As I suspected, the HTC Shift has a 20W/hr battery (2700mAh x 7.2v) just like the Fujitsu U1010 and is actually quite an efficient device. The short battery life has obviously been a choice based on size and weight priorities. As this device has been in the making for a year now (lets assume they started when this happened.) maybe they expected battery tech to advance. Maybe they wanted to use the slightly more dense Li-Ion batteries but, like others, switched to Li-Ion Polymer after all the exploding batteries changed the game. Maybe they haven’t actually got the final battery finished yet!
The good news about all this is that nothing in terms of board design would need to change and if designers could find a way to add the extra 50 or so grams and find the space for the extra cell, you would have a 3 hour device. Personally I’d be happy if they threw out the windows mobile component and added 100 grams to give me a four hour device.
Thanks to Kaz911 for this info. He has a few other tidbits over on his blog entry.
