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Got a mobile phone that is constantly surprising you on how fast it burns its battery life?  Walk through any airport and you’ll find folks congregated around outlets like leashed dogs.  According to a survey by Strategic Analysis, don’t expect big leaps in cell phone batteries any time soon.

Stagnant battery life?

The report, released yesterday, says battery life has only increased 4% for the past three years.  Worse still, as phones become more convergent devices, their battery consumption increases and more than offsets any advancement in power.  In fact, according to Stuart Robinson, Director of the Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies service, things are going to get worse for the next 6 years:

“Strategy Analytics predicts a 4.8% per year reduction in the Average Time Between Charges (ATBC) in cellphones between now and 2015. Much of this is due to the growing penetration of features like web browsing, navigation and social networking.

Back to the future

Is there hope for the future?  As geeks, we know that the next big breakthrough is cooking up in someone’s garage and we’ll see it on Gadgetell soon.  The study did mention that emerging technologies such as “Fuel Cells, Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), small semiconductor process nodes and bistable displays” could make an impact at some vague point in the future.

So until then, we’ll all be finding ways to save power or perhaps I’ll see you around that electric outlet in the airports.  Or check out our Doug Berger’s how to make your cell phone battery last longer.

Product page: [Strategy Analytics]