Why my 10 year old Siemens MC60 is better than my iPhone
For those of you who don’t know the old school Siemens MC60 phones I’ll give you a little context. They came just after the black and white 3310 nokia phones, actually had a colour display and banks gave them away for free back in the day. I got mine in 2005, and it is still alive and kicking.
Granted. The MC60 doesn’t really allow you to access the internet, doesn’t give you a notification when someone’s retweeted you, doesn’t tell you the weather forecast and has a camera that produces pictures as blurry as you’ll find them on a game show. And to top it off, when you take it out of your pocket your friends will look at you like you are mental. Trust me, it is so old school that I got those looks well before the iPhone even existed.
But the MC60 does do one thing that my iPhone doesn’t do. One thing that I really wished my iPhone did do.
It saves a bit of its battery when it shuts down and tells you it has died.
Now you must think: that is just an annoying little tech bug! Why would it not just use the full battery before it shuts itself down?
Whether this is an actual tech fail or has been thoughtfully designed this way (gold starts for whoever came up with it in that case) it gives you the perfect opportunity to do some damage control. With that little bit of battery life left you can turn your phone back on, quickly look up that one important number you need (or call 999 for that matter) before the phone starts shutting itself down again.
It gives you a second chance. Which in a moment of need is all you would ask for anyway.
According to a survey by uSwitch, 89% of Britons would be more likely to buy a smartphone based purely on longer battery life. And I’m not surprised to see this. We have all been in situations where our battery has died and it is pretty crucial for it to work. Like when you try to get home in the middle of the night, or when you need your alarm to go off the next morning and your phone battery dies while you are sleeping.
Again. All you want is that tiny bit of back-up power. That small second chance.
With battery life being the biggest issue and batteries being the slowest innovating piece of technology that seems to exist, we need to really start thinking a bit more about these common scenario’s more often when it comes to designing phone functionalities.
Why is it not much easier to set varying grades of ‘battery saving’ modes without having to comb through the settings panel? And why is there not an emergency mini battery that lets you call the emergency number?
When we all sit down and have a think about it, I’m sure we can all do better than coming up with an ‘External mini battery pack’.
Now on another note. It it seems there is hope with the ‘Holy grail’ of battery life that has recently been designed by researchers at Stanford University with the potential to increase the capacity of existing battery technology by 400% (http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/07/29/longer-phone-battery-life/)
But until then. And maybe even after then, I would suggest we all think about these common ‘what if I need to use my phone’ scenario’s a bit more often.
