As we’ve seen in the past, LG loves the letter G. Since officially announcing the LG G2 yesterday, and therefore officially dropping the Optimus name from their flagship devices, LG has gone a bit off the rails with their naming convention. The LG G2 contains lots of features, and while many of them are software related, there are plenty of new hardware features as well. LG is packing a rather large 3,000 mAh battery in the G2, which is nearly the size of many phablet devices out there like the Galaxy Note series. While the size of the battery certainly helps keep your device alive throughout the day, software optimization and other enhancements go even further to keeping your battery from draining before the end of the day. As such LG has announced a new display feature called GRAM, short for Graphic RAM, which detects when the display is displaying a static image and lowers the refresh rate accordingly. LG is saying that this feature will reduce the display’s battery usage by up to 26%, as Android Authority is reporting and therefore saving somewhere around 10% of your overall battery life in an average day.
This technology has been around for a while and is usually called Panel Self Refresh, but it has yet to be used in a mobile device up until this point. Mobile devices currently use a 60Hz refresh rate to display things on the screen. This means that the screen is refreshing 60 times per second. As you can imagine this can take quite a toll on the battery after a while. GRAM technology takes this concern and puts it into action by essentially pausing the screen when nothing is moving. For instance if you are reading an eBook, a webpage, email, or something else that has no moving sections on the screen, the LG G2 takes notice of this and captures what’s on the screen and will display that captured image until animation is required again.
This is achieved by a new memory cache on the display panel that acts as an intermediary between the central processor, graphics processor and the display. Images are placed in this cache (called GRAM) and when the above scenarios are reached the CPU and GPU can be nearly completely shut down to save power. This type of intelligent hardware design really could make a huge difference in user experience without the user even knowing it’s happening at all. This entire process takes part in milliseconds, which means it’s nearly indiscernible to users. With that big, beautiful 5.2-inch 1080p IPS LCD screen and quad-core Snapdragon 800 on board, you better believe saving battery life is getting more and more important to users. LG has something pretty special sounding here, and we’ll just have to see in real-world testing whether or not we can achieve that 10% battery life savings that LG claims here. What we’re not sure of is whether or not Verizon’s version of the LG G2 will have a watermark across the screen by utilizing this technology or not. Yes, that is a joke, don’t worry.