This thought popped into my head today for no reason what-so-ever and I wanted to see if I could get a discussion started.

Imagine this: One year ago, there was a huge battery breakthrough. All of your mobile tech gadgets have a battery that is good for an entire day of computing. I’m not talking about what a big company calls “all day computing inch (maybe 8 hours?), I mean 24 hours of continuous use on a single charge no matter what task you are doing.

Now answer these two questions:

1. How would your current computing habits be different (other than ‘work longer’)?
2. Two years down the road, what would gadgets evolve into, knowing that they were designed with all day battery life in mind?

When you are done, tag some people who you’d like to hear thoughts from.

Allow me to start:

How would your current computing habits be different?

First of all I think I would remove all of the wireless radio toggle software from my devices. Why turn them off if we have the power? Second, I might carry a more powerful device as my pocket computer. I would probably use the UX180 in place of my current iPhone, knowing that I could get more done on the 180. There probably wouldn’t be much need to turn my devices off so I would have an always online status. Services like Google Latitude would be active on my devices so friends could see me and I could see them.  I used to carry my UX around in my pockets, but I also needed to bring the AC adapter with me.

Two years down the road, what would gadgets evolve into knowing that they were designed with all day battery life in mind?

I think that smaller devices that would function as notifies would become popular. Envision a normal looking wrist watch, that has 3G connectivity and GPS, aggregating all of your notifications (email, IM, social networks, etcetera) and tells you what is going on right then, without having to pull something out of your pocket. I imagine a vibration from the watch letting me know that a friend is nearby (located with something like Google Latitude), and clicking a button on the side of the phone at that time would connect via Bluetooth to my phone and call my nearby friend. The watch would display other short info like micro-blog updates or SMS from my phone right on its own screen. I think that HD content would be much more prevalant, given that even handheld cameras would be powerful enough to do all day HD recording. This might have an affect on demand for faster bandwidth because people would be flocking to YouTube to be uploading or watching lots of HD videos, and they would want to do it with the same speed that they are used to watching SD videos.

Tag, you’re it:

Jenn from Pocketables.net

James and/or Kevin from JkOnTheRun

Also, link back to the people that linked to you, so they know that you responded.

Jon Stokes, one of my favourite mobility-focused journalists, wrote in ARS Technica about battery life on the Palm Pre a few days ago and brings up one of my favourite topics. Battery life.

It’s a real issue for smartphones now as the platforms reach levels where they can be considered capable of returning an acceptable web experience but when used in such a scenario, the battery life is too short. Losing your mobile communications because you spent 2 hours messing around on the Internet isn’t the situation most want to be in.

All day battery life on a smartphone!

Read what Jon has to say about the Pre battery life here:

The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – Ars Technica.

And check out my thoughts on the Pre too. I’d rather see the Pre as a MID than a smartphone. It will still be pocketable but you’ll be able to fit a decent battery on it and still have it in a pockateble format. It’s better for many people to split voice from Internet on separate devices to improve both experiences to the ‘pro’ level.

I’ve also taken a look at this topic in these two articles:

How long does your smartphone last in ‘MID’ mode?

How big is an ‘all-day’ Mobile Internet smartphone?

Admittedly, its not difficult to imagine a scenario where less CPU cycles result in less power drain and this method isn’t going to magically extend your battery life by much but its nice to see the theory tested to the extreme.

SecTheory.com took a notebook PC, a couple of browsers and measured the battery drain on the Top 100 Alexa sites. They then took the worst offenders, that is, the ones that took the most power drain, and blocked script and ads using NoScript and AdBlock Plus. The results were quite significant. On a Dell Inspiron B130 notebook, with a 1.5GHz Celeron M processor and 1 Gig of ram, running fully patched Windows XP SP2, the power consumption when browsing the worst offending sites dropped by 11W, a 20% reduction. If its a 25W TDP CPU we’re talking about here, I can believe the results because browsing website has grown to be a very CPU intensive task.

The effect would be much less on netbooks and UMPCs but I would expect the same test to save 1W average which is about 10% – about 15 minutes for a device with a standard battery. Of course, its not really normal to be picking the worst offending sites and continuously hitting them either. Under normal browsing use, you probably wouldn’t notice any difference but there’s something else you need to be aware of.

Script not only takes CPU and battery life, it takes time. Time to execute, render and in some cases, time to fetch the remote code. By disabling script you significantly improve browsing speeds on low power devices and by definition, you save battery life. I tried it a few weeks ago with the noscript plugin and I’ve seen many comments on UMPCPortal from users that also use the technique. It really works! You lock yourself out of application sites like Google reader initially but it doesn’t take any effort to enable exceptions for these sites as you go along. No more hung page loads waiting for remote sites to time out. No more of those terribly annoying auto-start video ads that make browsing on a low-end PC a misery. There’s even an improvement in security. Its a win-win-win!

Try it. Install the noscript plugin and see how you get on. Yes, I risk killing all of my advertising income if everyone does this on all their devices and I’m sure there are bloggers out there that will read this and cringe but I trust you’ll only use it on your netbooks and umpcs and put the exception in for your favorite sites! Long live the choice between simple html and web2.0!

Source: Sectheory.com

I’m going camping over the next four days. Here’s the kit that’s going to keep me productive.

[The Wife and little-one have planned a last-minute camping trip together and I was due to stay home and work but I’ve decided to go along and make a working holiday of it. Dads – this is the beauty of Ultra Mobile PC’s!!!]

That’s a Samsung Q1 Ultra being charged from a Tablet Kiosk MP3400 which will be charged using a Sunlinq 25W solar panel. Also included are the Nokia N82 and a battery charging set. More details here.

Check out Solar-UMPC for some more mobile and solar-computing posts over the next few days.

A clear message to ultra mobile PC OEM’s

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now. [If the results are not showing, make your vote and you’ll see them.]

While some people will accept 3-hours battery life for an Ultra Mobile PC, 85% of people want 4 or more hours. 50% of people here see 5 hours as minimum battery life for a UMPC.

Lets start this article with a poll.

If there’s one thing that always annoys me in the ultra mobile PC category, it’s a wasted chance. Be it poor design, poor software or poor hardware. If there’s one thing that annoys me more than that its when a company makes the same mistake twice. Even worse than that is when the device in question is high-quality in every other respect. Because of this I find the SC3 the most frustrating device I’ve ever owned. I want so much to love it and take it into my daily life but….

Read the full story

Author: Hanno Zulla
Original article appears on Hanno’s blog. Reprinted in full with permission.

When it comes to portable electronic gadgets, there are three major annoyances.

The three hour limit must fall

Photo by AndyArmstrong

There is an unwritten rule when designing portable computers:

The battery will last three hours.

Once technological advances allow the next generation to run longer – be it thanks to more efficient hardware or more powerful battery technology – the manufacturers decide to shrink the battery, capping the device back to the three hour limit.

Three is a nice psychological figure. “Lasts three hours? – not too short!” “Less than three kilogramms? – not too heavy!” After all these years, today’s 3 kg laptops usually still run for 3 hours or less.

This must end.

Three hours is not enough for a true mobile device (especially since the advertised three hours of battery time usually result to less than two in real use).

Read on for more….

Read the full story

At CeBIT 2007, Intel revealed their ‘Menlow’ plans and told a room full of reporters that we’d be seeing sub 4W PCs in 2008. In March 2008 I asked Intel if they were on target and they told me that I’d be surprised. I am!

I’m lucky enough to be testing a Menlow-based Gigabyte M528 (sample) this weekend and this evening I’ve been doing a battery life test. I’m listening to MP3’s streaming over Wifi through a java applet on the Firefox 3-based browser with the CPU averaging about 30% utilisation (yes, this java app isn’t the most efficient at playing MP3’s!) It’s been going for over 2.5hours on its 10wh battery. (backlight off)

For those that don’t know, the Gigabyte M528 is one of the first MIDs and it’s based on Intel’s Menlow platform; A PC platform. This baby can run Windows XP!

The test is still going. Check back to see how long the test goes for….

Updates:

I’ve just passed the 3hrs mark. I hope the battery dies soon as its 00:20 here and I need to go to bed!!

It’s 12:30 now. 3hrs 10 mins…still going…

I estimate that with no backlight, the device is running about 0.5W less than with the screen backlight on at 50%. When the test finishes I can estimate a backlight-on time.

3hrs 20 mins. That’s an average drain of 3W. Its getting into smartphone territory at this point.

3hrs 30 mins….

Battery light flashing at 3hrs 35 mins… not long to go now.

And there she goes. Test completed at 3hrs 35 mins.

Average battery drain (assuming the battery really is empty now.) 2.8W

I estimate that with the screen on, it would be about 3.3W which would give a run time of 3hrs.

Well done Intel! I’m off to bed now.