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Student Hacks iPhone for Longer Battery Life

By Nicole Martinelli (6:53 am, Dec 24 2008)

Student Hacks iPhone for Longer Battery Life

Atif Shamin, a Phd student in electronics at Carlton University in Canada, has figured out a way of reducing iPhone battery drain.

He’s replaced all the internal wires and PCBs of his iPhone with an antenna.

The swap allows a wireless connection between a micro-antenna embedded within the circuits of the chip.

“This has not been tried before — that the circuits are connected to the antenna wirelessly. They’ve been connected through wires and a bunch of other components. That’s where the power gets lost,” Shamim said in an article on the University website.

He estimates that his solution uses 12 times less power than the traditional, wired-transmitter module. That means more juice for the ever-expanding choice in apps.

“It’s a common problem. There are so many applications in the iPhone, it’s like a power-sucking machine,” said Shamim.

He’s filed for patents in the US and Canada, look out for details on his hack in an upcoming issue of Microwave Journal.

Via Make

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nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

If you're doing something new/cool that's Apple related, email her about it.

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  • goosesensor

    this is old news… and maybe i’m just being picky, but this sentence is horribly inaccurate: “He’s replaced all the internal wires and PCBs of his iPhone with an antenna.”

  • zahadum

    misleading headline …..

    1) this is not a “hack”.

    it is a serious piece of engineering, for which he will recurve a patent.

    a hack is a make-shift that utilizes the existing system for new ends; a hack is not a discrete unit of added value.

    2) he is not just a high school student with a science fair project.

    he is a phd candidate – which means that he probably had nearly a decade of postsecondary education.

    one of the requirements for a phd -unlike a masters- is that the scholar add something new to the stock of human knowledge.

    clearly he has done just that – and he deserved to be accorded the respect that his achievement & title demand.

    he will be called doctor (literally, from the greek, this means learned).

    stop writing such condescending (or is it simply ignorant) headlines!