Smartphone power struggles: Will we ever have battery-free mobiles?

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.

"Phones get more hungry as they get more powerful, but my own experience tells me that battery life isn't keeping up