding programmes, battery life is reduced – more power is needed to run all of the various applications simultaneously. Apart from simply developing better batteries (like the Razr Maxx and Ultrabooks), there also needs to be more progression in how they are employed. A great example here is the new Asus Transformer Prime, currently holding the crown as the king of tablets. It features quad core processors capable of running more demanding applications over the dual core generations, but it actually has longer battery. It manages this by having a 5^th companion core than only runs up to around 500Mhz, perfect for things like viewing media and web browsing and using only a fraction of the battery of its larger brothers. When more processing power is needed, this small one shuts down and one at a time the quad cores engage. Simple, but very clever.

Definitely hoping that this soon becomes the standard for phones, as the average smartphone dies by suppertime while those old gems, like the Nokia 3310, which could last up to 3 days. Amazing then, and would be now too. 

I’m after new tech to learn from this sort of example; it’s not all about hardware specs, rather hwo they are used. Rant over.