Colleagues from the University of Massachusetts have developed mobile software that has a unique way of over-coming the frustration of having to wait for your favourite and most used applications to boot up. Using a system labelled 'predictive caching', it aims to second-guess the apps you will load in a bid to pre-load them for you, moments before you do so yourself.

Weather applications take time to retrieve information from the internet, Maps might need your current GPS location to display a real-time overhead image, while loading up graphically-rich games test even the most powerful pieces of tech. The prophetic system aims to do most of the work for you, and in silence.

It does so by using the phone's location, motion sensors and the current time to first 'learn' when its user uses such apps and then proceed to pre-load specific applications to match its prediction. You might like to read an e-book on your tube journey back home in the evening, for example, whereby the system will begin to pre-load an e-book reader as you approach the station.

The software developed by Tingxin Yan and his team has so far performed well in tests, slashing the average 20-second boot-up time for apps on Windows phones by around 6 seconds, though this did consumer an added 2-percent of battery life per day as a result. Still, where applications are more power-hungry than ever and we continue to rely on heavy-duty multi-tasking, the software created by Tingxin Yan and colleagues is a confident step forward for faster loads and much smoother smartphone functions.

Richard Birkett