I am shocked appalled at this report…
At an event today, HTCs vice president of product strategy Bjorn Kilburn noted that the company had conducted research last year to find out whether customers preferred thin smartphones to those which compromised thickness for better battery life. The answer, interestingly, was that they generally preferred thinness, at which point its plans for 3,000mAh-plus devices were removed from the roadmap.
via HTC: customers prefer thin phones to better battery life | The Verge.
What the hell was the question they asked? Do you want a brick with excellent battery life? or a wafer thin mint that will run for 8 hours? I can only guess two things here, that Steve Jobs was right and you shouldn’t ask customers what they want or that they did ask the most stupidly and self serving research questions in the world!
I don’t think we need a phone that lasts a couple of days, but I truly believe the middle ground is that the phone MUST last under normal to heavy voice, video and data usage for 12 to 14 hours but it must be less than2 to 3 cms thick (which frankly is thin in my book). This is achievable today with good design. Right now phone manufacturers are making the equivalent of cars with 1 gallon fuel tanks… great around town near a petrol station, but useful for doing anything for longer. A car such as that would be seen as being fundamentally flawed and would sell like a plague carrier, so should a mobile phone that lasts 8 hours or less.




