After reading this article on the chips in the Pioneer Inno, Samsung Helix and Nexus I'm pretty amazed by their power consumption.

The Pioneer Inno and Samsung Helix both use Austriamicrosystems’ AS3524 Portable Audio Chip, while the Samsung Nexus uses the AS3525 chip. Both chips are similar, with the AS3524 obviously allowing for live XM Satellite Radio reception.

In playback mode, both the Inno and Helix have 10 hours of battery life. In live XM Radio mode they have about 5.5 hours of battery life. That's pretty impressive considering what's needed to receive the SDARS signal, not to mention power the 180x180 Color LCD Screens and all the other doodads involved.

So I got to thinking about how the Inno, Helix and Nexus stack up against the iPod in terms of power consumption.

After a bit of research I found that the 5G iPod Video consumes 1,000mW of power in playback mode. Now, consumption of course varies depending on what you're doing, such as starting up (1,800mW) or when the iPod is in "sleep" mode (70mW). But let's just focus on playback right now.

The Samsung Nexus' chip consumes 58mW of power during MP3 playback. Unfortunately, I don't have the numbers for the additional power needed to power the satellite radio decoder, but the playback power consumption alone is very impressive. Is this why they're restricted to 1Gb of flash storage? Too much power needed to power the SDARS decoder?

According to the article, the Samsung Nexus' chip has an ARM9-based processor subsystem with on-chip RAM and ROM, a CD-quality audio front-end as well as a smart power management and lighting unit. The Pionner Inno's and Samsung Helix's chips are similar but work with an analog front-end that is optimized for portable satellite radio reception.

The question that I have is whether these chips will eventually work with a hard-drive based unit (*cough* iPod *cough*). I assume battery life was comprimised when using a hard-drive based system, so they opted for a less battery intensive flash based unit for now, but do these chips have the ability to be ported to an iPod-like device once a more efficient power supply is figured out? Interesting thoughts.

A patent was recently filed by Lucent Technologies may be giving us a glimpse of things to come in term of convergence. The wonderful thing about Patents is that it forces companies to show their hand in what they have in development. Which is great, because then we get to sit around and speculate what it's all about.

On to the Patent:

Mobile phone combined with satellite radio

Abstract
A wireless telephony network provides satellite radio program information and content, in addition to conventional wireless telephony services, to eligible mobile stations of the wireless telephony network. The wireless telephony network receives satellite radio programming from a satellite radio service network, establishes one or more bearer channels (e.g., conventional voice channels or higher-bandwidth data links) and sends the programming to the one or more mobile stations via the one or more bearer channels. The wireless telephony network monitors and obtains billing information associated with integrated service delivery and coordinates the billing information with a satellite radio service provider. A controlling provider may be selected to control billing for the integrated services such that the customer receives a single statement.