For the majority of us that own a smartphone, we have to charge it once a day. Why? When did we settle and think 'well we can live with this'? Gone are the days where we would plug in our phones once a week and not have to worry about them running out of juice at awkward moments. Some people might argue that the days where we only used our phones for calls and texting are over too, so it was a tradeoff in the end. I disagree.
Why?
The reason we have phones that last just one day with moderate use is because we want it all from our phones. We want them to look stylish, give us push notifications, have a glorious touchscreen and allow us to play games/update statuses and anything else you can think of. Now if we were prepared to let one of these slide, like the stylish factor, then maybe phone manufacturers could fit a larger capacity battery and our phones wouldn't have such a close relationship with the wall socket. Before the iPhone came about, we didn't care much for how phones looked, we cared a little but nowhere near as much as we do now. After their release, manufacturers had a wake up call that as good as their phones are, they need to look good too. Phones became as much a fashion accessory as they did a device for communication. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either. It's just how our tastes as consumers have changed.
How to fix it?
Android phone manufacturers have started to implement battery saving software to help the longevity of a single charge. Samsung started a while back with its power saving function, Sony and HTC both have it implemented in their phones now too. The three flagship Android phones on the market now, the S4, the Xperia Z and the HTC One, all have some form of this on their phones as standard. It means that manufacturers know consumers want longer battery life, but they cannot put a bulky battery on as it won't sell, regardless of how long it lasts for. This is their answer for the time being.
Unfortunately for us, there's no real fix either. You could get an extra battery, but you'd have to keep it topped up all the time and phone manufacturers are increasingly moving towards non-removable batteries. You could buy a battery pack to charge your phone on the go when the battery is low but they're bulky and realistically you can't use your phone while it's charging on the go. Apps like Juice Defender have been around for a while now, but they only increase your battery life at the cost of less connectivity. Most of these apps are very limited in how much battery they save, since the biggest drain of our battery is the screen, which is something you can't really disable. Either way you look at it, we're stuck.
Our only hope?
While advances in processing power and storage are extremely quick and exponential, advances in batteries in general are much much slower. It has been the case for years now. Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on integrated systems doubles abut every two years, which means that processing power doubles too. This has been the case for some time now and looking at the mobile phone market, it seems to follow this phenomenon too. While the advances of memory hasn't been as quick as this, it has still been much faster than battery capacity improvements. In a way this is also stifling advances in the mobile phone market since manufacturers can't put their fastest chips in their phones as batteries can't sustain them for long enough. This forces them to spend more money trying to make them energy efficient, essentially making the whole research and development process longer. We'll have to sit tight and hope that there is a breakthrough in this sector, otherwise we will be forever doomed to need to charge out phones once a day...
Mo
No comments:
Post a Comment