In what’s being called a "Huge Breakthrough", Atif Shamim, a PHD Student of Canada’s Carleton University has created a way to increase the battery life of devices like the iPhone and Blackberry by up to 12 times.

He has managed to disconnect all wires that connect the electrical subsystems of the devices to the antenna, and has invented a way for those signals to transfer wirelessly. Doing this has reduced the total power consumed by over 1200%. This work was lauded by European Wireless experts as an "excellent integration of system design, material sciences and electromagnetic antenna design". He has also filed for a patent for this in the US and Canada.

A research paper describing the module that he cowrote with Muhammad Arsalan and adviser Langis Roy of Carleton’s department of electronics, was named the best paper at the European Wireless Technology Conference. Prior to that, the duo won the 2007 Strategic Microcontroller Council Industrial Collaboration Award (the picture above is from that award… video after the jump).

This breakthrough has been covered in Engadget and dozens of industrial publications, but more importantly (in my view) the significance of this invention can be seen from the types of comments it is inspiring from different people, some of which are below:

[An Ottawa inventor has pulled off something the titans of innovation behind the iPhone couldn't...]

[I am an undergraduate electrical and electronic student and it is pretty much my dream to make some sort of breakthrough like this. What a legend. I hope it is effective and works its way into our devices]

Excellent work guys!

Here’s the video of their prior work.