It’s the first official day of Mobile World Congress today, and we’ve already had quite a lot to talk about. Sony have introduced their new Xperia Z2 and their Xperia Z2 Tablet, Qualcomm have announced their first Octa-Core CPU and HTC themselves have released a pair of smartphones. When the company took to the stage to announce the Desire 816 and the 610, they also announced a broader initiative, that in time will affect the vast majority of us with an Android smartphone. It’s called Power to Give, and it essentially makes use of your smartphone’s processing power when you’re not using it, in order to help solve of today’s biggest problems. You might already have heard of SETI@home, HTC’s Power to Give is pretty much an extension of that.
You can choose a cause that you want to help with, plug your phone in, connect to WiFi and your phone will start processing a chunk of data. Once that chunk is dealt with, it’ll be sent back to where it needs to go and then the process will start all over again. There will be a bunch of different projects you can donate processing power to, such as finding out if we’re alone in the universe or helping serious medical issues. The application itself will be launching for HTC One and Butterfly phones at first, but soon it should be coming to all other makes and models. Something I’ll be very happy to see, as I’d willingly have my device(s) churning data when charging overnight to help a worthy cause.
HTC isn’t just doing this to look good, either. They’re saying that a million HTC Ones adds up to the same sort of computing power as a one-petaflop supercomputer. Over the next six months or so, HTC will be extending the app to other handsets. We’re pretty sure that a certain all new device launching next month from HTC might come with the app pre-installed, too. There’s a short and sweet video below to give you the lowdown on Power to Give.