Saturday, 5 April 2014

Ordeal of Mobile Devices – The Frying Batteries


I was first introduced to batteries by my father who used to change AAA battery in our crimson rimmed wall clock, once a year. I was fascinated by the chemical reactions and the magic of ions involved in storing and discharging power. I even carried out some childhood experiments on them after watching the famous Duracell advertisements in television. Since then, Devices have made significant leap whereas batteries which power them have increased their sprint power, but not the galloping ability.


Today’s smart and portable device users are victims of short life fried batteries and their daily charging rituals. And when you try to replace them, they almost cost the new device price which is ridiculous! As a consequence, battery life of the device has become an important criterion in purchase decision. It also makes one to think that it could be a strategy adopted by device manufacturers to ensure constant demand in market.

There are many websites, blogs and device manuals which recommend following tips in general.  Some of them are proven to work but with meager results, while others are like alchemy tricks.
o   Each charging eats away one cycle of battery. So charge it fully and run it till it is near empty.

This is easy to say, but tough to follow. Users don’t want to be caught off-guard or be blocked by drained battery during important occasions or at a place where there is no outlet to recharge. They charge it as and when they remember, just like refueling your car and keeping it ready.

o   Don’t keep it plugged in for a long time.

Generally when you are playing intensive games and that too for long hours, you don’t want to be annoyed by ‘popup’ messages. So users keep their devices connected. Why can’t we design smart adapters which will sense the battery level in the device and then pass on the charge to it when needed?

o   Turn off the high power consumption applications like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS etc.

Bluetooth and GPS make sense, whereas Wi-Fi is unreasonable. It is what that makes the smart portable devices score over the traditional wired ones. So, the application providers must include power consumption too as an essential non-functional requirement for their product and must specify it along with the hardware requirement.

o   Close unwanted browsers.

Users prefer to keep recently visited interesting web pages open for quick near future reference. Though the modern browsers do provide detailed logs of history and bookmark features, yet they are not so popular when compared to this practice. So, we need more UI design changes to effectively increase the usability of this powerful back end feature. Similar story is found with cluttered desktop, why can’t we provide a virtual desktop overview with quick access features?

o   Shutdown the system, when not in use.

Long time taken by OS to reboot had made users to leave their system on and incline towards sleep feature as a power saving mechanism. This feature requires creation of temp files and logs to recreate the last login session during reboot; as a result it clogs the system in long run. Why can’t we design JVM kind of component for OS to clean up the mess?

o   Frequent updates are necessary.

Users are generally averse to changes, as they do not want to disturb the current setup and waste time in troubleshooting it. I believe the cloud and SaaS seems to be the answer for this problem.

I have tried almost all of the above tips and was successful in reducing my battery charging cycle frequency from every day to once in two days. It appears to be trivial in words, but if you see in numbers it is nearly 50%!

Feel free to share your tips gained from experience and also funny alchemy tricks.

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