The world’s first official e-book conference, held in Washington DC in 1998, was a thrilling, supercharged pep rally for true believers who had dreamed for decades of the day when they could read a book on an electronic device nestled in the palm of their hands. At the same time, like any convocation of like-minded people whether it be shoe manufacturers or atomic physicists, the shoptalk was stultifying and the presentations soporific – until the Battery Lady got up to speak. She was beautiful, tastefully dressed and spoke in a lilting Continental accent. Someone called her Greta Garbo in a business suit. The topic was battery life and she was mesmerizing, delivering her topic like Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby” to a lovestruck male in a nightclub. During the coffee break she was all the geeks could talk about. No one quite remembered what she said but we all agreed she should be invited back the following year even if it was to tell us, in her enchanting, artless way that battery life had been extended by five minutes since the previous year’s conference.

The Battery Lady should be brought back today to expound on exciting initiatives to conserve the battery life of smartphones and other handheld devices. Thanks to an article by Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times, we’re informed that outfits like Pixtronix and Qualcomm have developed the means to make power last and last.

The Pixtronix color display technology, called PerfectLight, “uses energy-efficient LED bulbs, creating the image with thousands of tiny shutters that slide open and closed like digital pocket doors,” explains Eisenberg. The drain for backlighting is less than 50 milliwatts. A conventional LCD uses about 200. A Pixtronix executive says, “We have a single shutter for each pixel,” he said. A display in a cellphone might have 76,000 to 300,000 shutters for as many pixels.”

Qualcomm’s approach could not be more different. Explains Eisenberg:

New technology by Qualcomm takes advantage of natural light, reflecting the short, blue waves of daylight, for instance, and combining them in the same process that lets bluebirds glow with iridescent color in the sun.

A Qualcomm exec boasts, “You can end up with about a fifth of the optical energy that is put out by the backlight — or even less.” Very significantly, the screen color remains true in direct sunlight.

RC