Mobile phones + AtmegaXXX (or equiv)

Using Arduino Microcontrollers
1

I was thinking would it not be nice to see a mobile phone have your traditional processor ARM (or otherwise, Intel) have the ability to switch
to power saving mode...

Everything on the ARM side of things gets shutdown and a small 20mhz processor takes over which interfaces with your basic GSM hooks into the
LCD/OLED screen (simply text display, think of an Iphone with the interface of a nokia 3210 10 years ago) , and have basic system in place
to keep your mobile phone a mobile phone and not much else, a number of the person who's calling, a simple interface like the 3210, and a small
contact list that gets exported when the ARM processor shuts down..

eg in an emergency? power goes out, you switch modes and get days even weeks of standby from a modern day battery allowing basic functionality, calls, sms.

or not a good idea? I'd quite like that option have it open source code and give people the ability to do custom interfaces and stuff, letting people from here
write their own code for it or edit existing code, you get the idea....

2

cjdelphi:
I was thinking would it not be nice to see a mobile phone have your traditional processor ARM (or otherwise, Intel) have the ability to switch
to power saving mode...

What leads you to believe that isn't already the case? Turn your radio off and see how long your battery lasts. The processor isn't the power hog.

3

um... it is on mine, dual 1.2ghz cpu oc'ed to 1.4ghz...

even with 3g, wifi etc etc off... it's a power hog compared to my old nokia e72 (which would last for days on a single charge with a network connection for making calls)

4

Then there is something wrong with the implementation used by your phone.

When traveling internationally, I generally turn the cellular radio off on cellphone. In that case, the battery lasts almost a week, even if I occasionally use WiFi to surf the web or (primarily) update emails.

A good implementation of ARM (remember ARM doesn't make processors, they just make IP to go into a processor) can be a very low-power device. Yours doesn't sound like it is a good implementation.