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HP Portables Hardware

HP Introduces New Technology to Save Mobile Battery Life 225

Posted by CowboyNeal from the batmax-beware dept.
fenimor writes "HP researchers have developed new technology to save battery life on mobile devices. Targeting one of the main culprits of battery consumption -- the display -- they've developed an energy-aware solution that dims parts of the screen that aren't in use. Display battery life lasts from two to 11 times longer, depending on what the user is doing."
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HP Introduces New Technology to Save Mobile Battery Life More

HP Introduces New Technology to Save Mobile Battery Life

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  • HP innovation! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:57PM (#11915350) Homepage Journal

    Now, this is the kind of thinking and research development that I would expect from HP! This technology combined with optimizations in the OS like Quartz [apple.com] could be a real boost to the way we interact with our portable devices, allowing for progressive dynamic layering of items that are important to view. Shoot, one could even link it into search engines to render only what is relevant for display.

    Now if they could just put a little innovation into their calculators again....

    • Re:HP innovation! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:04PM (#11915419) Homepage Journal
      Now, this is the kind of thinking and research development that I would expect from HP!

      What? They're not supposed to just buy up some half-baked company that's struggling with quality issues and try to merge the two disparate entities together using words like "Synergy"?

      Dang. It is a rebirth of HP!

    • Re:HP innovation! (Score:5, Informative)

      by friedmud ( 512466 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:23PM (#11915559)
      I recently had a similar experience to "highlighting of what you're looking at" and I enjoyed it.

      It came with the new Xorg+New Nvidia Drivers+KDE Beta... with those three things you can turn on transparency where every window EXCEPT the one that is currently in focus is transparent.

      Combine this with "Focus follows mouse" and it basically "highlights" the thing you are currently working on... while everything else melts into the background... literally!

      If they integrated this with flat panels I could see it being useful for the only thing that was at full brightness is the window that is currently active... while the rest has been dimmed. I think this is pretty close to what the research in this story did (except it looks like they might have been even more fine grained than that).

      Not only would it be a usability improvement... but also a savings in power. I'm interested to see if they can bring it to market!

      Friedmud

      • Re:HP innovation! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by iowannaski ( 766150 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:37PM (#11915643)

        While it would be incredibly cool if this technology could be used with PC LCD monitors, don't get too excited yet.

        LCD screens generally rely on a single backlight for illumination. Swithing to multiple backlights is certainly possible, but don't expect to be able to control power consumption on a pixel by pixelbasis anytime soon.

      • how do you activate transparency in all inactive windows? (I am running k3.4 too)

        • Re:HP innovation! (Score:4, Informative)

          by pantherace ( 165052 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @08:06PM (#11915831)
          Kcontrol -> Desktop -> Window Behavior -> Translucency Tab. That controls transparency, and the Focus tab has Focus follows Mouse.

          • Sick of people being jealous because gentoo's package management system is better?

            Portage is not a package management system. It contains one, but it isn't one. Neither is apt. Neither is yum. Neither is ports.

            As for portage as a software distribution system, it is quite good. As for me, I prefer Crux ports, since they're much simpler to hack to my preference.

            By the way, I was the original 'sick of Gentoo zealots throwing plugs in unrelated topics?' guy. I took it down because people misunderstoo

      • Can I get one that just dims the ads?
    • "could be a real boost"

      Or it could be a major pain in the neck, like the "reverse-backlit" monochrome Palm PDAs. In dim lighting conditions, you turn on the backlight, right? But instead of the white pixels lighting up, increasing contrast so you can see, the BLACK pixels light up. Now the backlit black pixels are approximately the same luminosity as the unlit white pixels, rendering the display a muddy, unintelligible mess of green and gray.

      The older Palm pilots did it right, lighting up the white pixels
    • What the hell are you talking about... link it into search engines? Christ almighty.... oh and nice bit about the calculators, that always gets you modded up a few times by HP calc die-hards around here.

    • Re:HP innovation! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by the_ed_dawg ( 596318 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @02:48AM (#11917851) Journal
      Now, this is the kind of thinking and research development that I would expect from HP!
      The idea of turning off unused sections of the screen was proposed by Flinn et al. in 1999. They recommended that adaptivity be implemented at the window manager level with hardware support to actually change the screen intensity. Among other ideas, they suggested changing the window managers to "snap to borders," to prevent applications from being in multiple different lightable blocks. A similar idea was implemented by Chang et al. over the course of the past few years. They implemented a system that adaptively changes the backlighting of LCDs based upon the statistical properties of displayed videos. I saw their product at a conference in August (supposedly their third version), and it was pretty sweet. They had made a little ASIC that would perform all sorts of computations on the frames and display the videos at the full frame rate. You couldn't really tell that the intensity was changing, either. The first two versions were purely software, so I've heard. Not too bad from an academic group.

      Yes, HP's *development* is great. If the article is accurate, they seem to have fine-grained control over the whole screen. Chang et al. have the adaptivity right but lack the LCD development to get more than full-screen control. There's absolutely no way that an academic group can compete with the development power of a private company. I'm really glad to see that HP has gotten on the bandwagon because I spend most of my time working in a terminal and/or text editor. :) However, I'd just like to clarify that people have been proposing and implementing ideas like this for at least 6 years before we raise our hopes too much for HP's return.

  • Self Defeating (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:58PM (#11915357) Homepage Journal
    Watch a typical Windows user sometime. What's the first thing they do to whatever application they open?

    If you said "Maximize it!", then you're right! Sadly, this ends up being self-defeating. :-/
    • Why? Why can't this technology turn off the parts of the screen that are black (like text and fields) and dim the darker ones for programs that aren't using raster images?

      I don't like your attitude, young man.

      • Re:Self Defeating (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) *
        Why can't this technology turn off the parts of the screen that are black (like text and fields) and dim the darker ones for programs that aren't using raster images?

        Contrast. Unless you can modify the backlight at a per-pixel level, dimming a text area would actually decrease the readability. :-)
      • You're actually correct with your assumption. With CRTs, Black areas use less voltage than white areas. But, I dont think it works the same way with lcds.

    • Re:Self Defeating (Score:2, Informative)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )

      Because Windows and Maximize are so often used on mobile devices!

      This is intended for phones, PDAs, media players, etc. not for laptops etc. If you RTFA you'd have noticed the study was done on PDAs and MP3 players.

    • Re:Self Defeating (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:19PM (#11915521) Homepage
      I'm not sure that would defeat this technology; it may not dim on a window-level, but on a pixel activity level, cursor-closeness level, or something of the sort.

      Of course, I'd love to see a solution using electrochromic polymer (needing a single application of charge to change state, not continuous) pixels with an adjustable backlight for when it's dark. In bright light conditions, you'd have a screen like an adapting piece of paper. During daylight, you'd only need power when a pixel changes, so the battery life would theoretically be huge. Plus, I would expect it to be easier on the eyes. Anyone aware of any research on this front?

    • Re:Self Defeating (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't understand, what's wrong with maximizing a window such that it should be associated with the evil world of Windows? What's not to like about using as much of the screen as possible so you can see as much of what you're working on as possible? Does the stereotypical Linux user configure their WM so as to remove the maximize button, or something?

    • Re:Self Defeating (Score:3, Insightful)

      by browngb ( 823753 )
      I have two 19" monitors running dual display, because I decided I needed more desktop. Turns out I just have one app maximized to both monitors at once all the time, in stead of 60 small windows. The reason for it is pretty simple, I don't want to continually be scrolling. It's just much more comfortable to have everything laid out in front of me. If I need access to something else, Alt+Tab is just a click away.

  • Creative Displays (Score:5, Funny)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:58PM (#11915358)
    I'd like to be the developer that codes the algorithm for dimming the unimportant parts of pr0n images. I'd need plenty of research images, of course.

  • in other news (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:59PM (#11915366)
    battery life of your cell phone can be extended by

    TURNING THE FUCKING PHONE OFF

  • Meh.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Staplerh ( 806722 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:59PM (#11915367) Homepage
    Meh, I can buy a sticker that promises to do most of this, and all for a few small payments. Heck, it was even covered on Slashdot so it has to be true!

  • savings? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:59PM (#11915368)
    Now if they can just figure out how to stop the laptop from burning my privates when i compute naked.

    • Re:savings? (Score:4, Funny)

      by clutch110 ( 528473 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:41PM (#11915676)
      Why are you mixing the military, nudity and computers anyway? Don't you get court martialed for that?

    • Re:savings? (Score:4, Funny)

      by displaced80 ( 660282 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:45PM (#11915705)

      ...when i compute naked

      ... to how many digits?

      :-)

  • Unimportant pixels (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:59PM (#11915371) Homepage
    worked with Ranganathan to develop software that monitors a PDA's screen when it is in use and automatically dims the unimportant pixels.

    Occasionally I get devices from companies that have proactively singled out these unimportant pixels.

  • OLEDs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stryck9 ( 670369 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @06:59PM (#11915373)
    Maybe if they put some money in OLED research, they wouldn't need to worry about backlights at all.
    • Actually if we could just produce a 100% reflective, paper display (digital ink) we could save a lot of energy while still having a display that looked good under normal lighting situations, including full sunlight. I think that purely luminous displays are hard on the eyes. I'd adopt digital books in a hartbeat when you can give me a surface that looks just like paper (or glossy magazine stock) with 300-600 dpi electronic ink resolution. If lighting conditions are low, just add a reading light like a no
    • "Maybe if they put some money in OLED research, they wouldn't need to worry about backlights at all."

      You're right, they should just spend a good deal more money to solve the same problem.
    • You can use both techniques.

      OLEDs because they are more energy efficient
      Focus dimming to increase OLED usage efficiency

  • Its great! I am using it right now! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:00PM (#11915379) Homepage
    It is incredible... but I can only see what I am typing... and my mouse cursor sometimes.

    This is my blog I am posting to right? Must be... Cant tell though...
  • So is this another sticker we're supposed to put on the screen too? If we combine this with the sticker on the battery [slashdot.org], can we get hundreds of hours of battery life?

  • OLED (Score:5, Informative)

    by amembleton ( 411990 ) <aembleton@bigf[ ].com ['oot' in gap]> on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:02PM (#11915404) Homepage
    Won't these problems be solved with OLEDs?

    As far as I understand, Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) will emit light from each pixel much like an LED does. This will not require a battery sucking back-light, and if necessary it would be easy to dim areas of the screen, just make parts of it darker/black and less/no light will be emitted from it.

    More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:OLED (Score:2, Informative)

      by 0rbit4l ( 669001 )
      That's exactly the point of this research - the point is to develop user interfaces that leverage OLEDs to dim the parts of the screen that aren't in use. If you read the article, dimming parts of the display is exactly what they're talking about. The key isn't the LEDs that allow dimming - the key is the user interface research that these guys did to determine what people find acceptable. What's most interesting is that some interfaces are actually preferable to an "all on" solution (for instance, an in
    • Won't these problems be solved with OLEDs?

      Absolutely.

      However, one downside is a 15" OLED display will run you about $20,000.

      Not really.
    • As far as I understand, Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) will emit light from each pixel much like an LED does. This will not require a battery sucking back-light

      Where's the energy to illuminate each OLED pixel going to come from, though? Still from the battery.

      My understanding is that most modern LCD displays already use high-intensity LED banks for their backlighting. Unless OLEDs have significantly lower watts-per-lumen requirements, I don't think that OLEDs will have much effect on battery lif
      • I think the idea is that instead of wasting power on a uniform back-lighting that is modulated pixel-by-pixel with LCD, each OLED-pixel only emits as much light as is required for it to display properly. So it's really the reduced wastage due to pixel-by-pixel illumination.

        Of course this is true for conventional LEDs, as long as it is patterned pixel-by-pixel. OLEDs promise to be cheaper to build, thus making this technology reasonably affordabel. As far as I know, the OLED energy conversion is not that ef
    • "Won't these problems be solved with OLEDs?"

      No. An OLED simply doesn't have this problem, it doesn't make the problem of an LCD go away. Why am I being so obnoxiously literal? Honestly, I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything. I'm pointing it out because a.) OLED's are not mass-market yet, b.) They're likely to be more expensive than LCD's eat least intially, c.) There will likely be other reasons why a manufacturer of a portable device would pick an LCD over an LED.

      I may or may not be right in this

  • Well, but how really useful is this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kompiluj ( 677438 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:02PM (#11915408)
    I don't know - is this a useful technique or just another trick? When the salesman tells you that laptop runs 6 hrs. on system battery, but only if you don't touch it - how useful is this for you?
    Reminds me of other fallacies: the gigahertz myth, the LCD display reaction-time [xbitlabs.com]. myth
  • It's called an OLED display.
  • I admit I'm confused about how the computer knows things like which lines of text you're reading. Do you have to keep the cursor there, or something? Or is it...sentient? :P

  • LCDs and Dimming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:08PM (#11915452)
    You can't dim a 'portion' of a standard LCD monitor; the monitor is backlit by small flourescent tubes at the top and the bottom of the display, and it is those that take most power to drive. On desktops they have multiple tubes at the top and bottom (and you could shut one or two off to save power), but for notebooks they usually have only one, and by dimming that one you end up dimming the whole display, not a portion of the display.

    If they can light up only a portion of the screen they must be using white LEDs or something like that where they can light up as many or as few as they want. If this is the case, i wouldnt hold my breath as to when it will reach the market.

  • Maybe if they refine the idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:10PM (#11915465) Homepage Journal
    The technology has been around for some time to track where the eye is focussed. If they only fully lit hat one part of the screen, dimming with a function of distance, they'd save a lot more power, as they wouldn't need to determine what was important.


    Actually, the eye isn't equally sensitive to color, at all points, so you can gradually "bleed off" color as a function of distance, too.


    For that matter, the eye doesn't see with a uniform resolution, so you can "skip" pixels as you move off-center.


    Alternatively, you can say "screw it!" and represent all output with a row of 128 LEDs. This not only cuts down on power, but reduces the weight of portable systems, cuts down on environmental waste when the unit is recycled, and forces 99.9% of all the stupid idiots who just use computers for spreading viruses anyway to go out into the Real World and get something done.


    (Hey, punch-cards worked just fine for ages, and they didn't go to 128 columns IIRC)

  • Seriously... (Score:2, Funny)

    by paithuk ( 766069 )
    Or, rather than relying on the display, an LED light could blink to communicate the arrival of an email.
    Are they having a laugh?

  • Tempting homebrew sol'n ; article unclear in part (Score:3, Insightful)

    by macklin01 ( 760841 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:14PM (#11915494) Homepage
    Reading the parts of the article on MP3 player displays really leaves me tempted:

    Why not add a switch so that the display only shows when it's pressed? (I know that some players do this anyway, but not my Rio S10.) I rarely look at the screen anyway. I bet it wouldn't be that hard to open it up and solder one in ... (Then again, maybe it'd be better to just try a firmware hack instead ...)

    I was a little fuzzy on the article on how they could dim parts of a normal LCD monitor screen, however. Isn't there only one backlight, so it's all or nothing? Are they proposing a grid of backlights instead of just one large one? Or is it that when the pixels are dimmed, the transistors use less power? That part wasn't very clear to me after reading TFA. -- Paul

  • I worry about burn-in... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:15PM (#11915501) Homepage
    When there are two boob-shaped areas of my screen that appear to be burned in more than the rest of my screen, then people will know about my, ahem, viewing habits.

  • Xterms (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MoobY ( 207480 ) <anthonyNO@SPAMliekens.net> on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:20PM (#11915526) Homepage
    This is excellent! I'm constantly using full screen consoles with white text on a black background. This technology may give command line users excellent uptimes!

  • Stupid question, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:20PM (#11915527) Homepage
    If this is really so important, why not switch to white text on black background for mobile devices? This would maximize the amount of dim pixels.
    • maybe cuz:
      1) Using current LCDs a white and a black cost about the same, power-wise...
      2) Consumers want content on a white background, like they're used to in the real, non-cyber, world (National Inquirer, Cosmo, etc). Can you imagine reading the NY Times or WSJ on a black background ? Didn't think so...
  • While HP was busy researching this, Intel actually implemented a wide array of power saving measures for displays in their centrino chipset, including Intel DPST which can modify the backlight on the fly depending on the screen content to save power.

    http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/2005/v ol ume09issue01/art05_perf_power/p04_gmch.htm
  • So the little stickers DO work!

  • DVDs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by twelvemonkeys ( 689012 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:30PM (#11915599)
    hmm... and how does this help me watch more DVDs on long flights?
    • It could switch off the backlights for the areas of the screen not displaying video. This would be especially useful if you don't have a display with 16:9 aspect ratio - it'd blank the backlights for the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

  • Old news (Score:3, Funny)

    by pointyhairedmba ( 698579 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @07:45PM (#11915704)
    I've had this so called "technology" since Windows 3.0. My computer would blue out the whole screen to save energy.
  • Here's [hp.com] the HP article outside the PhysORG tarpit.

    I'd REALLY have to see this in action. After HP abandoned the Jornada (their own Pocket PC, one with a much better human-engineered design) for the Heath-Robinson iPaq, I've taken everything they've said about handhelds with a shovel-full of salt.
  • Is color reflective display technologies.

    That way, you don't need to have the display lit up at all, regular ambient lighting can be used to read the display.

  • Coralized [nyud.net]

    JOhn

  • OLEDs, STN, laptops and other silliness (Score:4, Insightful)

    by neurocutie ( 677249 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @08:25PM (#11915920)
    While their efforts are all well and good, there doesn't sound like there is much substance there when you here that one of the ideas is to resort to an blinking LED when an email arrives.

    1) Clearly moving quickly to a display technology that emits light efficiently ONLY WHERE YOU WANT IT, like OLEDs, is much smarter than the current backlit architecture, where you blast an array of FILTERS (devices design to THROW AWAY LIGHT) with a bright uniform backlight. The current LCD technology is about as stupid as it gets when it comes to energy efficiency.

    2) I am constantly amazed that no laptop company has yet make a laptop with EXCHANGEABLE displays. There are times, in the dark, where you want a bright color display, BUT there are other times when you would be much happier with a passive/reflective/no backlight display, which, by the way, is far more energy efficient. If I'm working outside, for example, writing a paper or whatever, I really would be happier with a simple STN reflective, LOW POWER, NO BACKLIGHT, perhaps even monochrome LCD (the type on those old Palm V's would be perfect: very high contrast, very low power). So why not have a laptop that you can simply plug in different display screens, depending on your anticipated usage ? I would venture to guess that a standard modern laptop with a TFT and a battery life of 3 hours, would last 6+ hours using a passive STN display.

    The fact is that in most daily human environments other than in a movie theater, it is expected that there will be sufficient lighting to read magazines, write postcards, etc, etc. So laptop displays need to take advantage of this, rather than the current (stupid) brute force method of trying to drown out the environmental lighting with a light-producing display.

  • It uses Doom3 technology and you need your mouse over anything you actually want to see.

  • Uncanny... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @08:27PM (#11915937) Journal
    A couple people were discussing the possibility of this exact thing [dexplor.com] on the notebook forums I host:

    I like the idea though, Maybe if they could design a backlight that could just light say 2" around the mouse?

    At the time I thought the idea was a bit far-fetched - seems like the HP engineers think otherwise.

    When the new OLED technology becomes widespread this capability will be inherit to the display, and be controllable at the pixel-level. A simple color scheme using as much black as possible (ie white text on black) could conserve batteries significantly.

    Dan East
    • Why stop at white? Think of the .000005% advantage you would get when power is then modulated at the sub-pixel level. Green screens, here we come...again!

      What will Microsoft do, though? Office pretty much defaults to a very white-dominated scheme. Word is pretty scary with a dark background and light letters. I bet the Excel engineers don't want to go back to the Multiplan (MS's first competitor against Lotus 1-2-3) skin. Access would be OK, though.

      They'll need to look at some of the various Winamp skins

  • strange... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hitmark ( 640295 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @09:35PM (#11916325) Journal
    that they are not rethinking the screen totaly. i have seen shots of a screen tech where you dont need a backlight as the screens active elements reflects light as if it was a hard surface.

    the funnyest thing was that they could remove the backside totay, basicly turning the screen transparent, and still be able to get a clear picture of the active elements of the image shown.

    and you didnt need to have constanct power on like on a lcd or oled display.

    the powersaveings on mobile devices with screens like these would be gigantic.

    only problem is that i cant find any info on colordepth or refresh rate at the moment :P

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