Due to the nature of wear and tear, as time progresses, you probably notice that your smartphone’s speed probably isn’t what it used to be compared to the first time you got it, and battery life is getting shorter by the day. This is because due to the amount of writing and deleting to the phone’s memory, and because batteries over time will lose their charge.
This will result in customers having to change phones every 1-2 years depending on whether they are able to cope with the hardware degrading. However over in the Hanyang University in South Korea, researchers claim that they have developed a piece of technology that could potentially extend the life and speeds of smartphones.
Dubbed WALDIO (Write Ahead Logging Direct IO), the idea is that this “mode” will cause smartphones to write as little data to the device as possible and only when needed. Like we said because of constant writing and deleting of data, your phone’s memory gets worn down, so by writing as little data as possible and only when it is necessary, it helps to preserve the life of your components.
It also helps to speed things up since essentially your phone would be acting like it’s still new. According to team leader Professor You-jip Won, this mode could potentially increase the speed of your phone by 20 times as well as extend battery life expectancy by as much as 39%. Of course it remains to be seen if companies will want to incorporate this technology into their products.
After all it is to their benefit if customers were to replace their smartphones every 1-2 years, right? If you’d like to find out more about WALDIO, you can check out the published paper on Usenix.
Filed in . Read more about Science.