There are three thing’s that that Cell Phone Manufacturers really care about when designing their phones: Cost, Integration and Customer Demand. Cost should be obvious, but these guys take it to an extreem (remember most phones will be “given away”. Yes I know we reallly pay for them, but thats not how the Cell Phone Companies treat it). Integration goes hand in hand with cost, the more things that can be squeezed into one chip, the cheaper it is to build the phone (This is why the one chip cell phone is the holy grail for these guys). Integration is more important to these guys from a cost of assembly aspect than it is for reduction in size.

Customer Demand is really the main reason why new features get added to cell phones, but we need to realize who the real customer is. It is not the individual consumer who uses the phone, rather it is the Cell Phone Companies which buy these phones in the millions and then gives them to their customers with strings attached. Cell Phone Companies do not care about battery life (if they did, cell phones would not have camera’s, MP3 players or play games). They mainly care about getting the customer to use as many of their services as they can, even if they have to force them into it. In fact, one could argue that Cell Phone Companies prefer keeping battery life at about 2 hours of talk time per charge (for average use) because it forces a constant recharging of the battery; making sure that it will wear out within two years. At that point, the customer becomes dissatisfied with their phone and is much more willing to sign another agreement to tie themselves to the Cell Phone Company for another “Free” phone, which now has more “Features” which force the user to spend more money on the Cell Phone Companies services.

Back to this article; If this technology does not make it into Cell Phones (for the reasons stated above), it still looks great for Wireless PDA’s and network adaptors. The problem is that in those markets, battery life is often less compelling as they are using larger batteries. These are also much smaller markets.