Okay, that’s kind of a baiting headline but an interesting topic came up this morning while I was at a state of the mobile union talk with Broadcom: Are the carriers not pushing hard enough to make smartphones have better battery life?
I’m not even talking about the connectivity part, although that’s clearly leading to bad battery life on 4G LTE devices like the Thunderbolt, but more of the influence that carriers have over handset makers. The mobile operators shape the mobile phone landscape – particularly in the United States – and these companies have a lot of sway with handset manufacturers on what should go in to the next crop of smartphones. Broadcom said that it’s been interesting to see that having amazing battery life hasn’t been a big focus of the carriers.
Don’t get me wrong, Broadcom said battery life is important to the carriers but it definitely hasn’t been on the top tier and that makes a lot of difference. For example, the chip-making company said that carriers have been pushing hard to have handsets with mobile hotspot capabilities and now it’s pretty difficult to find a smartphone that doesn’t include this ability. WiFi Direct is also another example of a feature that carriers really wanted in a device and that will be “ubiquitous” in devices by the end of the year. The same could be said of NFC technology over the next year, Broadcom said.
So, why are we still dealing with smartphones that are lucky to get a full day out of a single charge? Well, it’s actually pretty tough to do when you consider that the iPhone has led consumers to really want those large, touchscreen phones. Broadcom said the screen size is generally the largest power draw, followed by the internal circuitry and then there are other factors like the operating system. For the record, Broadcom said iOS and Android are pretty good at power management while Windows Phone and some of the others may not be as good.
It’s probably not that fair to blame the carriers for this, as we could all use BlackBerry devices if all we cared about was battery life but then we’d be cut off from the joys of a large touchscreen phone with multiple connected apps (don’t even try to bring up the Torch, friends). Yes, companies like Broadcom, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Intel are working on reducing power consumption but it’s gong to take a major breakthrough in battery tech for the vision of a real smartphone that lasts for days to come true.
It’s also going to take consumer demand, so let your carrier and handset maker know what you want.