The reviews are in for the newcomer, OnePlus One, and the verdict is nothing short of spectacular. A premium smartphone at a bargain price, the One packs in some serious horsepower, featuring a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 801 processor for a mere $299 starting price. Its Cyanogenmod operating system is reminiscent of stock Android found in the likes of the Google Nexus 5, except it’s outfitted with even more features and under-the-hood optimizations that tap into Snapdragon’s immense bag of goodies. One of these hidden gems, as the above video illustrates, is the One’s ability to process music within the Qualcomm Hexagon™ DSP – a technology block found inside certain Snapdragon processors. The result—processing music in this fashion—is hours and hours of battery bliss.
We kid you not— coupled with the balance of incredible speed and power efficiency inherent in the Snapdragon processor, you can expect music playback on the OnePlus One to last over 60 hours on a single charge. We put the claim to the test by plugging the OnePlus One’s headphone jack into a music receiver and continuously cycled through our long music playlist until the One’s battery was completely depleted.
With music, the secret to the One’s impressive battery longevity is the Hexagon DSP found in the Snapdragon 801 processor, working in concert with the large 3100mAH battery. Other processors rely on the CPU to playback music; with certain Snapdragon processors, music is funneled to the DSP, which uses much less battery power than the CPU. Steve Kondik, the founder of Cyanogen, describes how his team optimized Cyanogenmod to tap into the Snapdragon processor DSP for low-power music playback:
“We used standard Android APIs with Qualcomm Snapdragon enhancements. For supported audio types such as MP3 or AAC, the audio stream is sent to the DSP in large chunks without being decoded on the Android side. This allows the apps processor to sleep while the DSP decodes the audio and sends it to the codec. This results in an enormous power savings while listening to music, since the beefy quad-cores can power down.”
In other words, the next time you entertain guests without a power outlet to spare, the OnePlus One can be your music DJ for days at a time.
