Hacker News Reader

Comment by mehrdad | Hacker News Reader

The battery life issue of smart phone is coming to an end. Basically battery life will be the prime feature of competition for smartphone makers from now on. Wireless charging, better battery technologies, and etc means the probability of your phone dying on you is going to decrease considerably over the next few years.

View on HN

Take your argument back to 2005, it still holds. And it didn't happen. Doesn't mean the bar I'm at has a charger or that I'm going to remember to charge my phone when I'm out and about doing whatever I do (movies, golf, bar, board gaming, lan party).

The failure case is still terrible and consists of me with a hacksaw at 3am on the side of the road "Stealing" my own bike.

A charging cable seems at least as easy to find as a hacksaw these days.

...and would be worthless in most locked-bike locations. There aren't too many electrical sockets available near parking meters and signposts.

Well, I was imagining a comparison to the scenario where you had to go get a hacksaw, so you could just carry your phone somewhere. But sure, if there is a hacksaw right there, charging doesn't compare.

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).

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.

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.

Suppose you were to fasten a cellphone power-bank to your bike...

Yet this product exists now. It could be possible that there's a way to unlock from a laptop, but grogenaut's argument is pretty logical as of whenever Bitlock would launch..

edit: Didn't notice you were OP. If I were to use this product and my phone were to die, what could I do?

One option would be to borrow someone else's phone and log into the BitLock app and use their phone to lock and unlock. You can technically lock/unlock from your macbook/ipad since both have build-in bluetooth 4. But currently the app only works with iphone and android.

So Bitlock can unlock any bike they want? The key isn't stored locally?

The key would be only stored locally if you are the owner of the lock, otherwise you have to login to the app and check out a temporary (dynamic key) to unlock

which still means that the bitlock server could grant anybody the ability to unlock your lock

as the owner of the lock you can manage permissions through the app.

Also you can apply the same argument to Lockitron. They can grant access to anyone to open your door lock and I believe you have more valuable stuff at your house.

The same argument has been applied to Lockitron... connecting physical locks to the internet is just a bad idea.

More convenient, perhaps, but now in addition to jamming a pen into the lock or cutting the chain with a pair of cutters (or whatever myriad ways to physically assault the lock that there are) you have to worry about potential software exploits enabling remote entry from anywhere in the world. It seems to me that these things are, practically by design, exponentially less secure than their purely 'analog' counterparts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com