the Onda

A friend recently told me that upgrading to the 3G iPhone makes him feel like he's back in 1989, constantly worried about the state of his battery, always looking greedily at empty plugs in any public rooms he enters.

Being on the road for days at a time with an iPhone 3G (and far from its desktop trickle charge or a car cigarette lighter), I have to agree. Such a great device— and such a big Achilles heel.

Example: if you are traveling in a foreign city, the GPS and zoomable maps are worth their weight in gold. These two power vampires though will suck you dry faster than you can say "Achtung—" often after just a couple of hours of walking around lost when you are most psyched to be dealing with a dead phone.

And the iPhone is not unique here— in fact just about every 3G handset seems to suffer from batteries that are too small and radios that are too power hungry (what makes the iPhone extra special is inability to swap batteries, though truth be told, the last thing I'd want to do is to have to travel with a Batbelt to hold the 3 batteries I'd need to last through the day).

I think it was someone in Wired who argued that we should think of the iPhone not as a phone but as a mobile computer, and that since we didn't expect our laptops to last all day, why should we expect this new class of smartphones to do so? Almost as stupid as the claim that we should just adapt to its power needs and learn to manage it by trickle charging and turning off all of the best features. Since when are we supposed to be slaves to our devices and not the other way around?

On this power dimension, I want all of my devices to be like my Amazon Kindle which I can charge one before a week-long trip and forget about (even to the point of not bringing the power cord).

If battery technology can't get us there for the foreseeable future, maybe we should hack our way to that usecase by learning the electric toothbrush. Charged by induction, all I need to do is to place it on its pad at night. Could we have big induction pads in hotel lobbies, at restaurants, etc? How far can we push this idea? On subways? And on the flip side of stagnating battery technologies, can we work on the charging circuits such that short 3 minute boosts could be more effective at juicing batteries?

One final thought: when traveling, one thing we certainly all do is move around. If this movement happens to be human-powered, can we not store the kinetic energy for boost-charging later? What about a shoe whose impact on the sidewalk charged a battery that we could use later, a la "Minty Boost" when we might be in dire need of a power bump?

It is so clear that portable power is a multi billion dollar industry just waiting for these kinds of disruptions.

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