Batteries forever included?

A recent letter and response in a consumer computer publication clearly highlighted a typical dilemma for a new-product designer (Reference 1). The letter writer complained that the battery in her recently purchased Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) Jornada 548 PDA was not replaceable. She noted that if the battery died after the warranty expired, she would be stuck with an expensive paperweight. Responding to her, a Hewlett-Packard product-line manager said that feedback on the predecessor Jornada 400 series indicated that users wanted a slimmer profile unit, and the only way Hewlett-Packard could do so would be to abandon the replaceable battery for a built-in substitute.

This situation presents an excellent example of the challenge facing the design-engineering team. For most engineers, design is not a blank-sheet-of-paper, ivory-tower exercise. Engineering is the art and science of anticipating, characterizing, and explaining the innumerable trade-offs in key product characteristics, such as performance, price, power, and appearance.

This problem does not have a right answer. In the case of the battery, the product team undoubtedly grappled with the conflict between the desire for a smaller unit versus the many users' ingrained expectation that any battery should be a replaceable product part. Whether this belief is still technically valid is disputable. After all, a battery may be no more failure-prone than any other part of a PDA. Balancing the characteristics of a future product with the comfortable features of the older product and managing trade-offs with respect to constraints makes your engineering projects challenging.

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Contact me at bill.schweber@cahners.com.