(Good) Batteries Not Included

One of the reasons I still haven't taken the plunge and upgraded to a really smart phone instead of my slightly smart phone is that I seriously don't think I need one. Sure, there are times in which I am out of my house, need to Google something and at those moments the fact my phone is annoyingly slow about connecting to the internet and when it does the screen is usually too small to support the website is really frustrating, but those times are pretty infrequent. For some reason I still think of my cellphone as an "emergencies only" kind of thing, even though I shouldn't. I have a plan which would allowed me to spend as much time as I wanted to surfing the internet, but I pretty much just use my phone to text and send the occasional picture, two tasks which it does very well. I just don't see the need to have a new phone while my current phone can still handle all its duties. All that being said, when I look at new phones I am often impressed with all the cool things people can do with them so every now and again I find myself online looking at what I would upgrade to if I felt like it. I have yet to pull the trigger on a new phone but I am sure eventually I will be forced to upgrade (and then feel like an idiot for waiting this long to do so). Of course, this may happen sooner than later if my phone keeps acting up like it has been for the last few days.

For all the things I like about my phone, one of the most annoying aspects is that it uses one light to tell you five different things. If the red light in the top corner is on it means I have a text message... or a voicemail... or I missed a call... or my phone is charging... or my battery is dying. It is slightly crazy to think that for all the technology which is in this mini computer which fits in my pocket the one thing they skimped on was lights. Normally it is no matter because 90% of the time the red light means I have a text message. So you can imagine my surprise the other day when I picked up my phone and the red light was because my battery was nearly dead. I had just taken the phone off the charger a few hours earlier and barely used it since, so this confused me. But it didn't bother me nearly as much as it did 24 hours later, when the same thing happened again. I understand that batteries die quicker when the phone is in use, but if the phone has been sitting in the same spot for most of that time, shouldn't the batteries still have plenty of juice in them? When I first got my phone a full charge would sustain the phone for over 2 days provided I didn't go crazy with usage. I certainly haven't been using it more lately, so you can imagine my annoyance that for the last few days a full battery suddenly won't last longer than 24 hours. I can only imagine how quickly it would have died if I was feeling chatty.

Of course, this is the problem with batteries - after a while they simply refuse to hold their charge for as long as they used to, which is kind of a big problem to have. With that in mind it is kind of shocking to me that for all the technological advances we have been able to make as a culture over the last few decades we still can't figure out something better than batteries. The closest we came was rechargeable batteries, but even those weren't that great. I remember as a kid my family tried to be good and use them because they were supposed to be better for the environment and we even had one of those big recharging stations so we could do lots of batteries at once, but even if you took the battery straight out of the charger and put them into whatever toy you were using at the time it felt like the battery was always ready to die at any second. Plus, in a rather ironic twist, if you leave batteries on the charging station for too long it actually starts to harm them and eventually they can't hold a charge at all. [Sidebar: I actually think the memories of just how much a pain in the ass batteries can be is one of the main reasons the electric car hasn't caught on. Sure most of them look awful, cost more than a regular car and have no acceleration, but I feel like more people would be willing to deal with that if they at least came with a solid amount of range. Instead the batteries will only allow you to drive a few hundred miles (if you are lucky) and then take forever to recharge. For every hour of driving you have to spend three charging the batteries back up and that is if you can even find a charging station. You can't be terrible and high-maintenance. It all adds up to gas-powered cars just being easier.] So, what needs to happen is we need to come up with something better than batteries but you'd have to think if it was that easy to come up with someone would have done it by now.

Of course the cell phone companies know this, which is why buying a new battery for your current phone actually costs more than upgrading to a new phone would. They want you to get the new phone which runs all the fancy new applications because it means you have to upgrade your service plan and that is where they make their money (it's like printer companies - they will happily give you a free printer because they are then going to charge an arm and leg for ink cartridges). If you don't believe me just try to order a new phone battery. The clerk will look at you like you are crazy while trying to sell you on all the new technology they have for sale (and the same goes for iPods). Now, since I know all this going in I would be fine accepting it because it is not like am going to run out and start my own cellphone company, only I have this sinking feeling that battery life is getting worse which is not cool. It is one thing to sell me something which is going to be obsolete in a couple of years because that still leaves the decision about upgrading to me, it is entirely another to design something which is going to fail and force me to buy a newer version of your product within a couple of years. It is the epitome of shady business practices and if I had any proof I would call the Better Business Bureau to complain. Well, if I had proof and a battery which would allow me to have a phone call lasting more than 4 minutes.