Battery Life
It's pretty simple. Battery life sucks in most new devices. I'm dealing with this problem on my MDA Vario II from T-Mobile, which in general is a great device. But the fact that the battery is empty after 12 hours max with all features on and light usage really doesn't me a happy person make! Now, I just read about the Nokia N95 over at GigaOM. (By the way, it pretty much gets "bashed").
I was playing with the idea of getting this one to have on the side when I don't need a QWERTZ device to handle e-mails and messaging. What turned me on about this one was the quality of its music client and great camera. It's kind of the perfect phone in theory to compliment a business phone. I'm simply convinced at the moment that a convergence device fullfilling all my business as well as personal needs just isn't going to happen near-term. At the same time, there are great devices fullfilling business needs on the one hand and personal needs on the other. Unfortunately, these are still two separate devices.
Anyway, to get to the point. Battery life is the greatest detractor from quality at the moment. As soon as you add all these new features to a device, battery life gets torpedoed. No device exits where I have wLAN, Bluetooth, GPS, music, etc. working at the same time and lasting longer than a day (forget any lengthy voice calls by the way). If you do know of one, let me know. Add applications on the device which may be running in the background and you're looking at even less battery life. I've had days where my Vario is taken off the charger at 8 a.m. and needs to get back on the charger by noon. I'm at this point not leaving the house without the charger in my briefcase. Luckily, I almost always have a bag with me, but if I know I won't be near a charging opportunity during the day, I have to shut everything on the phone off, meaning no wLAN, no Bluetooth, no push e-mail, forget anything GPS (even though I have this via Bluetooth on the Vario), etc. You can pretty much just leave the phone on and use nothing else. For this, I could simply get a EUR 100 bare-bones Nokia which needs charging every 5 days or so.
What am I doing about this? Well, battery management software for the device as well as battery technology are areas where I am convinced there are great opportunities. Figure out how to double battery life and you've got me sold. Know of any cool companies doing this? Let me know, even if they are financed. I am doing lots of research in this area.
