Scottish Scientists Create World's Smallest Smart Antenna

judgecorp writes "Each generation of smartphones actually has more dropped calls and worse battery life than the last, because antenna design has fallen behind, says Edinburgh-based Sofant Technologies. The firm has made a tunable, steerable RF antenna using micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) which it says will change all that. It's based on research from Edinburgh University and is designed to get the best out of LTE/4G."

Re:That's not an antenna.

[iamhassi]

No, each generation of smart phones has shorter battery life because they put bigger brighter screens on them and are connecting to higher-speed networks that require faster processing or more hardware to encode and decode the data. Display power dominates most smartphones and is closely followed by general processing power when used as a web appliance rather than as a phone.

*worse* battery life? Seems to me smartphones are getting better. Sure the screens get larger, but I'm getting much longer battery life from a modern smartphone than I would from a Pocket PC from 2003. [wikipedia.org]

wish there was a proper idea of the size of it...

[advocate_one]

can't tell what denomination that coin is so can't tell exactly how small it really is...it's either a five pence piece or ten pence piece and the ten pence piece is twice the size of what we call the tiddler. Is it too much these days to expect people to put a small one inch and one centimetre scale next to the items when photographing them?