Shit battery life is making my shit life even worse
Do you have an iPhone charger I can borrow?
Mobile phones might be finally getting us laid, but their makers have ignored the real issue afflicting us all: the battery. The shiny new devices (as phones are now boringly called) have less juice than ever before.
Don’t you wish phone companies would stop everything else, and just spend two years building batteries that lasted a couple of days? Even one day would be nice – they honestly don’t do that at the moment. Last winter I invested in a Google Nexus, a hateful black slab with quite good features, but a battery capacity which barely gets you through to five o’clock.
It’s like having a baby. You fill it up, and before you know it, it’s hungry again. At lunch time, you’re forced to plug it in. You watch it greedily sucking on the charging cable, wondering why you spent a week’s wages to become enslaved by a machine which can recognise your face and voice, but never works when you need it.
And the Nexus is typical of its generation. They say you’re never alone with a phone, but thanks to the new steroid-infused processors and brighter-than-a-supernova screens, you often are. By 8pm on most nights out, I hopelessly cling to my friends, knowing losing them means the end of my night, a rainy, jerky night bus with not even a drunken text message for company.
It’s actually pushing us back in time. Before the golden age of mobile phones (when Snake II was king), if you arranged to meet someone and they didn’t turn up, you just had to go home. Now, you regularly find yourself back in that quaint position as you discover the phone has smugly switched itself off just as you were composing a crucial text about which Tube exit you are meeting at. When your date goes to the loo, you sit there lamely staring out the window, when normally you could be Googling conversation topics.
Apple & co. even try to make us do the work for them. From that annoying advice about letting your power run all the way down before charging (or is it never letting it run down?) to the nuts n’ bolts Battery Doctor app, there is an unending stream of bogus science claiming to help extend your battery life. One app tells you to keep your phone plugged in for 20 minutes after full charge, to allow the energy to “trickle” through the phone. Surely that is made up.
Now clearly, this is all something to do with “built-in obsolescence”, where products are designed with a limited life so you buy more. They’ve got us hooked, and they’re making us come back for more. But honestly, do they have to have such bad life from the start? Can’t they just work well for six months and then blow themselves up? It’s honestly preferable for most addicts.
Gadget lovers like Mic Wright may be content to drool over the sexy design and fingerprint recognition of the new iPhone. But for anyone who uses their phone for decent, honest things like Tinder and browsing pornography, the frills are surely not enough. The new iPhone looks great, but if you buy it, you’ll spend a lot of time just carrying around a very expensive black mirror.