Got a smart phone? No big deal you may think as the vast majority of mobile owners now have a device linked to the app store or the space aged named Android. The smart phone is now the phone and with it many improvements have occurred – social media has risen through the stratosphere. Shopping, banking and gaming on the go has really improved, and the ability to switch between functions has made them ever more versatile. There is just one BIG BIG problem and that is the.. hang on.
Just had to charge my.. hang on.. charge my phone up there! The problem is the charging.
2015 for most people has been segmented into the following:
33% sleeping
33% awake and at work/undergoing life
33% hunting down a charger and charging or thinking about hunting down a charger and charging.
If you look at the official ipad guidelines then it’s clear that actual battery length has not improved during this time period – in fact it has actually decreased in some cases which may be a surprise. This is mainly due to the phones offering higher processing power and a quicker user experience but it may be surprising that the battery length has not sky rocketed and matched how fast the models have developed. It is widely hoped that in the next two incarnations of iPhone that the battery is the feature that really advances – as a sticking plaster there has been a battery saving mode added through the latest iOS update, this demonstrates that there is understanding of this problem from within the apple bunker.
Charging iPad
The variety of demands on devices ensures that the battery may always struggle to keep up as new features are constantly being developed. Gaming for example used to be simply for Snake but now the graphical power is notable as well as how the game can be tailored to that individual. One example is the Coral website which offers live gaming to customers. Gamers can also grab a free bonus, innovations like this would have been unthinkable 3-5 years ago and it will be interesting to see how it develops further over the next four years.
A demonstration of how battery life has struggled to compete with updates is the Amazon app – typing in what you want is so 2014 as now you simply scan an image and somehow it identifies the product within a few seconds – it then gives you the link to that product. This could be a book or a game or even something mundane like a hairdryer – madness. Banking apps also give you the option of a ‘quick balance’ so you don’t have to log in as well as the Apple Pay innovation.
Perhaps battery life will not be able to keep up until the turn of the decade so until then you might still have to keep using the power banks and constantly plugging your device in self-consciously at train stations and in coffee shops. But until then this behaviour is a small price to pay for all the great innovations that you enjoy right here right now.
