I currently need to recharge my mobile about every 12 hours. That means plugging in at night and also leaving it plugged in while I'm working at my desk or plugging in whilst I drive. I'm a reasonable person and would be very happy if I could reduce that to recharge once every 24 hours then I would be very happy.
Therefore I was interested to see the story about Nokia researching the opportunity to charge mobile phone batteries from ambient radio waves. It is also interesting to note that Apple promise increased battery life and talk time in the forthcoming upgrade to the iPhone. I'm glad to see that in spite of all the other advances on mobile phones, battery life is still high up on manufacturers priorities. The issue just won't go away. Isn't it weird how things have changed so slowly in this respect?
Of course things have changed really quickly and batteries now are smaller and more powerful than ever before. But the phones have gone from walkie-talkies to small laptops in terms of power consumption so we've not shown the progress we've made.
'Talk-time and battery life' first became a catch-phrase for me in 1997 when I attended a roadshow held by Talkland a UK mobile service provider. Ivan Donn from Vodafone turned up to espouse the virtues of the Vodafone network and some of the phones they had. One of these was a dinky Ericsson handset with a not very memorable number. Ivan listed the key features of the handset as weight, talk-time and battery life. Those were pretty much the only things other than the appearance, to differentiate one handset from another. These days there is so much more but if your battery is flat they aren't much use.
About the same time in the late 1990s I remember being given a Motorola phone which was about a centimetre thick, together with an 'industrial strength' battery which was over a centimetre thick. Motorola also had a charger which would take about 4 batteries and you could then travel around with plenty of spare batteries for when one goes flat. That idea was a pretty practical way of solving a problem without having to improve the technology. I wonder why we don't see more of it now?
Over the years I have learned to treat battery longevity claims with some suspicion. They never quite last as long as we thought the manufacturer claimed, and by the time you have been through a few charge cycles, you can't rely on the original manufacturers figures anyway. So I guess this 'always on' life style we are encouraged to adopt, keeps the battery meter high on the list of things to check on a regular basis. Sadly all too often this meter is telling us to recharge.
Recharging is not always easy. Generally each phone requires a different charger. So I was also pleased to hear at the GSM 2009 conference that at long last the mobile phone manufacturers are planning to adopt a common interface. If we can just get each country to adopt the same socket size then we're really going places. Thank goodness car cigar lighters came to the rescue of people who travel regularly, so long as they hire cars too!
Of course the Nokia research into harvesting power from ambient radio waves is going to need a bit of backup and that could be in the form of utilising solar power, in a similar way to the plans from LG with their solar Car Kit, which was also on display at the GSM 2009 show.
If the work being done by Nokia's researchers in Cambridge plus some solar power as and when it is available can keep me from having to plug in to recharge more than once a day, then I'll be a happy man. Then I'll wonder why laptop manufacturers can't do the same, but thats another story.
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