Halfway through the work day, you see your smartphones battery running into the red zone and you find yourself desperately looking for a charging port.

While the phones are getting more feature packed with huge processors and big camera’s the thing getting ignored is the battery. All these features pull out a lot of power which eventually hampers the overall battery performance.

Samsung Electronics hopes to eliminate the battery issue. The company has set a goal that smartphones coming out this year can last all day under average to moderately heavy use, according to Kevin Packingham, vice president of product innovation at Samsung.

“When you wake up to when you go to bed, we don’t want you feeling anxiety about your battery life,” he said in an interview at CES.

The company is working at optimizing different aspects of the phone, such as searches for Wi-Fi or powering up the 4G LTE radio. The Charge, Samsung’s first LTE phone for Verizon Wireless, was a good test bed for the company, but the company can do better. Samsung wasn’t quite there yet in terms of power efficiency, said Packingham.

So with this, we hope Samsung bringing out huge smartphones with greater battery life.

Research In Motion (RIM) has announced the launch of the next version of its Storm range “The BlackBerry Storm2″ smartphone with BlackBerry OS 5 in India today. It came after almost two year when the original Storm was released in India.

According to RIM, “the second generation of RIM’s innovative and award-winning touch-screen smartphone, the BlackBerry Storm2 smartphone significantly improves the BlackBerry touch-screen platform with enhanced technology and new features”. The Storm2 introduces a new SurePress technology based on an electronic system that provides the user with tactile feedback when the touch-screen is pressed and comes laden with BlackBerry OS 5, the latest version of the BlackBerry smartphone operating system. According to RIM, SurePress makes typing on the smartphone’s virtual keyboards is easier, more comfortable and more accurate.

Features include:

• Smooth design and premium finish with sloped edges, chrome accents, glass lens and stainless steel backplate
• Large 3.25”, high resolution 360 x 480 display at 184 ppi
• Capacitive touch-screen with integrated functions (Send, End, Menu, Escape) and new SurePress technology that makes clicking the display practically effortless
• Global connectivity support: UMTS/HSPA (2100Mhz), quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM and Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) networks
• 3.2 MP camera with variable zoom, autofocus, flash and video recording
• 2 GB of onboard memory storage and a microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports up to 16 GB
• Background noise suppression technology
• Loud distortion-free speakerphone
• Face detection (proximity sensor)
• Media player for videos, pictures and music
• BlackBerry Desktop Manager for both PCs and Macs
• BlackBerry Media Sync for easily syncing iTunes and Windows Media Player music with the smartphone
• 3.5 mm stereo headset jack and dedicated volume controls
• Bluetooth (2.1) with support for Secure Simple Pairing, hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits and other Bluetooth peripherals
• Built-in GPS for maps and other location-based applications, as well as photo geotagging
• Access to BlackBerry App World
• BlackBerry Internet Service and BlackBerry Enterprise Server support
• Removable, rechargeable 1400 mAhr battery
• BlackBerry Browser improved with faster JavaScript and CSS processing as well as support for Gears and BlackBerry Widgets

The BlackBerry Storm2 will be available in the Indian market for Rs. 31,990.

Just like Nokia leads the "dumb" phones market, it tops the smartphone sales as well. While Nokia continues its comfortable lead over competitors in this segment, its dominance is under constant threat from players like Apple, RIM and Android based devices.

In 2009, Nokia had introduced close to 20 smartphones in a variety of price brackets. The notion that smartphones are only high-end devices has begun to fall apart and we now see quite a few moderately priced smartphones as well. As a strategy to retain its lad in this segment, Nokia has come up with a plan that, at first, might raise eyeballs. It is actually planning to cut down on the number of smartphones it will release in the forthcoming year. In fact, we might only see around 10 new phones from the company next year. While it is a good idea to reduce the number of handsets, it also presents to the consumer, far fewer options and freedom of choice which incidentally was one of the strong points for Nokia. People could buy a smartphone of their choice, that suits their needs.

On the flip side, there is also this talk about almost all Nokia phones being similar with the same OS and the consumer being too confused as to what to buy. The reduction in the number of models would mean a simpler, uncluttered product line up. It remains to be seen if this strategy does bear fruit and translates into increased sales.