In the end, it all comes down to *#$%#$?@ batteries! I was greatly amused to read today David Berlind’s ZDNet Blog post, “iPhone redux: Is it time for the battery life equivalent of a ‘nutrition label’ (see example)“.
His statements are entirely true. We as an industry do need some kind of “truth in labeling” decree about battery life. I loved his diagram that he came up with (shown on right).
This point was vividly driven home to me a few years back when for about a year or so I was the product manager for Mitel’s wireless portfolio and was involved with the rollout of Mitel’s IP-DECT solution in Europe. Never in my life did I expect that so much of my time in the product launch would be consumed in dealing with issues around batteries! Being a “software guy”, I really had very little understanding of the nuances of power consumption and their impact on battery life. It was definitely a great learning experience! As David Berlind says:
Not only was plenty written about the iPhone’s potential battery life issues, the truth of the matter is that there’s only so much you can ask a battery to do.
Batteries can only do so much – and the real challenge with a mobile device is to find every way possible to reduce power consumption so that the battery will go that much longer. But, as he points out, we want our devices to do so much more….
(Me? I just want to be able to turn on Bluetooth on my Blackberry without having it require daily recharges!)
It’s true, power is everything. As someone pointed out to me at an IET meeting last year, there have been some great advances in battery technology over the last 10 years. However, it is still a chemical process, and it is unlikely that anyone will come up with a miracle technology that will revolutionize the battery. If you plot the curve on a graph showing the increasing CPU power, or the amount of memory you can buy for $1, you see that battery technology is improving at a very shallow rate compared to other improvements in hardware.
Technologies like WiFi can be a huge challenge as radio systems are not always very power efficient, and sometimes they’re not really designed to be. Look also at the case of UMTS, where using 2100MHz as the carrier instead of the lower frequencies used by GSM results in much shorter talk time. This is just basic physics, and one of the reasons mobile operators would like some of the (lower) frequencies that are today used by analogue television.