Improvements to batteries not enough to offset heavy cellphone usage

Thanks to the ever increasing number of things people can do with their cellphone, battery usage has grown so much that even improvements to those rechargeable power cells we all know and love cannot keep up. According to Strategy Analytics, browsing, navigation and social networking will go from using 9% of your battery life in 2008 to a stunning 30% by 2014. The reason that these functions are taking up an ever growing piece of the power pie is that battery capacity in cellphone has increased at a rate of only 4% per year over the last three years. Help is coming in the form of  Silver Zinc and Hydrogen Fuel Cell power sources that someday might replace those slabs of Lithium Ion that we have become familiar with. Not surprisingly, most of the demands on today's batteries come from the feature-rich, fully loaded, very expensive smartphone which is often used not just as a personal communications tool, but also for business contacts and for obtaining and manipulating data. It is also the one niche area in the cellular industry that is expected to show growth in the next two years despite the poor world economy. Strategy Analytics predicts that the average time between charging your cellphone battery will decline 4.8% per year between now and 2015 and while the use of speed charging products will speed up the time it takes to reload your power cell, it won't increase the total amount of power available in each battery. Perhaps some technology, one that is not even known to us now, will be discovered to improve the life of the average handset battery.

source: Cellular-news