Running out of battery
As a worker of mobile corporation, I use mobile phone for both business (emails) and fun (chatting, surfing). I’m nowadays regularly using mobile phone while traveling in Helsinki.
So, I happened to stop by at the university today to do some things I promised to do. I sat there, close to computer, for hours and did some actual work also. Then, after few hours, I decided to left back to home. While sitting in the bus, I noticed the battery level being rather down: it seemed like it would last for the whole journey.
So, I started to think. This was obviously my mistake: I should have charged it while doing other things. But then, was it really my fault? Mobile phone is rather unnoticeable. I didn’t check the battery status during the day. I didn’t know that it was rather low.
So, even thought there’s a human error behind this all — there’s rather easy technological solutions. First, the charging procedure is rather hard. You need to plug things in and do all this manual work. It’s not easy and fun, especially if you’re mobile.
Secondly, one isn’t specially aware of the mobile phone if it’s not used. My main focus was on transscripting things, not checking the wellbeing of my phone. Should the device notice where I am and tell me that it has a low battery? Some sort of smart contextuality would be interesting.
This brings up the question that how much we want that the device effects our life. Actually, for some situation — like battery charging or profile mode choosing — I would give the device more intelligence and power. Luckily E90 has a good battery and I survived to home to continue IRC discussion with a laptop.
Tags: battery, context, intelligence, notification
November 9th, 2008 at 5:05 am
There’s this trick that spared me from utter boredom countless times when I was serving in the Finnish army: Carry a spare battery with you everywhere you go
The E90 battery, despite being one of the biggest Nokia uses, is still quite compact and fits my wallet nicely.
There’s, of course, a small flaw in this plan: The spare battery needs to be kept charged, too. This can be somewhat nontrivial, as my method of choice for recharging the cell phone is leaving it plugged overnight.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Actually, there’s several solutions for this. One friend of mine asked in the irc if there’s USB charging solutions. Yes there are; I own CA-100 and found out that there’s solutions with PC connectivity also, CA-126. And I’m sure that there’s 3rd party things doing this also.
Japsu suggested that I should carry secondary batter with me, and sometimes I’ve got N810 in the back also – which uses the same battery. But these are only solutions for the implication, not the problem.
I consider that the problem is that mobile devices are so quite and just stay in the pockets most of the time that ordinary people forget them. I try to charge my device every night, but just now I noticed that the device has been laying on the desk without charging for hours.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I think the problem is much more interesting with the iPhone. Since the release of the new 3G version, there’s been much complains about it’s battery life-time. I think E90 suffers from the same problem because of it’s keyboard and large screen.
It’s not that the battery isn’t enough, but numerous possibilities and ease of use that drain it empty too fast. According to some tests iPhone’s battery is actually more durable than those in competitors devices.
So what happens when other mobiles become as easy to use as iPhone? Common folks start having these daily battery issues.
Your solution sounds neat, but doesn’t solve the actual problem. The smarter the phones become, more power they need. We need better battery technology.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Mika, you are correct that the battery technology is the bottle neck here. But I don’t think that just putting “more” capabilities into the battery is enough. As the devices become more powerful, it will most likely mean more battery usage.
In any case people need to charge their device some time. Thus the charging experience need to be good in any case and one must remember to charge the device — which I forgot in this case. I actually had the charger with me, so that wasn’t the problem — I just forgot my device totally and focused to work with the desktop.
E.g. I like the iPhone’s dock: every time I’m next to computer I most likely would remind to take the phone out of my pocket and give it some more power. But how to take care that this happens in unusual environment, like in my university, also?