A worker of Wysips shines a torch on the screen of a prototype of a smartphone equipped with a photovoltaic film.
Mobile phones may be getting smarter, faster and more capable, but when their batteries run out just hours after you charged them, you'd be better off with a piece of string stretched between two empty soup cans.
With battery performance becoming an obsession for many smartphone users, the race is on to innovate ways of prolonging power to ensure that juice-guzzling devices can stay the course.
The good news is that scientists say that they are on track to create power cells that may rarely need charging -- or even phones that have no need for batteries. The bad news is that these may be several years away.
Until they arrive, phone and gadget companies are scrambling for solutions to the problem which, in the absence of major technology announcements, was one of the key talking points at the planet's leading mobile technology showcase this week in Barcelona.
"Power supply is the giant elephant in the room here," says CNN's Dylan Reynolds, who has been struggling to keep his own handsets alive while tweeting and reporting from the 2013 Mobile World Congress. "Phones get more hungry as they get more powerful, but my own experience tells me that battery life isn't keeping up.
"Everywhere I go at Mobile World Congress I hear people complaining that their phone just died, or is about to die. I've started carrying a large and heavy external battery to make sure my phones make it through the working day."
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The problem has prompted the event's organizers to deploy charging points around the huge venue. It also led to manufacturer Nokia causing an unlikely sensation by announcing a no-frills retro phone capable of lasting a month between charges.
"But that's just treating the symptom and no-one seems have a solution to the underlying problem," Reynolds adds. "I think that's why Nokia's phone grabbed so much attention. It also underlines the trade-off between the sophistication of your phone, and battery life."
Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, says the industry is "coping rather than solving the problem," and says there is no breakthrough on the horizon.
"We are still seeing the same battery cell technology that we saw back in 2003," he said. "Typically we expect one day usage from a fully-charged battery.
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