With battery performance
becoming an obsession for many smartphone users, the race is on to
innovate ways of prolonging power to ensure that juice-guzzling devices
can stay the course.
The good news is that
scientists say that they are on track to create power cells that may
rarely need charging -- or even phones that have no need for batteries.
The bad news is that these may be several years away.
Until they arrive, phone
and gadget companies are scrambling for solutions to the problem which,
in the absence of major technology announcements, was one of the key
talking points at the planet's leading mobile technology showcase this
week in Barcelona.
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"Power supply is the giant elephant in the room here," says CNN's Dylan Reynolds,
who has been struggling to keep his own handsets alive while tweeting
and reporting from the 2013 Mobile World Congress. "Phones get more
hungry as they get more powerful, but my own experience tells me that
battery life isn't keeping up.
"Everywhere I go at
Mobile World Congress I hear people complaining that their phone just
died, or is about to die. I've started carrying a large and heavy
external battery to make sure my phones make it through the working
day."
The problem has prompted
the event's organizers to deploy charging points around the huge venue.
It also led to manufacturer Nokia causing an unlikely sensation by
announcing a no-frills retro phone capable of lasting a month between
charges.
"But that's just treating
the symptom and no-one seems have a solution to the underlying
problem," Reynolds adds. "I think that's why Nokia's phone grabbed so
much attention. It also underlines the trade-off between the
sophistication of your phone, and battery life."
Malik Saadi, principal
analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, says the industry is "coping
rather than solving the problem," and says there is no breakthrough on
the horizon.
"We are still seeing the
same battery cell technology that we saw back in 2003," he said.
"Typically we expect one day usage from a fully-charged battery.
"Although the
architecture within the batteries has changed, and the number of cells
within the battery has increased, the actual technology is the same.
"We need a revolutionary
or new type of battery, for example fuel cells, but unfortunately those
technologies have not been able to make it to the marketplace because
they are expensive, and they're also too big to fit into the phone."
And so he said the
industry was relying on the consumer to adapt their behavior. "Consumers
are adapting. They know they can't do anything about it, so they're
learning ways to cope."
One current coping
mechanism is solar power. Phones fitted with solar back panels have been
around for some time but most are barely capable of keeping the phone
on standby.
This year's MWC saw French firm Wysips
unveil what it said was the world's first viable solar touch screen.
The transparent photovoltaic film can be installed on most smartphones
to generate power while still allowing users to operate their device.
Wysips says its 0.5
millimeter-thick screen can be plugged directly to the phone's power
inlet to provide an extra four minutes of battery life for every 10
minutes it is exposed to direct sunlight. It can also charge from
artificial illumination.
While this will merely
assist in stretching phone life, the company says it is working on more
efficient models which could one day be fitted as standard to mobiles
and perhaps virtually eliminate dependence on mains electricity.
With the increasing
popularity of cable-free charging pads that allow devices to soak up
juice from a mat (or even a pillow), the Wireless Power Consortium is lobbying to standardize such systems so that any phone can access any charger.
Current charging pads
are generally dedicated to one product or brand, but if these become
generic then they could be integrated into a broad array of surfaces in
public spaces, offices, restaurants, bars or cafes.
Despite Saadi's gloomy outlook, potential answers to the battery problem are beginning to take shape in laboratories.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing new long-lasting power cells that they say will be capable of charging to full power in a matter of seconds.
Using nanotechnology,
MIT's Professor Joel E. Schindall has laid the groundwork for what he
calls a "synthetic battery," a power cell that, instead of the chemical
reactions used in standard units, stores charge in a forest of tiny
carbon "nanotubes."
Elsewhere, some
innovators are experimenting with devices that draw power from the human
body's kinetic energy. Such technology is already used to power
watches, but scaling this up to the level required by smartphones is
difficult.
But one team from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new technique that
uses bodily movement, such as footfalls, to generate static electricity
that can then be harnessed in quantities that could viably charge
larger devices.
Such solutions are
clearly some way off commercial development, but with Apple rumored to
be designing its hotly-anticipated iWatch around a power source based on
kinetic and solar power, a battery-free world isn't such a distant
dream.