In search of power

The other day I was on my way to a meeting when my mobile (a Nokia 6255) beeped. I looked at its screen and found the message "Low battery". Accompanying this message was a cute animation of a battery with very little "juice" (power) shaking around all over the screen. This set me thinking - why can't mobile phones be a little more intelligent?

Lets say the phone is nearly out of juice and could shut itself down at any moment. The last thing you would want it to do in such a situation is display a cute animation which uses up even more juice and hastens its end. What I would like the mobile to do in such a situation is to get into a mode that uses as little juice as possible but yet warn me so that I can get it charged again.

Perhaps the phone could have some form of power management (do any mobiles do that already, outside of these 'smartphone PDAs' that is?). Sort of like the power management you find on laptops - with several hundred profiles such as "writing email", "oogling at pics", "trying to get work done in MS Word" etc which adjust the processor's speed etc based on the kind of activity you're currently on. I am sure there must be a dozen activities that the latest and greatest mobile phone does which have absolutely no impact on your life and which could be safely switched off in favor of a bit more juice.

How about if you're on a call and the mobile phone is able to recognize that you are at the receiving end of a boring conversation? The phone could send you a subtle beep which means "Hey this conversation is not worth my juice". You would then have an option to, for example, clear your throat in the next 5 seconds, which the mobile phone would recognize and promptly disconnect the caller. The phone would then send a message to the mobile service provider's server instructing it to automatically issue a 'busy' signal to that caller for the next 12 hours, hence saving some more juice. Hopefully by then they would have also forgotten what they wanted to say, saving some more juice.