When it comes to portable electronic gadgets, there are three major annoyances.
- The three hour limit must fall
There is an unwritten rule when designing portable computers:
The battery will last three hours.
Once technological advances allow the next generation to run longer – be it thanks to more efficient hardware or more powerful battery technology – the manufacturers decide to shrink the battery, capping the device back to the three hour limit.
Three is a nice psychological figure. “Lasts three hours? – not too short!” “Less than three kilogramms? – not too heavy!” After all these years, today’s 3 kg laptops usually still run for 3 hours or less.
This must end.
Three hours is not enough for a true mobile device (especially since the advertised three hours of battery time usually result to less than two in real use).
- Batteries should be replaceable
A rechargeable portable device that doesn’t allow the user to replace its battery is a disposable item, it was made to break.
Enforcing planned obsolescence by making it hard to replace the device’s consumable parts is a design choice that should be opposed.
- We need a standard battery for gadgets
This is the hardest task for the future and it’s unlikely to happen soon. But we desperately need a new battery standard.
Good luck when you try to find the battery type used in a laptop or cellphone at a reasonable price just few years after its release.
The AA battery‘s format was standardized 60 years ago. Battery technology has improved since then, yet you can still use today’s AA in a 1980s walkman or a 1950s flashlight.
There are several manufacturers. You can buy AAs anywhere in the world. Recycling is possible.
It’s insane: Gadget manufacturers keep a stock of fast-aging device-specific batteries for a limited time and sell them at premium prices. There are no or few competing offers and formats change with every new device generation.
We need standard battery formats just like AA for laptops, cameras, cell phones and other portable gadgets.
#1 is just my personal requirement. The technology exists to design sub-500-gramm computers that run for a whole day, but few customers buy them, so unless people decide that a three hour MID isn’t really such a mobile internet device, the industry has no reason to change.
But #2 and #3 are ecologically disastrous and I’d even welcome government regulation to enforce these if the industry doesn’t come up with solutions by itself.
Photos via flickr by AndyArmstrong, merfam, Eva the Weaver.
This article was written for umpcportal.com.
Hast Du englisch gewählt, weil Du Steve und seine “3Stunden-Akku-nicht-wechselbar”-Spießgesellen von Apple meinst?
@Erik: Ne, das war ursprünglich ein Gastbeitrag für eine englischsprachige Webseite.
[...] blogger alemán ha publicado tres propuestas sobre las baterías que visten nuestros dispositivos portátiles. Son tan sencillas y escuetas que parecen un bello teorema [...]
About mobile devices (pocket size), there really a lot of components to pack in a tiny volume. I suspect the size of the battery to be one of the free adjustable parameter, during the the challenging hardware packing task.
Good point, but there is a lot more aspects of energy efficiency and battery life.
Usability often requires more battery power: aesthetics cost resources, and hardware features do too.
Another important feature of a mobile device is Suspend To RAM. There is a project on Garage to get this working. For example, say you are travelling or it is night. You would not want to put your NIT off and on as this costs too much power. If you use Suspend to RAM instead you won’t lose much battery life.
Alternative ways to give a mobile device power are also welcome. For example, solar energy. Apple has patented a way to put a solar panel behind the LCD screen which could also be used to adjust the backlight. I doubt this patent will hold. In any case, RuG (Rijkuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands) has invented in 2007 a way to put thin solar panels before a window. This could, in theory, be used on a LCD screen as well.
I also recently saw a foldable ultra-thin LCD screen on physorg.com. While a research project. and probably expensive, this lowers weight and could be detachable from the device. This way, in theory, you could have 2 devices, with only 1 LCD screen, using e.g. BlueTooth.
Another issue I have is the several devices required for functionality: PDA, DAP (MP3 player), GSM/3G, GPS (navigation). The more can be integrated in 1 device, the more user friendly it is because one needs to carry less devices. A slight weight increase is then not a big deal.
While some of the above might be (initially) expensive these are important points because we’ll see more and more competition in the field of tablets what will matter is how good the device is hardware wise. Software-wise most is open source; a clone is therefore easily made. And this is also already happening.
Nokia n800 for example lasts longer than 3 hours.Say, 5 or more.And there is trouble:there is no standard battery which will fit this device and will provide same power.AA accu are 1.2v * 2800mAh at very best, 3.36 watt-houra at very best.Nokia accu is 3.6v * 1500 mAh = 5.4 watts. And it’s slightly thinner than any AA.So, with 2 AAs device will be too fat to be usable. Really, issue is that best state of art batteries are Li-ion.They can’t replace standard AA and similar.They are 3.6 v per cell rather than 1.2 … 1.5 v per cell as AAs & co.So there must be absolutely new standard which allows 3.6 v cells and well, what about sizes?Devices have very different sizes requirements and from possible form factor you want to have maximum possible power.So it is a major issue – there must be those who is willing to create standard and those who is willing to obey it.It must be maximally efficient in terms of size to power ratio.And it must be state of art at the edge of battery development.This is very challenging task.For specific device it is easier to use custom battery.Well, really cells aren’t so custom and really there is some popular cells form-factors packaged as final battery.But well, Li-Ion has own problems.While its watts per volume and watts per weight ratio is unbeatable, Li-Ion has limited life, 2-3 years at most, losing capacity.This is li-ion technology ‘feature’ – they are great but can’t resist long against time.And they can explode with a big boom if overcharged.So it is not possible to sell just li-ion cell to unaware users.Assemblied batteries are include protection circuit.Also li-ion will irreversibly die if discharged too much.So device must prevent overcharge and overdischarge, etc.Hard to standardize all such stuff and still remain efficient enough, yeah?And after all, devices evolved slightly. But best of the best batteries are only couple times better than 20 years older ones.So it is simple: batteries are showstopper.
I think this is just now starting to change. For example, the Eee PC 901 weighs 1.1kg and has battery life 4.2-7.8 hrs depending on use. This is partly from having a largish battery (6600mAh I believe) and partly from its choice of CPU (Intel Atom), and to a lesser extent the use of SSD instead of spinning hard drive.
Though I suspect that the unwritten rule of 3hrs is partly because 3 hours really is enough for some people’s use. I haven’t so far found the 3-4 hour battery life of my Nokia 770 to be a problem. (Whereas its limited sleep time of barely a couple of days is more of a problem.)
Apple ipods and McDonalds toys are the only things I’ve heard of whose battery isn’t easily replaceable.
We don’t necessarily need a single standard battery for gadgets (some gadgets are smaller than others, or their typical use implies different tradeoffs in size, weight, capacity). However, batteries today are gratuitously different: I’ve seen mobile phone batteries from the same manufacturer differing by only a couple of mm in width/length.
Well, one can replace a battery of most embedded, mobile devices but the batteries are often either not good enough quality-wise (they lack some protection mechanisms or aren’t well tested for the device), or they are the official batteries and expensive. Although I have to admit I don’t know much about the batteries internals.
If you have one standard you can use this to buy alternative batteries but guess which corporations don’t want this to happen and why it therefore won’t happen anytime soon? The corporations who do the R&D on the batteries and the corporations who sell these batteries to corporations like Nokia. So you have a vendor lock-in in this regard, and it won’t change any time soon unless something revolutionary happens.
I have a backup battery for my laptop just to be sure, and once I’ll start to use my NIT for serious matters I will for sure get a second battery. There are also usually official addons for a device, like a car loader.
I believe the ideal battery life of an embedded, mobile device is to use it for a day, hang it on AC before sleep, and use it again when you wake up. Ofcourse, hardly any device achieves this goal, so the user has to make choices regarding the use of the device.
I’ve stated a few possibilities to limit the power abuse of a device. One could also use PowerTOP to find out the programs & settings which drain the device the most, and for the NIT there are several unofficial ways to get a better performance for less power. Like the n800-s2ram program, but also several kernel patches. All these little things, when stable, add up to a better user experience.
Furthermore, I don’t know what the magic line of usability is regarding battery life, Is 3 hours caught out of thin air, or has there been statistic relevant evidence that 3 hours is a magic line to be achieved to be seen as ‘usable’?