So, before you charge out to buy a phone charger, think about where, how often, and why you'll be using the mobile phone and the most practical way and place of recharging it.
We take phone chargers for granted these days and spend our time being more irritated about the lack of those little white bars at the top of our phones being erratic than how to maintain the power of our phones.
But, do you remember the days when mobile phones were the sizes and sometimes shapes of bricks?
Eriksson in the 1950s actually had a mobile phone that weighed 80lbs! But did you know that a vast amount of the bulk and weight of those old devices was made up mainly with the battery?
They provided only a tiny amount of usage time before they ran out! This wasn't so long ago, and the advancement of mobile phones and their accessories has changed dramatically thanks to a few seemingly simple devices.
The cell phone battery that we vaguely recognize today from the original technology was invented in the 1970s and is thought of as the mother of the modern mobile phone battery.
A prototype, of what can be viewed as the modern cell phone battery, was created in 1973 by a concept at Bell Labs, USA. By the late 1970s, it was being tested out all over the States and Japan, with various pilot schemes. Their concept was large (nowhere near pocket size) and provided 30 minutes of charge if they were lucky!
Due to the 1980s growing popularity with mobile phones, there was more of a focus on the chargers' evolution.
However, the batteries still took up to 10 hours to recharge at that time! Car phones became more popular due to the limitations of the cell phones' batteries.
The main factor of change is that during the 1980s and '90s nickel-cadmium batteries (NiCD) were the batteries of choice.
These were the big, bulky ones who made the cell phones big and bulky too. They tended to have a short life and also got hot, which caused disturbances. As they contained cadmium, a toxic substance, they were difficult to dispose of, and there was inevitable, health scares for users.
Mobile phones were, at that time, still a bit of a niche market. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that the batteries and the mobile phones began to get smaller and more manageable and more mainstream.
The mobiles and their batteries in the 1990s were getting smaller, and the networks used to run them were getting better too.
There was more of a focus on how the batteries could be recharged rather than disposed of. By 1991, there was even digital phone networks and systems such as GSM, TDMA, and CDMA evolved. These 1990 phones were easy to carry around as the batteries and computer chips shrank from 20-80lbs to between 100 and 200 grams.
So, in the late 1990s, the cell phone batteries were nickel-metal hydride, also known as NiMH.
These were non-toxic and had fewer memory issues; they were also thinner and weighed less.
Also, the NiMH batteries had a longer shelf life, so users could speak for longer before they died.
But it was not until the noughties onwards that Smartphones and the compact and more powerful batteries began to hit the marketplace and the general mobile phone industry exploded with an increasing number of choice of mobile phone and their rechargers.
Although these smartphones are totally different in relation to their predecessors, they still faced obstacles and challenges, albeit different ones.
The difficulties smartphones face is that they are used so frequently and for some many different purposes that their built-in power banks which although compact and powerful batteries, often run out of power.
Therefore, there's been a considerable move towards external battery chargers.
These battery chargers have become the constant companion of the mobile phone user, and with so much choice on the market, it is sometimes difficult, with the ever-changing technology inventions, to know which battery charger is the best.
The lithium-ion battery replaced the NiMH, and which is still in use today. They are thinner, lighter, and have a long life span. They don't take long to charge either. As they can be made into many different shapes and sizes to suit the customer so that any mobile phone company can use them in their devices.
They don't have memory effects to concern them, so they can be recharged lots of times and to top it all, they are safe for the environment!
Their downside is the cost... Expensive compared to older batteries! The latest development in terms of materials used in cell batteries is the lithium- poly ion or Li-Poly battery.
This has 40% more power than the earlier NiMH batteries!
They are mega light and have no memory effect issues which can cause charging problems. However, these batteries are still a rarity and aren't commonly used yet.
So, while we take it for granted to have an external phone charger with our mobile devices, it wasn't so long ago when they were in-built and had a short life.
It's, therefore, a savvy idea to keep your eye on the latest inventions with this ever-moving market!