Extra AAA battery life with Philips’ Xenium 9@9j

It’s certainly a cool idea – if not new, the press announcement was made back in April 2007 – and even now we’re not exactly sure whether the addition of the option of a standard AAA battery power source in the forthcoming Philips’ Xenium 9@9j phone (codenamed the Xenium NRG) is likely to encourage sales. Is battery life a bigger issue than form factor these days? We guess this is something of an experiment to find out.

Anyhow, with additional energy smarts from Techtium’s Backupower technology, the redesigned phone (originally released in clamshell configuration as the Xenium 9@9 in 2005 we think) comes with a slot for a AAA battery, which is designed to be used a backup source of power, providing four hours of talk time or days of standby. The Xenium range is designed to be low power anyhow, with 10 hours talk and 1 month standby time claimed off a single main battery charge.
Interestingly, in terms of power management, if you fit a rechargeable battery, it will be recharged whenever you recharge the phone’s main battery. Additionally, if you fit a single use battery, the phone will ask you if you want to use that power once the main battery is dead. If you’re using a rechargable it will use it automatically.

And as you can see from this image, the battery compartment is relatively well integrated into the phone’s form factor, so it shouldn’t put too many people off.

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