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’?

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.

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.)

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.