After his recent thesis of battery threshold, Steve's now asking why the battery life of a smartphone is getting worse. The recent announcements at 3GSM have only confirmed this to him, and now he's ready to present his evidence. Is your smartphone above or below the thin red line of battery capacity?

As usual with these pretty charts, there's only room for a handful of thumbnails, but I still hope to make a point. Right at the top, we see the past - glorious battery life (weeks) but at the expense of lacklustre screens, dependence on replaceable AA or AAA cells and little or no wireless/phone functionality. Although it would be cool to speculate on the life of (say) a modern Nokia Nseries device powered by two AAA cells totalling 3000mAh between them, i.e. three times the current capacity of many internal rechargeable Li-Ion cells, it would be fairly pointless since the market seems to have categorically turned away from disposable batteries towards internal rechargeables, for both lower impact on the environment and also greater convenience. The days of AA and AAA-powered handhelds are long gone, I suspect.

Read on for the full article.

(Duracell Casing Thumbnail image by Alipyon, Flickr)