Penny Mobiles – Mobile phone news, reviews & information

Nokia’s X6 is a pretty impressive handset. It sports a 3.2 inch TFT capacitive touch screen display, an ARM 11 434MHz CPU and a 5 mega pixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, auto focus and LED flash. This media-centric handset has been designed to play plenty of media file formats and provide users with hours of entertainment in video or music.

Of course, that entertainment can only last so long. Between surfing the web via 3G or WiFi and using the handset’s media player, many users are reporting that the X6’s 1320mAh battery is not living up to expectations (on a full charge, users expect to get about 35 hours straight of playback).

According to a recent report, it seems that the culprit for the battery issue is not really the hardware, but user’s inability to shut down applications that are still running in the background. While the same solution applies to many other devices, it is inherently important for the Nokia X6 –as shutting down these errant apps is a simple matter of having to just access a menu and individually turning off the unneeded apps.

For those wondering why background applications would drain power, it is because the processor is still running the apps. CPU’s are among the most powerful users of battery energy. Running apps to a minimum is an important part of conserving the energy on a phone.

Of course, there are also a few other things that users should keep in mind when it comes to batteries. The first is to have an alternative power supply if you know you would need it. Long trips, all night events and other activities have a tendency of keeping users away from being able to charge at home. In this case, having a phone charger or a secondary battery is quite important especially if you will need the device (of course, it is important to make sure that the secondary battery always has a full charge).

Cambridge based electronics manufacturer ARM is enjoying a very solid position in the mobile phone industry, even with competitors such as Texas Instruments, the company’s CPU’s are the standard hardware for many smart phones by manufacturers all over the world.

Intel, a major player in the computer industry, seems to have their sights on the mobile phone market as well. With the introduction of the Intel Moorestown CPU several months ago and the continuous evolution of the Atom hardware to consume less and less power, the company is getting close to producing hardware that will provide plenty of processing power, but will not be consuming so much energy.

According to recent reports, the first Intel bearing smart phones might be seeing light by 2011.

The company is taking the transition slowly and steadily. The company has already started with several Taiwan made tablets –providing the CPU for handheld devices can go a pretty long way.

The MeeGo operating system which Intel co-developed with Nokia is going to be released in October to November. According to Intel, they intentionally designed the MeeGo to work with a wide range of processors –not exclusively Atom technology. By doing this, their OS can be more widely used. Their previous operating system, the Linux based Moblin OS seems to have been scrapped in favor of the MeeGo mobile platform. Of course, with their team up with Nokia, it is likely that new devices from the Finnish phone maker will be showing the new Intel CPUs next year.

In the meanwhile, ARM is steadily strengthening its position in the industry. They have already acquired the support of Microsoft for Windows Phone 7 –according to Steve Ballmer, Qualcomm will be playing an instrumental role in the development of the OS and as such, a Qualcomm CPU is a requirement for the new platform. Aside from Microsoft, Intel has also teamed up with phone manufacturers HTC and Motorola.