Subconscious Phones
Savvy smartphone users know they can save battery life by switching off WiFi, but few take the trouble since it’s so convenient to just leave it at the ready to speed up Internet access. Now a new subconscious-mode could let smartphone users have their cake and eat it too. Proposed by University of Michigan professor Kang Shin and prototyped by doctoral candidate Xinyu Zhang, smartphones and other devices with WiFi can license the new subconscious mode to extend smartphone battery life by as much as 50 percent. WiFi speeds Internet connections by running orders of magnitude faster than typical 3G connections, convincing most smartphone users that it is worth leaving on so that acceleration is automatic whenever a familiar WiFi signal is detected. As a result, smartphones spend most of their time in what is called the "idle listening" mode, waiting for data-packets to arrive that could be transmitted by the nearest, strongest WiFi connection, as well as listening for incoming