Smartphone battery life improves with new invention

(CBS) - If you're lucky, your smartphone battery life lasts an entire day. But over time, that number could dwindle down to a handful of hours depending on use.

Now imagine that your smartphone battery could have even more juice than that thanks to a new invention? That'd be life-changing, wouldn't it?

University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang might've found a solution to do just that. The two (heroes?) are set to present their new power management approach on September 21 at the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas.

At the moment, the innovation is just a concept - it's not yet commercially available, says University of Michigan.

So what did Shin and Zhang discover exactly? "Even when smartphones are in power-saving modes and not actively sending or receiving messages, they are still on alert for incoming information and they're searching for a clear communication channel," according to University of Michigan. "The researchers have found that this kind of energy-taxing 'idle listening' is occurring during a large portion of the time phones spend in power-saving mode - as much as 80 percent on busy networks."

The researchers realized that if they can make smartphones perform this idle listening more efficiently, it would result in longer battery life, a process dubbed "E-MiLi," which stands for Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening.

"We came up with a clever idea," Shin said. "Usually, messages come with a header, and we thought the phone could be enabled to detect this, as you can recognize that someone is calling your name even if you're 90 percent asleep."

E-MiLi will slow down your smartphone's WiFi card's clock by up to 1/16 its normal frequency, but jolts it back to full speed when the phone notices information coming in.

Sounds awesome! Now all we want to know is, when can we get our hands on the technology?