Continued...

Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if your iPod played videos for days or weeks on end instead of the paltry five hours? Five hours is just not good enough. The same applies to notebook computers. We get excited about the fact that a notebook will give us three or even four hours of battery life. Again, for something that has achieved mission critical status for most companies/corporate individuals, four or five hours of battery life (and even that’s stretching it a bit) is simply not good enough.

And of course, the omniscient cell phone. With more and more features being built into them, cell phones are the next multimedia hub. From streaming content to taking videos, they do it all, and yet, the maximum talk time on a phone will not be more than six hours at best. Sure, the stand by time is at least in days (mostly a couple), but that doesn’t help many of us who are constantly on the phone.

Give me a notebook that has a 10-day battery life but doesn’t let me burn a DVD; I think most of us would be comfortable with the compromise. Similarly, if you give me a cell phone with 100 hours of talk time, I can live with the fact that it doesn’t take pictures at unwanted 7-megapixels.

Perhaps manufacturers and technology companies should come together and give us technology that really benefits us.

I hear that Intel is working overtime with Panasonic to develop batteries that will last eight hours for notebook computers. That, too, is substandard, but it’s at least double of what we have currently.

Perhaps other companies can come together and get behind battery development in a big way. While it may not be glorious, a battery is one of the most integral parts of a device, and the only way forward to increasing the value of a device is to enhance battery life (and work on similarly critical aspects) as opposed to adding more frugal components that are a mere burden on the already weak battery life.