Windows Phone Thoughts: Better Battery Life For Mobile Devices?

Portable electronic devices have made huge advances over the years. Many of you are walking around with a Pocket PC that would embarrass your $3,000 desktop you purchased in 1996. One area though that is moving at a snails pace is battery technology. Yeah, I know, we no longer have memory effects, recharges are faster and overall lifetime is longer, but if the time between recharges had grown anything like the rest of the technology in your hand over the past 5 years, all of our devices would last hundreds of hours before the low battery warning appeared.

Well, don't look for anything earth shattering down the road. :roll: "The improvement in battery life could be achieved by using smarter power-control algorithms." oh yay. Better algorithms. I can see us in 3-4 years where batteries are the huge limiting factor. As more and more places are enabled for wireless access and people are increasingly using cell phones for more than yacking and PDAs for more than cool day planners, getting 6 hours out of a device is really going to hurt productivity. The same can be said for laptops. With my WiFi card in my Latitude C610, I get maybe 2.5 hrs. I just find it interesting of all the things we've done in the past 100 years, advances in portable electricity is one of the areas that just moves too slow for the cool things we are trying to power, from cars to computers.