The mystery of the power bank phone taking over Ghana

About the "absence of a proper multitasking OS", well, that's what many/most non-smart phones have even today. I think my first phone that supported J2ME software would not properly receive messages while the JVM was running, and the handling of phone calls was jerky. If you received a call the application/game would be terminated abruptly, causing any state to be lost. Yeah, that's how most phones worked ten years ago - forget any sort of background tasks, be them Java apps or music (MIDI!) playing. Not all phones were as bad, though: Symbian-based ones, for example had some sort of multitasking IIRC, but these also tended to be more expensive.

The smart part being the one that's missing, you can't power multiple radio antennas and systems (GSM, GPS, bluetooth, WIFI, ...) for 4 weeks, let alone multiple antenna bound to a gigantic, bright and power hungry screen and a CPU which wouldn't have been out of place in a desktop computer 10 years back which keeps being woken up to fetch new data. We just don't have the battery technology.

Hell, if you just shut off all the smart part off and keep the thing in your pocket without powering the screen you'll get multiple days out of the average smartphone easy. No reason to buy one though, you can just get a $20 candybar it'll do the job better.

> I can't count the number of times Galaxy and iphone touting friends have become unreachable in the evenings because of this - I would have trashed those in a review, who cares about fancy features if you can't even call your friends on a night out because the battery doesn't make it past 10pm…

Well that's great, you've got your priorities and they've got theirs. Nobody's forcing you to get a smartphone.

My other friends and I made fun of him. He always had his ridiculously large, power-guzzling phone plugged into it. But he insisted that he had it because it could jump-start a car (he's a mechanic, but with no formal training and only a high school education, and he said he had never used the device himself). I and another friend, me with a masters degree in electrical engineering, and he with a PhD in an engineering field, thought the idea preposterous: Surely one could not draw enough cranking amps from such a device to start a car, and could it even hold enough energy to do so?

I received, by way of my own carelessness, an opportunity to test this out when I found my car's battery dead one day in the middle of winter. My friend lent me his battery pack, and I set it up, leaving it connected to the car's battery for 30 seconds before attempting to start the car. Lo and behold, the car started.

I felt chagrined, but I also thought this was really cool. With the price and availability of lithium batteries as they are, why _should_ you need a 50-100 lb lead-acid battery to jump start a car?

Also, maybe I should learn a little more about cars.

[0] I couldn't find the Amazon listing back, but this is in the same product category: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00D42AFS8

Many of the examples you listed did the same. Different for the sake of being different doesn't work out.