Smartphones vs sockets: a few words about energy saving



    If someone told you 20-25 years ago that such a thing as nomophobia would appear, then you would most likely have laughed and continued to calmly do your thing. Just in case, we recall that this term refers to the fear of being left without a mobile phone or away from it. There are even scary statistics on the Internet: allegedly as many as 66% of smartphone users suffer from nomophobia. We don’t undertake to confirm or refute it, because the source is unknown by good tradition, but one thing is certain: entertainment is entertainment, and without communication it really is unpleasant to remain. Moreover, gadgets are always discharged at the very, most inopportune moment. There are no exceptions. And it is about the batteries in smartphones that we would like to talk a little today.


    There is nothing to be done about it, but people really every year more and more depend on smartphones. And here even their developers themselves from research centers are no exception, everyone is equal. Manufacturers are well aware that the golden dream of every user is at least a week of battery life, as in the good old days of phones with buttons. But what exactly allows the battery to last longer?

    High battery power


    Battery capacity is a key indicator that primarily determines the battery life of a smartphone. This parameter is measured in mAh, milliampere-hours. The large physical size of the battery usually means that it will last longer than a more compact battery at the same load. But no one wants to carry a phone the size of a brick. However, the battery capacity can be increased by increasing its density. However, reducing the size of the battery even by 0.1 mm is a complex process and, unfortunately, not cheap. But it's worth it. For example, the thickness of our smartphone Lenovo P90 is 8.5 mm, but the inside is installed with a battery capacity of 4000 mA · hr


    Lenovo P90

    System integration


    A good battery inside the gadget is just the beginning. Indeed, even if your car has the best engine in the world, this does not mean that it will drive faster than all other cars. The speed is significantly affected by all the numerous components of the car. Also with the battery: it depends on the hardware component of the phone. Processor, software, display ... all components of the device should work to increase battery autonomy.

    An example is the compact Lenovo A5000 smartphone with a powerful quad-core processor. So that the "extra" cores do not work idle and do not consume energy while solving the simplest tasks, the smartphone simply turns them off when the user, say, reads or writes in messengers. And it activates again when some Dead Trigger 2 or GTA is launched.


    Lenovo A5000

    Another example is the dynamic voltage system in the Lenovo P70. In this unit, the frequency and voltage of the processor change automatically depending on the system load.

    Screen optimization


    It's no secret that the screen consumes the most energy. But with this, too, it is not only possible, but also something needs to be done. Let's take Lenovo P70 as an example, which is equipped with a display based on IPS-matrix with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels, diagonal - 5 inches. Its “trick” is not only in OGS (one glass solution) technology, when the matrix, sensors and protective glass are actually one. Such a display requires a lower brightness of the backlight than screens with an air gap between the matrix and the glass, and, accordingly, consumes less energy.

    Another useful thing is the built-in light sensor. It automatically changes the brightness of the screen depending on the intensity of the surrounding artificial or natural light. Well, the proximity sensor is worth mentioning, which turns off the display during phone calls. This is no longer a unique solution and is used everywhere, but it is unlikely that many suspect that they also save energy during communication.


    Lenovo P70

    Energy Saving Software


    Software also plays an important role. In the case of Lenovo smartphones, the “soft energy saver” is the “Power Manager” built into the system. This is a proprietary solution that is fully optimized for working with Android OS and Lenovo shell and is on average 30% more effective than third-party programs. It has a number of very useful features.

    For example, at the moment when you see a frightening red bar on the battery icon, then it's time to activate the emergency mode: it forcibly disables all that is superfluous and leaves only the ability to receive / send SMS and receive or make calls. There is also a feature that reduces the power consumption of the screen and GPU.

    Here you can assign a forced shutdown of any of the installed applications when the smartphone goes into sleep mode. There is a double benefit: not only energy saving, but also the fight against annoying notifications. And finally, you can set the time when the smartphone will automatically go into the emergency mode described above and exit it.

    In addition, the “Power Manager” is always ready to show the owner of the smartphone programs and technical components of the gadget that consume the most energy. Based on these statistics, it is very convenient to use the above tools.


    Power Manager in Lenovo Vibe UI

    Fast charge technology


    It happens that before going to bed you forget to charge your smartphone ... If in the morning after that you are lucky to wake up from the alarm clock, then immediately after that you will see the words “15% charge left” or something like that. Of course, during breakfast, the smartphone after such ups and downs will want to “feed” at least a little, and there are also special tools for this: fast charging technologies. The freshest, of course, so far go mainly to the flagships , but the Lenovo A5000 and P70 can also be recharged quite quickly - just 15 minutes from the power outlet, and for at least 4 hours in a row smartphones are ready to talk. In addition, as soon as the connection to the mains takes place, the smartphone recognizes it and ceases to consume the resource of its battery, which also speeds up the charging process.

    And the P70 has a special bonus: through the OTG adapter, you can connect some other discharged phone to it, and the Lenovo gadget will friendlyly share its energy with it. That is, it will act as a portable battery. This “trick" at events rescued our employees more than once.


    Battery Lenovo P70

    Finally, we will share our own hand-collected statistics on the energy consumption of our smartphones. The usage scenarios are different for everyone, so we decided to compare the gadgets in the same conditions. The first test - watching a movie in FullHD-resolution at maximum brightness and with the Wi-Fi transmitter turned off, the SIM card was also not installed. The battle went to the victorious end, that is, until the battery was completely discharged. The second test is a one-hour race in Modern Combat 5 to identify which phone will be more discharged during this time. Unfortunately, in the results there is no P90 smartphone, they could not promptly issue it in stock. The super slim Lenovo S90 is shown for comparison.


    * The maximum brightness of the Super AMOLED screen in this case is approximately 270 nits, the brightness of IPS screens is about 350 nits.
    ** Video codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC Part 10, resolution 1920x1072.


    Thank you for reading our publications on GT. We, by good tradition, are always ready to answer all questions that have arisen, including not only on this topic! :)

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