Not so smartphone power

I love my smartphone. I know that I regularly claim to friends and family that I could live for days without it, but if I’m honest, I probably couldn’t make it through a couple of hours, let alone days, without my phone.

It’s not that I make, or receive, a lot of calls – in fact I barely speak on the thing – but I do while away many hours browsing the web, Tweeting, checking my e-mail and playing games. I’m addicted. I’m big enough to admit that.

But there is a problem. Sometimes I feel a little like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and find myself almost shouting out: “Scotty, I need more power!”.

As much as I love my smartphone I hate the fact that its battery is so woefully ill-equipped to handle the task at hand. Even on days when I’m being relatively restrained with my phone there is that inevitable point in the day when suddenly the battery indicator turns a disturbing red colour. I know that unless I get the phone to a power source pretty damn quick I’m going to lose it.

It’s all well and good having a phone that can do just about anything you can think of but what is the use if if you spend half the day tethered to a power socket?

I swear it’s a conspiracy. A conspiracy to get me to spend more money. More money on a spare battery for backup, an extra charger for the office in case I forget the other one at home, a car charger for a quick juice-up between meetings.

It’s insane. I now have to make sure I have a cable charger at all times so that I can enjoy the convenience of “wireless” communication. I know it’s not just my phone which has a poor battery life. Most days I can’t get hold of my wife to alert her to some impending domestic catastrophe because her phone has died. And she’s nowhere near the smartphone addict I am.

My first mobile phone was an Ericsson GH688. It was pretty ugly by today’s phone standards and with the extra-life battery it could never be described as slimline.

Today my phone is so slim I can forget it’s in my pocket, until it beeps to remind me that the battery is about to die. Some days I’d gladly change this slip of a phone for something a little bulkier if it meant a slightly larger battery that could last out an entire day without needing to be plugged in.

The only other alternative would be to replace my smartphone with one a little dumber. But then what would I do while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, standing in a queue at the shops or sitting through an interminably boring meeting? I can’t imagine…

As Captain Kirk might well have said if he was stuck in my position: Battery power: the final frontier.