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Thursday, 8 October 2009

Handset Battery Capacity Unable to Keep Up With Power Requirements

The gap between the power demands of cell phones and the battery capacity available to users is widening at a rapid pace, and it is believed that there will not be any complete solution to the problem any time soon, according to market researchers at IMS Research.

The increasing power requirement for cell phones is driven by two key factors: consumer behavior and handset features. In recent years, people rely more and more on their handsets to perform different tasks, causing mobile data and application use to surge substantially. In the meantime, improving on-device features, such as crisper and brighter displays, faster CPUs and higher data throughputs, demand higher power consumption than before. These cell phone upgrades continue to add pressure on handset power usage, and IMS Research predicts that power requirement for smartphone owners will grow at a rate of 15 percent per year.

The resulting gap between power available to users and the power required by a growing number of handset features threatens to slowdown the mobile lifestyle consumers are increasingly embracing. This also put cell phone makers in a dilemma, as they are trying hard to extend battery life, but at the same time embedding more power-draining features into smartphones to satisfy customers’ needs.

There may be a number of potential solutions to ease the problem, including new display technologies, more power efficient silicon design, and new battery chemistries. Nevertheless, analysts generally agree there will not be a major breakthrough on the battery technology soon.
While waiting for new technologies to address the problem, cell phone users can take several measures to extend their handset battery life, such as turning off GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when they are not in use. You may also want to keep an extra battery, a travel charger, a car charger or a portable mobile charger by your side to juice up your handset anytime you want. For iPhone users who always have to endure poor battery performance, an external mini battery pack would be a perfect back up for you.

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