in Mobile Phones |

Battery killed the Mobile Internet star

20070321Battery.jpgThere are plenty of new great internet applications coming to your mobile.

You will be able to chat with your friends, catch up with e-mails, read your favorites RSS feeds, browse the Internet, do Skype call while hitting the road.
That’s great. I want all of these applications on my mobile phone.

As we wrote some time ago, the technology is there.

Look at the latest baby coming from Nokia. The N95. This is a great piece of hardware: UMTS, Bluetooth, WiFi, GSP, USB, big sharp and bright screen with a lot of nice application on board and a lot of other applications that you can install.

It’s cool, isn’t it?

Now, let’s have a look at the battery specification: Li-Ion 950 mAh

Ok, just turn on Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS. How long can we imagine the battery will last?

I think this is one of the most critical issue that the Mobile Internet will have to face in the near future.

The main issue is that battery technology does not improve at the same speed of other technologies. You can have a look at the market and something is moving (Fuel cell batteries, Prismatic Lithium batteries, etc.) but it’s not moving fast enough.

This is the first problem: battery power is not enough.

The second problem is that mobile phone design is now moving into new territories. Not all battery technology can cope with design requirements.

It pretty much clear that the market will have to find a compromise on this. Handset vendor will push for new technology and new design on mobile phonrs, applications vendors will push to have their applications on the same mobile phone, operators will push to make the user run all of these applications… and the battery will die after three or four hours.

Unfortunately the only solution is in battery technology. As an operator you can fine tune your network parameter, ask third parties to develop power smart applications and so on but it will not be enough for scenario that is going to be shaped in the next few months.

Will we see double batteries packaged with the mobile phone? Probably yes.
Why do I blog this? I already find myself charging my Nokia N73 battery every single night and that will get worse in the near future.

Related posts:

  1. My fat mobile phone
  2. The Internet in your phone
  3. Technology is there
  4. The perfect mobile e-mail application
  5. links for 2006-11-27

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  1. I completely agree with you Alessandro. A practical solution could be to force OEM to build a common recharging unit? Or maybe use a standard USB port to recharge the phone’s battery? I know that there are technical issues but the general point is to face the problem with a different perspective: givin user easy access to rechargin tools. Quite utopic uh?
    PS the double battery solution is not so user friendly if you consider that you still need a phone to recharge every battery pack.

  2. Alessandro, yr right. I tested it in-the-field. batteries has gone after a morning of very intensive use – recording video, shooting photos, sending them to Vox and using GPS

    But it’s a great object anyway 🙂

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