The Inconvenience of Convenience: Smart Devices and Their Batteries

With the advent of the iPhone, computers lost their identity. Suddenly, a phone could do most of what a computer could do, and though it would take more than a decade for humans to realize it, eventually we understood we didn't necessarily need a laptop or desktop computer anymore.

Phones and tablets not only became great devices for consuming websites, but replaced computers for e-mail, finances, social media, and just about everything else we needed. Who needs a computer, phone or a camera, for that matter, when a single device does it all?

The problem with this technological convergence is these devices: smart phones, smart watches, and tablets, have become overly complicated, to the point where we have to constantly tether them to a power source because everything we do on them eats away at their batteries.

For me personally, I try to make recharging predictable, so every two days I charge my phone first thing in the morning, and hopefully, less frequently with my watch. But usage can be unpredictable, and suddenly one or the other plummets into a low power state, and it's time to charge them again.

This is a phenomenon we didn't see with traditional watches, old feature phones, and cameras. Their batteries were relatively predictable, and we could count on days, for some devices, even months or years, of usage. Now all bets are off, and no matter what the manufacturer claims, our phones and tablets often suddenly die because of an unusual usage pattern, or maybe from a software bug.

Regardless of the why, we pay for our use of these innovative devices with the inconvenience of having to charge them often.