I think about the movie The Road Warrior whenever I pass through places where business users and students gather--coffee shops, airport gates, hotel lobbies, and trade show common areas.

In The Road Warrior, Mel Gibson and groups of scruffy post-nuclear mutants wandered the Australian outback, clad in fabulous leather couture, fighting for dwindling supplies of gasoline.

And that's the scene wherever people gather to use mobile computers. Those places are bleak, Darwinian landscapes, where every hand is turned against the other, and only the strongest survive by controlling access to a rare, life-giving resource:

Working electrical sockets.

Chip and portable system vendors are looking to make those common areas into kinder, gentler places, by working to extend the battery lives of mobile hardware.Efficient power consumption is one of the main design principles of Core, Intel's new processor architecture, expected by midyear to be included in all Intel's products, including mobile computers, desktops, and servers.

Hewlett-Packard recently introduced a notebook computer battery it claimed could extend life beyond 14 hours.

Efficient power consumption will be needed when vendors roll out computers based on Origami, Microsoft's new design for an "ultracompact computer." Origami is sort of midway between a smart phone and a Tablet PC; it's a keyboardless device running Windows XP with a seven-inch touchscreen display. Reading about Origami made me exclaim, "Sweeeeeeeeeet!" and start reaching for my credit card--until I read that battery life is expected to be three hours. That's hardly enough time to look up 1970s sitcom actors in the Internet Movie Database-- I mean, I can hardly expect to do any productive work in three hours.

Power consumption is a problem for data centers, too, where electrical costs are up to about $3.3 billion annually and expected to increase 50% over the next four years, and cooling can cost more than real estate.