You Are The Incharge of Your Cell Phone Batteries

Suzanne Choney said: Phone are getting smarter, but are their batteries?

As more of us gravitate to smartphones with features such as Web surfing, e-mail and video, we’re putting more demands on cell phone batteries. And, while cell phones are evolving, batteries really aren’t, experts say. It’s up to the individual user to take charge, so to speak, and do a better job of managing battery life.

“There are ways of improving cell phone battery life, but there are very few ways of improving the batteries themselves,” said Kevin Burden, ABI Research’s mobile devices research director. “Essentially, battery technology is governed by God — there are just no new elements showing up in the Periodic Table.”

Almost all cell phones now use lithium-ion batteries, offering better performance than the nickel-metal hydride batteries that were in many mobiles until a decade or so ago.

“In 2000, a lithium-ion battery provided ample power for cell phones, but the power demand is now above what is available,” said Isidor Buchmann, founder and CEO of Cadex Electronics, Inc. The company manufactures battery analyzers and chargers.

At BatteryUniversity.com, Buchmann’s educational Web site, he notes that the battery industry “is making incremental capacity gains of 8 to 10 percent per year,” which is not fast enough to keep up with the hardware and software changes bombarding smartphones, such as BlackBerrys, iPhones and Treos.

Battery life 'critical issue'
While cell phone talk times generally range from 3 to 7 hours, once you add in extra duties, such as Internet use and video, all bets are off when it comes to figuring out battery life.

“There’s no doubt that batteries are becoming the critical issue with so-called ‘converged’ devices,” said David Chamberlain, principal wireless analyst for In-Stat Research.

“Assuming there are no chemistry or physics breakthroughs forthcoming, there are a couple of directions we can head,” he said.

“One is by having phones with much smarter operating systems that turn off unnecessary functions,” including radios in the phones that power 3G, for a faster data network, as well as GPS and Wi-Fi radios when they are not in use. Right now, it’s up to the user to make those decisions, generally in the phone’s “settings” menu.

Another way to augment battery life is to divide and conquer, said Chamberlain, who describes himself as an “evangelist for the two-device user.”

“I think the (Apple) iPod touch is a reason to start thinking about a device that has wireless data connectivity (to the Internet), but doesn’t necessarily do voice and text,” he said. “That way, our talk-and-text phone can have terrific battery life, while a second device handles the multimedia/navigation/game applications.”

But Chamberlain realizes his may be a lone, or at least lonely, voice in favor of that argument.

Smartphone sales are stronger than ever, in part driven by the success of Apple’s iPhone, as well as by significant and steady price drops on almost all smartphones in the past year.

In the first six months of 2008, 19 percent of cell phone sales were smartphones, compared to 9 percent for the same period last year, according to a recent report by The NPD Group.

Multimedia phones — those that play music, games and videos— are also increasing in popularity.

Better Bluetooth, screen technology
Cell phone manufacturers “are always examining ways to make devices more efficient from a power standpoint,” said Joseph Farren, assistant vice president of CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group.

There are some efforts to improve technologies that will reduce battery drain. Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology used for hands-free headsets, is getting more efficient and less power-hungry, for example.

Qualcomm is working on a screen technology called “mirasol” that could help consume “significantly less power,” and help extend cell phone battery life, according to the company.

Mirasol, which now is being used in very small-screen devices, such a lightweight MP3 player, “takes the ambient light around you to power the backlighting of the screen,” said Burden of ABI Research.

“Obviously, Qualcomm’s goal is to get mirasol into mobile phones, but we’re talking at least two years down the road before phones using it hit the market.”

Phone manufacturers “have been somewhat hesitant to tamper with screen technology, because the screen is what attracts consumers,” he said. “When people walk into a store to buy a new phone, historically it’s always been the screen that’s drawn them to the phone that they want to buy.”

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