Why The Next Innovation In Smartphones HAS To Be Battery Life
Give this article a read, you know, if you have enough battery to.
The year is 2014, We've put a man on the moon, created the internet to connect us across oceans and developed features like E-mail, GPS and Wikipedia. All of this and yet if I go to bed at night without plugging in my smartphone, then there is no point in getting out of bed the next day.
Smartphones were the defining innovation of the 2000’s ever since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on that fateful day of the 9th of January 2007. I spend a genuinely worrying amount of my time using mine, just like millions of people around the world, we didn't realise how bad our Nokia and flip phones were until these amazing devices came along.
With every new year there are new apps to use on your smartphone, every new phone that is announced seems to have a better processor, more RAM, a better camera and a bigger, higher resolution screen. The only thing that doesn’t see big updates is the battery, which is a problem.
A smartphone can be as smart as it likes, with every bell and whistle imaginable, but when you’re down to 5% battery life and it’s not even 6pm yet, I doubt you’ll care for those extra mega pixels in the camera or just how many pixels they managed to shove into a few inches of phone. How can a ‘smartphone’ be deemed smart if it doesn’t come with a sufficiently large battery? Surely that would be a ‘smart’ idea?
Why should I have to carry a charger with me wherever I go? Doesn’t it somewhat contradict the ‘mobile’ part of mobile phone when I can’t stray more than 4 feet from a plug socket? Call me selfish but technology has made me this way, my Motorola flip phone from 2005 could last a week, I didn’t feel the stress and pressure of watching the battery die on a daily basis, to go from that to where we are now very much feels like two steps forward and one step back: Here are loads of awesome new features, but only for a few hours at a time.
It wasn’t meant to be this way.
Two words: Wireless Charging. This was meant to be the saviour. 2012 saw the introduction of the Lumia 920 and the Nexus 4, both came with the mythical wireless charging capabilities. Finally, the stress of low battery would be avoidable, we’d be able to populate our bedrooms and offices with charging pads,and live our lives with 70% battery or more, we’d be able to look back at wires and laugh of how primitive they were.
I repeat, the year is 2014 and I’m still worried about my phone dying on a daily basis. 2 years may not sound like a long time but in the tech world it may as well be a few decades later. We’ve now had 8 iterations of the iPhone that blew all of our minds back in 2007 and yet it still won’t last longer than a day of moderate use?
So why isn’t wireless charging ubiquitous yet? Well there just so happened to be a few different standards which are used by different companies, much like the whole Betamax vs VHS or HD DVD vs Blu-ray battle of yesteryear (Depending on how old you are). Qi seems to be dominant with the most big players behind it, but we all know that nothing is a standard until Apple declares which side it will be on. Hopefully 2015 will be the year that Apple embrace Qi wireless charging technology and we can finally start moving towards wireless charging utopia with pads integrated into tables at McDonald’s and Starbucks, integrated into all new cars and present in buses, trains and offices everywhere.
Of course this isn’t true wireless charging, as your phone still has to be on a certain pad for ages, this doesn’t fix my dream of being able to live in the centre of a room more than 4 feet away from a wall, but it’s a start.
Of course OEMs could just stop worrying about super-duper ridiculously pointless retina screens when the whole point of retina was meant to be that the human eye cannot distinguish the pixels. They could stop their obsession with shoving as many cores into phones as possible (We’re at what, 8 currently? How long till we see a 12 core phone?) and they could start using their phones on a daily basis, and when they realise they can’t get through a whole day they could maybe scale down the spec war and start ‘innovating’ in the battery region.
Things are getting better, you only have to see the difference in how Samsung presented the galaxy s5 compared to the s4, more emphasis is being put on the user and how they actually use their devices (Although we still don’t need a heart rate sensor on a phone, Samsung). Motorola seem to get it, their RAZR devices may not be as mainstream as their Moto X and Moto G, but they do pack some serious battery punch.
The last year or so has seen Laptops shake of their piss poor battery life with the latest Intel processors, Chromebooks and tablets also manage to offer a decent day of juice. Surely it’s time smartphones caught up? After all, they are the devices we check the most.
I’d love it if manufacturers took a year out, gave us the same old Galaxy s5 and HTC One (M8) in 2015 but with beefed up batteries. Hell, maybe even shed a few features and optimize the software to last 2+ days. I’d also love a handset with truly top of the range specs that isn’t a palm pushing 5+ inches big, but that’s a request for another day.
I’d wager that nearly all iPhone users would happily let their devices gain a bit of thickness and weight (I mean seriously, have you held an iPhone 6? they’re ridiculously light) in exchange for an extra couple of hours of battery life.
I’ll end this quickly just in case the battery in the top right corner has turned red and you need to get that screen off before you get home from work.
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