Google Says Your Phone Should Last a Day, Blame Apps for Poor Battery

[phandroid]

Battery life is such a heated concern that many mobile users face. Beyond Android, I’ve seen complaints of battery life on all sorts of platforms: Symbian, iPhone OS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile. Simply put, smartphones just can’t seem to catch a break with providing decent battery life without the need to go out and buy an [...]

More...

 

[ynwa]

1 day isnt enough for a battery anyway i believe. I would hope to get 2 or 3 days from a battery, giving you plenty of time to make sure you get it charged. technology for batteries doesnt seem to be moving as quick as other technology.

 

[Isthmus]

I have asked this a ton of times and have never gotten a response. Why is it that no company embeds solar cells on the periphery of the screen (and maybe into the body of the case), as a means to generate supplemental power and extend battery life between charges. It's not like the technology doesn't exist. Heck it is used in exactly that way in modern solar watches every day (only there it is used as the battery's primary charging mechanism). It seems to me like you could squeeze a fair amount of extra use time out of a charge if you had some supplemental power helping out. That plus the device could continue to recharge on it's own when not in use, by drawing power from any light source.

How hard could it be to engineer such a system into a phone or a tablet?

 

[Poldie]

I have asked this a ton of times and have never gotten a response. Why is it that no company embeds solar cells on the periphery of the screen (and maybe into the body of the case), as a means to generate supplemental power and extend battery life between charges. It's not like the technology doesn't exist. Heck it is used in exactly that way in modern solar watches every day (only there it is used as the battery's primary charging mechanism). It seems to me like you could squeeze a fair amount of extra use time out of a charge if you had some supplemental power helping out. That plus the device could continue to recharge on it's own when not in use, by drawing power from any light source.

How hard could it be to engineer such a system into a phone or a tablet?

You'd have to leave your phone lying around in pretty much direct sunlight to get an power at all. There's almost no space on the front of the Desire for solar cells. And i'm about to completely make up a statistic here, but I'm pretty sure that even if the whole of the display of the Desire were made of solar cells you'd probably need 4 months of sunlight to power it for even a few minutes. Having solar cells anywhere other than the front would mean people would scratch their phones to death turning them upside down on rough, outdoor surfaces, and you'd have to watch them the whole time otherwise they'd get stolen. I don't think there's much power to be gained from internal lighting. If you're inside, you're better off just plugging the phone into your PC or the wall.

Ditto for using kinetic energy - charging your phone as you walk.

 

[Isthmus]

You'd have to leave your phone lying around in pretty much direct sunlight to get an power at all. There's almost no space on the front of the Desire for solar cells. And i'm about to completely make up a statistic here, but I'm pretty sure that even if the whole of the display of the Desire were made of solar cells you'd probably need 4 months of sunlight to power it for even a few minutes. Having solar cells anywhere other than the front would mean people would scratch their phones to death turning them upside down on rough, outdoor surfaces, and you'd have to watch them the whole time otherwise they'd get stolen. I don't think there's much power to be gained from internal lighting. If you're inside, you're better off just plugging the phone into your PC or the wall.

Ditto for using kinetic energy - charging your phone as you walk.

no disrespect meant poldie,but there seem to be a fair number of assumptions in that reply without any technical explanations to verify the conclusions. would you be able to explain further with some technical examples of why there would not be enough power generation to provide supplemental power (or why it would take 4 months)? I don't know the technical limitations of solar power generation using solar cells and would like to know more.

 

[dbrookes]

I have asked this a ton of times and have never gotten a response. Why is it that no company embeds solar cells on the periphery of the screen (and maybe into the body of the case), as a means to generate supplemental power and extend battery life between charges. It's not like the technology doesn't exist. Heck it is used in exactly that way in modern solar watches every day (only there it is used as the battery's primary charging mechanism). It seems to me like you could squeeze a fair amount of extra use time out of a charge if you had some supplemental power helping out. That plus the device could continue to recharge on it's own when not in use, by drawing power from any light source.

How hard could it be to engineer such a system into a phone or a tablet?

Watches have been designed for centuries to use a little energy as possible. Solar watches work because a typical watch battery has around 100mAH and that is sufficient for 6 months to a year. Where the Droid, for example, goes through 1300mAH in a day. That means the phones are using more than 1000 times the energy a watch uses. That's why the complexity and expense of on-board solar charging isn't worth it.
--D.

 

[Bluesman2008]

Watches have been designed for centuries to use a little energy as possible.

Watches do nothing but tell time. Not a huge deal for a battery. My watch battery lasts over a year.

 

[Poldie]

no disrespect meant poldie,but there seem to be a fair number of assumptions in that reply without any technical explanations to verify the conclusions. would you be able to explain further with some technical examples of why there would not be enough power generation to provide supplemental power (or why it would take 4 months)? I don't know the technical limitations of solar power generation using solar cells and would like to know more.

Yeah, I'm a little too lazy to do any real research into it (much like yourself, I suspect). You'd have to google or something - find out how efficient current solar cells are, how much energy per square centimetre, how long it'd take at that rate to charge the battery etc. It's just too much work. The information is out there though, and available to the people who'd produce such a method of charging. I have to say, though, that the idea that if it were easy then it would have been done already is a rather compelling one, don't you think?

 

[caustic]

What I do know is that those little solar cells you buy that provide USB power hardly work as it is, and they're usually larger than a phone in itself

 

[jdubin]

A while back (uh... 15ish years?), a friend with a MicroTAC had a third party battery with a solar cell on the back. I thought it was a great idea... until I picked up the phone which had been sitting in the sun for a couple of hours and nearly melted my hand.

Instead of putting the solar cells right on the phone, maybe make a case out of the flexible solar cell material, with a short micro or mini usb cable inside to plug into the phone. If the case could fold open fully, you could easily get 4"x4" of solar cell, which might provide enough juice to be somewhat usable.

 

[darrenxes]

I have asked this a ton of times and have never gotten a response. Why is it that no company embeds solar cells on the periphery of the screen (and maybe into the body of the case), as a means to generate supplemental power and extend battery life between charges. It's not like the technology doesn't exist. Heck it is used in exactly that way in modern solar watches every day (only there it is used as the battery's primary charging mechanism). It seems to me like you could squeeze a fair amount of extra use time out of a charge if you had some supplemental power helping out. That plus the device could continue to recharge on it's own when not in use, by drawing power from any light source.

How hard could it be to engineer such a system into a phone or a tablet?

Constant charging will kill ur the battery life span...

 

[IOWA]

I have asked this a ton of times and have never gotten a response. Why is it that no company embeds solar cells on the periphery of the screen (and m

Constant charging will kill ur the battery life span...

Not really. That's with older nickel cad batteries.

Tapatalk. Samsung Moment. Yep.

 

[Pryomancer]

Solar panels aren't worth it because you need to keep them in constant sunshine to generate any electricity. Solar panels are incredibly inefficient, something like ~15%. An average phone just doesn't have the surface area to generate enough energy. Even if you covered the whole phone, well that would be pointless since half of it would be facing down at any one time.
It's fine for the roof of a house, since the surface area is in metres, not centimetres.

Plus solar panels look ugly and make you look like a green freak.

 

[dextercath96]

Battery life is such a heated concern that many mobile users face. Beyond Android, I

 

[Niir]

my HTC Desire is managing about a day and a half with moderate use after a few weeks burning the battery down/charging full.