Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, seems to have come up with a very interesting solution for an ever increasing problem in the world of Smartphones. With consumers wanting more and more performance-wise out of their devices while still wanting good battery life, the relatively weak processors our devices are stuck with can often be a limitation.

What Chun has created makes use of our ever growing highspeed networks to feed processor intensive tasks back to a “clone” of the users Smartphone on a server. This server would be able to make use of much more capable processors to complete that task much faster than the Smartphone and then be able to transmit the end result back to the handset. For example, when Chun demonstrated a prototype face-recognition application on an Android-powered handset, the device required 100 seconds of processor time to complete the task, while offloading the task to CloneCloud resulted in a completion time of just one second.

There are many potential advantages to this system, the main one being that less stress on the processor would increase battery life. The possibility of processor-intensive tasks such as virus scans could also soon become a norm, making “CloneCloud” as Chun has named it, a very good option. Chun also says that this type of service could quickly become a competitive advantage for vendors in the marketplace.

The development is not without problems though, as network latency and coverage issues are still a reality that would restrict the success of CloneCloud. In addition, questions of how to secure the constant transferring of information have also been raised.

Still, this is a pretty exciting development in the mobile world that could make for some substantial changes for our Smartphones and the way we can use them.

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