This has to be one of the biggest frustrations of cell phone users - battery life, or rather the lack of battery life. Here’s an article over at MSNBC that looks at how all those new bells and whistles being offered on phones can put the hurt on your poor overworked battery. While they may be coming up with faster way to surf the Internet (my friends with iPhones have complained about this one), battery technology is essentially stagnant.

“There are ways of improving cell phone battery life, but there are very few ways of improving the batteries themselves,” said Kevin Burden, ABI Research’s mobile devices research director. “Essentially, battery technology is governed by God - there are just no new elements showing up in the Periodic Table.”

It does remind me of one of my favorite features of my phone. I have it set to turn itself off every night around midnight and then turn itself back on eight hours later.

From the article, here are a few tips to prolonging the life of your battery.

• A battery’s life is determined by a combination of the number of times it can be charged and by time itself, says Buchmann of Cadex Electronics. “Batteries age from the day they’re manufactured,” he said. “Even if you’re not using the battery, it ages.” Most lithium-ion batteries will last for between 300 and 500 charges. But if you let the battery run down too much before charging, that can hurt its lifespan, he says.
• Heat - especially in the car - is not your cell phone battery’s friend. It’s one of the elements that can shorten battery life the most, Buchmann says, so don’t leave a cell phone on the dash or put it in the glove box.
• Turn off the Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi and 3G radios in your phone when you’re not using them, and dim the backlight on the phone’s screen, says Burden of ABI Research.