I've lightly touched on this subject a few times, but the gist is this: unless some new breakthrough comes along in battery density technology, the future of the multimedia-centric phone is going to have issues -- with fast-dead batteries, that is. As phone inevitably become more complex and pack in all kinds of multimedia features -- high-rez cameras, music players, video players, streaming television and video, games, etc. -- the batteries that feed all this will start to poop out only after a few hours.Let's not forget that phones are not becoming any larger as well -- they're becoming smaller. Of course, once a certain smallish threshold is reached, phones will remain at that level -- but this poses battery issues, as most manufacturers may need to move to Li-Poly batteries just to get the milliamps they need while making the battery itself as small and as flexible as possible, however they do that. This interesting article talks about Samsung's foray into fuel cells as an alternative battery technology for upcoming handset models.
There is an interesting story also over at dpreview.com about Toshiba's methanol fuel cell technology, which would be as useful in ever-shrinking digital cameras as it would be in our miniature cellphones.
