Microsoft Research's Ambitious Goal Is To Have A Smartphone That Can Last Up To 7 Days In Single Charge

Microsoft Research is known for its basic research and breakthrough innovations. Speaking to Channel 9, Senior Researcher Ranveer Chandra shared his insights on his work at MSR. He worked on lots of research groups around whitespaces, energy, and wireless protocols. On talking about energy efficiency research, he revealed that Microsoft Research have set up an ambitious goal of developing a smartphone that can last up to 7 days on single charge. Microsoft started working on this from 2010 forming a virtual team of researchers from Microsoft Research Labs all over the world. These are researchers who work on hardware, networking, software, security, programming languages, sensors, etc, together this created this mission of creating super energy efficient mobile device.

He said that Microsoft Research is trying to attack this problem from various directions including exploring new battery types, how OS works with different kind of batteries, how OS deals with apps, etc,. He even revealed a case where a simple push email takes a significant toll on our smartphone battery life. Microsoft Research is now majorly focusing on how they can offload CPU process to the cloud to save battery life on the device, and how OS should treat batteries depending on the workload.

You can watch the whole video above, which I think is pretty interesting. If you want to hear only about the smartphone energy stuff, watch the video from 8:00 minute mark.