September 08, 2003

good news for wi-fi on mobile devices

with all the hype surrounding deployment of wi-fi as a competitor to 3G services, the one thing that has always stood in the way is wi-fi chip power consumption and the lack of exponential innovation in battery life. on most consumer devices employing embedded wi-fi chips, battery life has been pathetic. the ipaq 545X series pocket pc devices last maybe 2 hours with wi-fi turned on, the palm tungsten C a little longer as it turns it on and off as you are using the device - but to get a combo wi-fi phone device to be palatable to the market, we will need to see a usable battery life of 24 hours at least.

if wi-fi has 1/100th the power output of a GSM transmitter, this physics would seem to work out - but up until now, most wi-fi circuitry has been engineered for the laptop profile, where bigger, mightier battieries exist and AC power is part of the equation of use.

that's why i'm excited to see announcements such as this announcement from broadcom and philips as well as similar announcements made by texas instruments earlier in the year. we might just see those usable 3G/combo devices sooner than we had hoped.

Posted by Steve at September 8, 2003 09:40 AM | TrackBack


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