Energy management – Are we missing out on something?

Lately, we see more and more of these great services for mobile devices: messengers (e.g., YahooGo!), uploading photos via FlickR, LifeBlog, permanent recording of events, wireless sensing, AI on our phones and what not. And not to mention here presence, VOIP, surfing etc. as rather basic IP services.

But I keep wondering, in particular after I’ve gotten my N80 lately. Does nobody actually consider energy management as crucial here? I mean, we’re thinking of placing all kind of stuff on the phone, assuming the ever increasing speed and memory sizes for our small little mobile gadgets. We also seem to assume the ability to run all this in a mobile (i.e., power-disconnected) way.

But it is here that we’re seemingly wrong. If we look at the development of smartphones in the last three to four years, we can indeed observe an increase in speed and memory (the new Nokia E series phones come with around 70MB of memory – my first PC had 32MB!). But the battery capacity per size has barely increased. Today, a phone like the N80 is sold with an appalling capacity of around 800 mAh. In normal usage (to me), i.e., without fancy WiFi surfing, IM and VOIP, I still end up charging the phone once a day. I do not leave anymore without spare battery in my bag in the fear to run out of power because I might use some fancy features on my great new phone. This observation is seemingly supported by forecasts around battery capacity. I just remember an article I read a few weeks ago that forecasted a mere increase of the factor of two for the next ten years in this space! So what functionality increase do we expect to place on the mobile devices with that outlook?

What I miss is a orchestrated effort that tackles this problem. And this is truly multi-disciplinary. It starts on the hardware platform, encompasses software issues but also includes interaction (e.g., developing interaction modes that simply do not require to ‘fire-up’ your display as a major power source). I have seen little in this respect and wonder why? For instance: the new smartphones from Nokia come with a small little blinking LED. It took about four years of smartphone generations to develop a mechanism that actually switches off the display as a main power source rather than displaying a useless “screen saver” (LCD screen don’t have burn-in effects in any case). Unfortunately, the LED though signals only that the device is still running but nothing else (at least in the current N80). There is hope though since the new E50 does use the LED also for signaling new SMS, MMS and emails so that you do not need to wake up the display all the time in order to check in a meeting if anything happened.

These are small steps but I see more is necessary. The outcomes of such efforts could be design guidelines for hardware and software, the development of tools that automatically create the mobile device software with energy-optimized runtimes. Interaction design guidelines as metrics for future “good software development” could be other outcomes.

I’m truly concerned that this will hit us very soon if we don’t address this problem sufficiently. Power does not exist in abundance, generally (looking at sustainability of our planet) and specifically not for mobile scenarios!