Are batteries the gating factor on mobile productivity?
Are batteries the gating factor on mobile productivity? My buddy Dennis Rice, fellow Tablet PC MVP and contributor at GottaBeMobile.com thinks so and I'm in complete agreement. Even with devices optimized to squeeze as many hors as possible out of a charge as possible like the Lenovo X60t Tablet PC both he and I are using these days, you have to plan outlet proximity after about 5 hours of working. Or you need to lug extra batteries around. I notice this most when I'm working an event or am having a long travel day where airport time is consumed by getting to my next flight and precious litle time is left to grab some juice.
Where is the next breakthrough in better battery technology? I'd love it the folks at Intel and AMD would devote a percentage of their respective brain trust's time to helping solve this problem. They've made their processors smaller and better on power management and, in Intel's case, flash memory more efficient. Time to attack the problem from the other side. I'm not exactly sure if the skill sets used in optimizing power management in chips has any direct application to battery technology or not so this might be a stupid idea. But based on the Intel folk I've gotten to know over the last 27 years (they have a big fab in my part of New Mexico), they have some very smart people who could probably make a significant contribution to the evolution of portable power.
Dennis has labeled the problem "The Mobility Battery Void". Works for me. Hi... I'm Marc and I suffer from MBV.