Whether electricity flows in sufficient quantity or not is a key to just how far the mobile revolution will go.

During the past decade, handsets have morphed into miniature computers and laptops have exploded in terms of what they can do and the purposes for which they are used. All of these new functions require electricity, and the industry is struggling to keep up.

It is unfair to label it a crisis – yet. The seeds of discontent already are apparent, however. A survey of about 3,800 respondents conducted in December, 2008, by ChangeWave Research found that short battery life was tied with lack of a QWERTY keyboard for the biggest perceived shortcoming of the new BlackBerry Storm. Both issues left 21 percent of respondents unhappy. Earlier in the year, European research firm Canalys conducted two surveys on the broader smartphone sector that revealed similar dissatisfaction with battery life.

Findings such as these should get the industry’s attention, and they have. There actually are two interrelated issues with which the industry is dealing. The first is that the applications themselves are more demanding. A minute of streaming video requires more power than a minute of talking. The other issue is that laptops and smartphones are ever-more central to users’ lives. That means that they are used more – and seem to users to be running out of steam faster.

There are three approaches to improving how mobile devices are powered:

1. Upgrade the management of a device so that the same amount of electricity goes farther.
2. Use a new technology to buttress or replace the current dominant power source, which is the lithium-ion battery.
3. Improve lithium-ion batteries by increasing their power output and/or enabling them to recharge more quickly.

Improved Management

The old ways of using a cell phone were profligate in their use of power. Today, default settings turn off screen backlights more quickly and let users more easily make other adjustments that conserve power. Sara Bradford, the principal consultant for Frost & Sullivan’s energy and power systems group, says that some of the most impressive advances have been made on laptops. She points to examples in which drives are shut down when not in use and devices put into hibernation mode more quickly than in the past.

There also is a natural progression to efficiency usage. Jerry Hallmark, the manager of Energy System Technology for Motorola, says that new features such as streaming and Bluetooth use the main microprocessor. Eventually, they are moved to a customized chip, which cuts power consumption. “Whenever there is a new function, there is a bump in energy consumption. You work your way back down,” Hallmark says.

There is a lot going on at the integrated circuit (IC) level. Dean Chang, the senior product marketing Manager for Fujitsu Microelectronics America’s Embedded Platform Solutions Business Group, says there is an industry-wide effort to make ICs operate in a smarter fashion. This functionality, which either is built into the main IC or self-contained, is charged with getting the job done with the lowest possible power expenditure.

In the past, chips used when a device was sending or receiving data would be on all the time. The first generation of power management circuitry made it possible to turn them off when an action was complete and back on when needed again. Late last year, Fujitsu released a second generation of power management that enables more granular sections of the IC to be powered up and down as necessary.

There is more good news. Chang says that such common-sense approaches as coordinating the switching on and off of circuitry in the mobile device and a WiMax or LTE base station leads to lower power expenditures. Finally, a serendipitous byproduct of the miniaturization of chips is that voltage, and therefore power demand, drops.

New Power Sources

New things are sexy. Why sweat and strain to tweak management when it is possible to introduce an entirely new element to the mix. Methanol, in the form of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs), has gotten a lot of buzz during the past few years. Fuel cells and batteries will work in tandem in mobile devices. Batteries will supply the juice for bursts of power and fuel cells will provide the constant power that will suffice the rest of the time.

The challenge is squeezing DMFCs into portable devices. PolyFuel President and CEO Jim Balcom acknowledges that vendors, his company included, have not delivered. “We heard that fuel cell technology was the answer and that products could be expected in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007,” he says. “Each of those years there were plans to introduce fuel cells in the market [but] it has not materialized yet.”

The problem is one that is familiar to entrepreneurs in highly competitive industries: The marketers got ahead of the engineers. In this case, Balcom says, the stumbling block was finding a way to eliminate the water vapor that is a byproduct of the chemical process that produces the electricity. He says that the company has designed a process for recycling the water in the fuel cell itself.

Miniaturizing this technique and integrating it into the overall fuel cell is taking time. Work is still ongoing on integrating PolyFuel’s technology into the systems that will go into the devices. In some cases, Balcom says, the company is working directly with the vendor and sometimes with battery makers or other third parties. He would not discuss the company’s clients, but says that full availability may still be two years away.

Improving Performance of Today’s Lithium-Ion Batteries

Finally, there is the drive to make today’s batteries do more. There is a positive and negative to this approach. Lithium-ion batteries, which have only been the main battery technology since the early 1990s, are in place. Thus, any gain that is made is a pure bonus. Internal designs need not be changed and supply chains need not be disrupted. This clearly gives batteries an advantage over fuel cells.

The other side of the coin is that these gains are limited by inconvenient physical limits. Motorola’s Hallmark guesses that it may be possible to squeeze about 25 percent more electricity out of lithium-ion approaches than they produce today.

A related issue, and a big positive, is that it is becoming possible to more quickly recharge devices. People will be more forgiving if recharging is speedy. Boston Power is designing a lithium-ion battery for laptops that recharges to 80 percent of capacity in 30 minutes, and 40 percent in 10 minutes. That is an increase of about 30 percent over current standards, says Founder and CEO Dr. Christina Lampe-Onnerud. In December 2008, the company announced that its Sonata rechargeable batteries will be an optional upgrade for Hewlett-Packard laptops. Lampe-Onnerud says the technology eventually may be used in handheld devices.

The arrival of 4G (WiMax is rolling out now and Long Term Evolution (LTE) is down the road) could pose significant challenges. The key, says Fujitsu’s Chang, is to understand that consumers won’t go with run times less than today, even if they are using their devices to do more and each of those applications is more demanding.

“You can’t introduce a new technology that takes much more battery life,” Chang says. “Nobody will use those devices. People expect talk time of four to six hours. If a mobile phone [using a new application] has one to two hours, there will be no market. It’s just not going to happen. But if you go further, you can get a competitive advantage. That’s what all of us in the industry believe.”