Microsoft Patent Reveals User Behavior Based Battery Saving

Let’s face it, no matter what smartphone or super smartphone you get, you’re limited by battery more than anything else. The phones have come a long way with iPhone 5, Lumia 920 lasting at least the best part of a day, with Wi-Fi, 4G, streaming, 10-11 hours of the battery-life is reasonable and the best case scenario.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone came out with a Battery Saver feature that would turn off background processes, email checks, location services, etc. once the battery reaches 20%. It’s effective. There are times when I simply turn it ON when I know I won’t have access to a charger for  more than 10 hours. It works. But that’s a very straightforward implementation, these are smartphones we’re talking about. They should be smarter than a simple 20% if/else. The engineers at Microsoft seem to be working on something that is. Every user has different use-patterns; I, for example, keep my data plan OFF most of the time, saves me battery & makes sure I don’t exceed 200MB in a month. The patent filing reveals an basic flowchart of tracking use-patterns and use this data to preserve device battery.

According to a patent, Microsoft wants to track when phones are charged and how often certain tasks are performed. A simple implementation described in the patent is that the phone will suspend sync operations depending on parameters like:

• whether the phone can continue operation till next charge (this means the phone tracks the time when a person usually charges his phone, it could also track location such as home/office)
• whether the phone will have better signal soon (location)

These are simple parameters since they’re pretty obvious in thought.

According to the patent this adaptive process can have significant impact of battery. Here’s a chart without the implementation:

Here’s one with:

PS: This feature’s usefulness extends to tablets too.