[mehrdad]

In 2005 there were not as many smart phone out there as day. Plus we are getting more and more dependent on your smartphone. We use it for calls, navigation, emails, not to mention facebooking! soon it will be your wallet as well. So this creates a lot of pressure as well as incentives for smart phone makers to get ahead of competition of things like battery life. Note that innovation in smart phones has almost died. Apple is struggle to innovate (still they are doing some stuff with fingerprint scanner, motion processors,...) but the next big thing for them will be the battery life in terms of hardware innovation.

a final note, the battery innovation does not even have to be that much of a breakthrough. if your phone lives for a couple of days on a single charge, then the probability of running out of battery will decrease dramatically (since most people charge at least once every two days).

[grogenaut]

The pressure is to make the phones more powerful to do more with teh instegrahms, not to have longer battery life. If it were we wouldn't have gone from month long standby times (Nokia 5xxx) to partial day battery life (any modern phone with everything turned on). You can argue it all you want but battery is not growing faster much as our hunger for screen size, processing power, network use, memory, gps, etc are. Anything we can squeeze out of a battery will get gobbled up for quite a while.

Feel free to use something like this. It's geeky cool. I've just been burned by things like not being able to contact my ride from the airport, or my phone randomly deciding that it's just too dead to turn on at 8%, that I'm not trusting it for keys to my transportation / apartment.

For those things, if they have battery, like say my apartment combo lock, I want things with a good battery life (in the years) for the whole thing, a good failure state that I will always have on me (a combo), and obvious notification EARLY when the battery is going low.

[leoedin]

Battery technology is not simply a product of consumer demand. There's all sorts of reasons why battery life is currently hard to increase which won't be solved by throwing more money at the problem. There are definitely some improved battery technologies on the horizon (particularly ones which use air), but the reality is that improving battery life without making an explosive is actually a hard problem to solve. Most of the gains of the past decade have come from reducing computer power consumption and shrinking down the electronics in devices (leaving more battery space), not from increasing battery capacity.

There will be improvements, but they won't be easy or particularly fast.