I routinely leave home without my phone charger. If my phone dies, no one will be able to get in touch with me.
But my phone doesn’t die. It runs and runs and runs, like a GSM-enabled Energizer bunny.
A music (and charging) festival
I went to the Pickathon music festival a few years ago. It was a long weekend of camping and music, just long enough to be enjoyable and not so long as to feel punishing.
But what surprised me was that there was a huge concern for everyone there: how would they charge their smartphones?
People had enterprising solutions to this. One friend of mine brought a battery pack and an inverter, effectively bringing a small generator to the campsite to keep phones humming.
For those less inclined, there was a service offered by the festival. For a small fee, you could drop off your phone at a small hut and they would charge it for you. I walked past this hut multiple times, and they were doing a brisk trade.
Range anxiety
It’s not unlike electric cars and “range anxiety“. One of the big barriers to adoption for electric cars is the fear that the car will run out of power and the driver will be stranded. (While there are gas stations everywhere, charging stations are thin on the ground in places, though this is changing.)
Because of this, many people won’t buy a car unless it has a long range (equivalent to the range of a normal gas tank) or a gas engine for backup purposes.
But “range anxiety” is real for smartphone users. Since phones last about a day, less so with heavy usage (and approaching zero with wear), a user must plug their phone in every night without fail, lest they be unable to communicate with anyone.
I’d like to posit that something so important as communication to the wider world is too important to be limited to something that can’t hold a charge for more than a few hours.
Pay phones don’t exist anymore; that ship has sailed. Keeping in touch requires having a phone present. And charged.
Seems risky to rely on a smartphone for such an important task, don’t you think?
Do you have “range anxiety”? I’d love to hear about it below.
