New tech will make cellphones use less energy

Everything You Need To Know About pCell - Business Insider

How is pCell better than 4G or LTE?

Besides speed and signal strength, it uses a lot less power. pWave radios use a 1-milliwatt transmitter to deliver data, compared with the 250 milliwatts used by most Wi-Fi radios and even larger amounts of power used by cellular towers.
They also use less power on the user's end, too: phones as they exist today would waste far less power searching for a signal, and one day "pCell Native" devices could use parts that use even less power than the Wi-Fi chips built into devices like the iPod Touch today.
Going back to the carrier side of things, pCell also brings significant reductions in the amount of infrastructure needed to power a cell network. Unlike cell towers, which need a massive fiber infrastructure to provide enough bandwidth for all their users, pWaves can be deployed in enough locations that each unit can "see" another unit, meaning they can bounce data around using line-of-sight radio waves for far less money. And instead of using custom hardware to handle all signal processing, a carrier using pCell can run the software behind it on any sufficiently powerful Linux computer.

Will I need a new phone to use pCell?

Nope. To make adopting the technology as easy as possible, Artemis engineered pCell to work with regular LTE devices — so when it's ready, your iPhone or Android device should already be compatible. That also means you'll be able to use your phone on a pCell network and still have it work when you go somewhere that's still running regular LTE cellular service.
With that said, there will be some devices made "pCell Native" that will use less power (and thus get better battery life) than regular LTE-compatible devices.