Is it time to take a step backwards?

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Perhaps in this rat race of features and more features and powerful processors, the importance of good battery life for a mobile phone has been lost. Battery life used to be a serious buying criteria back in the 90s and the first half of this decade. But today, its no longer a leading criteria, perhaps lost in the jungle of featues and apps and processors and GPUs.

However the neglect and perhaps the lack of innovation in this regard is quite astonishing. Nokia's once flagship device, the N95 had a fierce reputation of having the worst battery life among mobile phones of the age. The same reputation is being carried forward by the new generation touchscreen devices of the company. The N97 Mini has a hilariously short battery life for a smartphone. Its not just Nokia which is facing problems. Even the hallowed iPhone 4 has battery issues, as in the battery life isnt as impressive as the 3GS. The same problem can be found with the Samsung Galaxy S. Reason? Well for starters, its the super heavy duty processor and battery life-unfriendly OSes. Now tell me somerhing, whats a smartphone which cannot be used for extended hours? Whats the use of a device which requires you to carry chargers or cables as daughter packages wherever you go?

Now would you go back to a simple good old blackberry, or a N70? These truly had awesome battery lives. I guess most would say no. Hence whats required is a better battery management system where every single app will be able to utilise the battery power only as per the minimum requirement. I am hoping that the manufacturers already have this in mind and are working towards a solution. This also goes with the 'green' theme everyone's suddenly obsessed about, hence makes good marketing sense. Else we consumers would be forced to used dated devices with poor functionality.

N97 Mini Battery Life Woes

I am currently being forced to write this post as I have recently been affected by the unimaginably poor battery life of Nokia N97 Mini. Yesterday some of my friends came over and I had to put the N97 Mini for the first time to the test. The Mini has a 1200mAh battery (substantially reduced from the original N97 which had a 1500mAh one). And yes, expectedly the battery life or the extreme lack of it, is giving me serious problems. I will in detail list my points below.

1. Widgets: Nokia has somehow been fascinated by widgets and is proudly hailing it as a USP in current devices. However what is missed especially in case of the N97 Mini is that these widgets, the ones which require internet connectivity eg. facebook, email widgets etc. draw a huge amount of power from the battery.

2. WiFi - Cool technology eh? Yeah I guess and Nokia thinks so as well, only if it had been serious enough to give it a proper thought before implementing it in devices. (Read on for more details on this)

3. Screen Display Brightness - Oh well, the one time I tested the device using full brightness, it didnt even last me 6 hours! So, forget about using your device outside an air conditioned chamber (read indoors).

Okay, so here's what I tested. I enabled the facebook and email widgets and waited for it to see how long it lasted. To my utter shock and surprise, on normal use which included occasional phone calls and using offline games (oh well I do have Quake 2 installed on my N97 Mini, coz thats the only decent game available for the device. If you're getting an N97 Mini make sure you're NOT a gamer, it has NO GPU, so forget about gaming, just for the info, all recent devices including lower end Android ones and of course the iPhone have dedicated GPUs), the battery hardly lasted me 5-6 hours. Hence, if you're using the N97 Mini, dont use online widgets, or else make sure you carry the charging cables (USB or charger) with you all the time and stay close to a PC or a socket, always.

Next came the acid test. WiFi. I was using Mobbler, a highly popular LastFM client and Tune Wiki. It took me simply 2-3 hours to reduce a fully charged N97 Mini to a completely battery life famished device. Which is like saying, dont use this device to use if you're a heavy WiFi user.

And for the sake of decency I am not comparing this with recent Android and the iPhone, but you get the point.

So, not only is this device underpowered (memory and processing capability wise), its also under-powered (quite literally) as well.

I was completely unaware of this aspect of the N97 Mini till I put it to the test yesterday and today in the morning. Bottomline, I am hating it. I am looking at options to sell this device and get an Android powered one. The severe lack of processing capabilities, softwares, proper usable OS and now a less than usable battery is too much for me to bear. This is my last Nokia. I really dont care if the company comes up with a better device in the future. I am currently ruing my decision, and feeling really crap coz of having spent a substantial amount of moolah on this. May Nokia be a better company and may it produce better devices in the future, but I honestly dont give a damn.