Not A Blog™

There’s been much to do, recently, about iPods and cell phones and cell phones playing music to compete with iPods and UMPCs inadequately filling the “gap” between handhelds and laptops and so on. The idea is that one day, we’ll have a sufficiently small and sexy device which does it all: play music, take pictures, make music, backup data, make calls and steal music. And you’re going to love it!

Never mind that the following point has been put forward: having one device do lots of things means it does none of these things well. While I personally believe this to be the case, the devices manage to do all this stuff well enough that, for example, people who would normally never carry around a camera use their phone to take pictures of everyone else. In other words, the loss of quality from taking a normally stand alone device and squeezing it into a handheld buffet of technological fetish doesn’t bother most people. Hence the line of reasoning which says everyone will eventually want one.

While I will concede that it would be more convienient to have all of life’s necessary gadgets in one gadget, it will never be successful until another technology is perfected. Until there is a major breakthrough in this area, we will not see any all-in-one device take the market by storm.

The area is batteries.

Batteries have remained more or less unchanged since they were invented slightly more than two hundred years ago. Even the lightbulb has improved more than batteries. (Partly because it was easier to improve the efficiency of the light bulb than it was to improve the efficiency of the battery powering it.) It is very unusual to see a battery powered device that lasts more than a few hours, unless the battery powering it is unusually large. As an example of this, I have a battery life extender for my iPod which is larger than the iPod itself. The whole contraption is like a freakin’ brick. Yes, I get over 48 hours of continuous play out of it, which is pretty nice. But it’s huge.

So what does crappy battery output have to do with how well a cell phone plays music? It has to do with something I’ve never heard being discussed anywhere else, so I’m claiming it for myself. It has to do with electron economics. The electrons in my cell phone are worth more to me than the electrons in my iPod.

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that I don’t have any way of powering my devices unless I’m at home. Naturally this isn’t the case, but it makes the example more clear. Let’s also say that when I leave in the morning I have a full battery in my iPod and my cell phone. (Note: I rarely do because I always forget to charge them.)

Now, I can listen to my iPod almost all day at work and not have to charge it. My phone can be on standby all day, ready to receive calls, but it only has maybe an hour and a half of actual talk time. (Yes, it’s an older phone and it sucks.)

If my iPod dies during the day, it’s not really a big deal. But if my phone dies during the day, that’s something else entirely. Suddenly I’m cut off from potentially super-important information that someone might need to call me about. I’m not nearly as dependent on my phone as some other people are, and I would guess that the problem is even more acute for them. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

If my phone and my iPod were together in one unit—even if the frankensteinian device was as effecient as the iPod alone—it would mean one of two things. Either I get to listen to my iPod all day and then not be able to make calls, or I don’t get to listen to my iPod even if I don’t make any calls. With two devices, I get to both make calls and listen to my iPod all day. Furthermore, the possibility that someone is going to call me regarding something important is more important to me than listening music, so I need to make sure that’s available. But if I didn’t want to listen to music, I wouldn’t have gotten a device that could play music in the first place!

Ergo, the electrons in my phone are more important to me than the electrons in my iPod

That’s why, even if Apple releases an iPod phone, I don’t want it. If the music player and the phone were dependent on the same source of power, suddenly I have to make electron-importance decisions factoring in both the instant gratification I want and the potential need for those electrons later. The electrons become like money. Do I want to buy ice cream now, or save money for a house? I can get away with that transaction because the cost of a scoop of ice cream is so negligable, but throw in enough of these negligable transactions during the day, and suddenly they’re costing you so much you can’t save for the house. Same with gadgets: throw in a bunch of little useless things and suddenly they add up and cost you a lot of electrons.

Batteries just aren’t efficient enough to power all the useless stuff without worrying about powering the important stuff, too. I expect this will change when some battery breakthrough allows essentially unlimited power (note: this is on the horizon with capacitors; call it five years). But until that happens, I don’t want to share precious electron potential among various gadgets. This is going to be an obstacle to the widespread adoptance of all-in-one devices.

In the meantime, someone should invent a thingamajig that can suck the power out of one rechargable battery and transfer it directly into another one. Then sell the device at cost to drive sales and make a killing on the accessories needed to fit every one of the 4,638 proprietary cell phone ports known to man!

I’ll get right on that, as soon as my phone finishes charging.

-Ted