What we need is better battery tech, but what we have is fancy cameras and quick charge

I still remember that day in August 2006 when I got my first cellphone – the Sony Ericsson Walkman series W300i. It was an era when Nokia ruled. My requirements were simple – good call quality, good battery and good music playback. The W300i delivered on all three. There wasn’t much one could do back then. Smartphone was yet to become a term. Over the last 10 years, I’ve changed many phones. Ecosystems have changed. Smartphones today are as powerful as a PC was in 2006. You can do everything from ordering food to making video calls to your loved ones to booking flight tickets on your smartphone today. But when I go to buy or recommend a phone, two considerations still stand above others. Namely, good battery life and good call quality. They are called phones for a reason. I’m not alone when I lay emphasis on these two specifications ahead of a fast processor, higher RAM, latest OS, high resolution camera and other features. To give a Maslowian hierarchy analogy, battery life would, at least for me, be at the base and things such as dual rear camera setup would be at the top of the pyramid. Smartphone marketing spiel Times have changed. And that’s good. Back in the day the pitch was around the camera – more megapixels meant better cameras; then came the display wars - AMOLED vs IPS vs others. Around the same time, it was processors cores – more cores meant better processing and hence a faster phone. A couple of years ago, it was the resolution battle – HD vs FullHD vs QuadHD. Now it’s fingerprint sensors, high resolution front-facing cameras with front-facing flash, dual rear cameras and so on. Pull up any poll from the last couple of years or any story around consumer needs. There’s one common denominator – battery life. Long-lasting phones. But all we hear in the world of smartphone marketing is about larger capacity batteries. Since last year, there’s been a trend towards phones with batteries over the 5000mAh range. With high battery capacities come higher dimensions. You lose out on slimness, and features such as the camera end up being basic. We don’t need to tell you what happens when battery component is overlooked in a haste to launch a phone sooner. We are looking at you Samsung. The exploding Galaxy Note 7’s have really been a PR disaster for the Korean giant. While it is great to see innovations happening on every aspect of a smartphone - better cameras, faster processors, better antennas, and so on. But we are yet to get a Moore’s law equivalent of the battery tech world. The Lithium-ion and Lithium-polymer batteries have been the same ones we have been using since a decade or even before that. Our lives still revolve around batteries The only thing that has improved is device charging times. Chipsets let you charge your smartphones quickly when the device battery is drained. And that is the only battery-related communication we see – 15 minutes of charging will give you 7 hours talk time and so on. We rarely hear of any smartphone maker talking about innovating on the battery front. Improving battery technology is a research topic in a lot of universities, and it’s a multi-year project. But when was the last time you heard about a smartphone maker pro-actively funding such projects? It would be great to hear what companies are doing to address the elephant in the room. Better battery tech. And by better battery technology we don’t mean just a higher capacity battery. We keep reading about battery technologies every once in a while. This paints a rosy picture, for instance. Solid state batteries , for instance, could prevent exploding battery issues. Nanowire batteries. Turing talked about **Graphene batteries** in this beast of a device they’re planning. Implementing new battery tech inside a smartphone will no doubt involve some sort of re-looking at the manufacturing and assembling processes. It is an investment which will initially cost dearly, both for smartphone makers as well as consumers. But it’s a cost worth incurring. While it’s great to have that 16MP dual rear camera, the irony is that all image sharing services compress those high res photos. Higher resolution displays may be great, but they’re also great at guzzling battery. Not saying these are bad things – but they are great add-ons to have. Coming back to the Maslow’s pyramid – these features will be in the upper half.