Megapixels, multitouch, haptics, gestures, ease of use, and revolutionary user experiences mean nothing if your mobile device is off thanks to a dead battery. As we expect our mobile phones to do more and more, and keep us connected to every facet of our digital lives, how are we going to get through a whole day without having to carry a charger in our bag and quickly scanning every building we walk into for a power outlet?
Apple had the right idea, a phrase you’re not going to hear me say very often, when they launched push notifications. The concept was that instead of having your device ping Flickr to see if your friends uploaded new photos, ping ESPN to see if the Yankees won, ping GMail to see if you have new email, ping Twitter to see if you have any new @ replies, etc., your device would have a single connection to an Apple server that would handle all your traffic requests and then spit out the results.
Imagine your instant messaging program, in my case Skype, but instead of having a list of friends in your list of contacts, you have a list of services you use. Instead of keeping a persistent connection to each and every one of the companies in your list of contacts, you have a single connection to a central server, Skype, who handles requests on your behalf and just serves you the results. That central server can be your own personal cloud, running in some data center somewhere, and constantly connected to your mobile phone.
Every time your mobile phone powers on the radio and transmits/receives data, the battery takes a hit. In the Motorola CLIQ preview posted on The Boy Genius Report, here is what BG had to say about the battery life:
Not even joking when I say this — the Motorola CLIQ has possibly the worst battery life of any phone I’ve tested in recent memory with the current software. Maybe Motorola’s BLUR back-end isn’t optimized yet, maybe the phone software isn’t final, but this is ridiculously bad. Especially since it doesn’t even deliver your status updates when you want them, it just sits there pulling in data constantly updating in batches. I haven’t used the device as a primary device so I couldn’t give hard statistics on battery life when phone calling, but with on and off usage, it’s ridiculously bad.
Now what about just pushing the data versus polling for it? Internet geeks are currently fighting over which push protocol we should all be using, RSSCloud or PubSubHubbub, but we can all agree that push enabling data is the future. Now we just have to wait for all the services and blogs to start transmitting data in real time, versus having to poll them at a set interval of time.
Why should we each have our own cloud versus letting the device receive push requests from newly enabled push services? Because not every service we use is going to be push enabled over night. Adoption is always slow, and there will be some sites that never even make the switch. Having one central location, in the cloud, that we can all log into to manage our information flow just seems like the right way to go forward.
Am I nuts or do you think we’re heading in this direction?