ASSAULT AND BATTERY

Dick Pountain/Mon 19 January 2004/2:40 pm/Idealog 114

I'm apparently one of the very few who didn't get an iPod for Christmas this year. I probably won't get one next year either, because I don't listen to music on the move all that often (and when I do my old Discman offers better sound quality from the handful of CDs that I'd ever want listen to outdoors). I'll only join the Pod People once they've invented a peripheral that can rip my large collection of '60s soul, blues and jazz vinyl without me having to take them out of their sleeves... I did get a digital camera for Christmas though, and it shares  one important characteristic with the iPod - it works on battery power, like almost every new toy made nowadays.

Actually the camera, a Minolta DiMAGE Xt, improves on the iPod in one respect: you can remove its tiny Li-ion battery for recharging, and the manufacturer gave me a free spare as a special offer. The iPod on the other hand is reported to have nasty battery problems - according to a Channel 4 news story and the website ipodsdirtysecret.com, iPod batteries fail at a rate that's provoked a band of disgruntled customers and a lawsuit, while Apple refuses to replace them and recommends buying a new iPod. I have no real axe to grind in this matter (except to reminisce, wasn't it Apple that invented the incendiary laptop a few years ago?) but it merely provides ammunition for my growing hatred of battery technology and battery-powered devices. A few years ago I swore to cut down the number of battery-powered thingies in my life, even to the point of buying an autowind wristwatch: that's when I discovered my lifestyle is too sedentary to keep it wound and had to slink shamefacedly back to quartz. There just doesn't seem to be any escaping them any more, if we will insist on taking our conveniences and comforts with us on the road. I now have at least four or five battery chargers plugged into a power strip in my office, the way I used to have mains adapters.

 When you consider how much processor speed and memory capacity have increased, all with shrinking chip sizes, over the last decade, the brutal truth is that battery technology just hasn't advanced enough to keep up. I've moaned in this column on several occasions about the battery life of current colour-screen PDAs, which I don't consider long enough for them even to meet the purpose for which they are sold. Any PDA that can't go a whole day without recharging is frankly worthless, but that includes almost all of them now. Monochrome, replaceable AAA cell PDAs like the Palm m100 and Sony SL10 are a dying breed because no-one wants a mono screen once they've seen a bright backlit colour one. But if you logically combine those last two sentences, the stark conclusion is that PDAs that are both useable and saleable cannot be made given the current state of battery technology. I went to Maplins and bought myself a set of rechargeable NiMH cells and charger for my SL10 - they last two weeks or so before charging, less than throw-away Duracells, but they are cheaper.

 It's not only PDAs either. I've recently had the battery conk out on both of my laptops, because neither of the manufacturers recommended removing the battery if you work on mains power most of the time, as I do. A constant shallow discharge/recharge cycle seems to shag Li-ion packs just as well as it did with NiCads. My HP's battery at least failed gracefully, letting the machine continue to work: my Dell wouldn't work at all with a duff battery installed, but the symptoms were so misleading (automatically shutting down 10 to 20 seconds after a successful reboot) that I wasted a day troubleshooting suspected motherboard failure. So many people are, like me, purchasing laptops as desktop replacements nowadays that you'd think the manufacturers could come up with some simple circuitry to prevent this happening, with an appropriate new option in the Power Management console called Desktop Use. If they can't manage that, an underlined warning in the Start Up Guide for mains users to leave the battery out might be nice.

 I'm not normally prone to conspiracy theorising, but it's all enough to make you wonder whether they don't tell you because they want to sell you a £70 replacement battery, just as Apple wants to sell you a new iPod. That old marketing wisdom concerning razors v razor-blades is common knowledge nowadays, and once this paranoid frame of mind takes hold, you begin to wonder if the battery manufacturers are really looking as hard as they could for new technologies, since it's so profitable to generate repeat purchases of the old, short-lived varieties. (People used to level those accusations at the light-bulb industry, but I can't remember if they were true or not). When I used to work for Byte we surveyed battery technology every couple of years or so, and it certainly felt as if there was more research and innovation back then. Lithium Polymer cells, which once seemed the most promising, are taking an age to get to market and get cheap, and they only offer a doubling of current energy densities (at the cost of halving the cycle life). The area where best progress is being made appears to be fuel cell technology: how about a mini-cell that runs on ethanol so your PDA can double as a hip-flask...