One of my favourite scenes from the movie Bull Durham is when Tim Robbins' character, an up-and-coming baseball pitcher, starts bragging to Kevin Costner's character about all the cool things he has.

"I got a Porsche already; a 911 with a quadrophonic Blaupunkt," he boasts.

Costner, who is mentoring Robbins, simply tells the young pitcher, "You don't need a quadrophonic Blaupunkt! What you need is a curve ball!"

I was reminded of this scene while reading reports about how Motorola is planning on bringing about a 2.0 processor for a mobile phone by the end of the year. That's up there on the coolness factor with the Blaupunkt, which was pretty much the epitome of car stereos in the 1980s. All of the top phones these days, including the Motorola Milestone and the iPhone, use 1.0 gigahertz processors. I can see the appeal. More processing power means better graphics and better performance.

But that's not what I need. What I really need is a phone that doesn't need to be recharged twice a day. That's the curve ball the industry should be working on.

The battery life of most phones these days is atrocious. iPhone users have been complaining about battery life almost since the handset hit the shelves. The phones running Google's Android operating systems are worse.

I've tested out a few of them, including the Milestone. The phones are great: big screens, easy to use, WiFi and Bluetooth, and in the Motorola's case, there's even a physical keyboard that slides out. When the company announced that they would be using Android on their handsets, there were a lot of people who thought the OS would finally bring the phone maker back into the market after about three years of struggling. The Milestone is all that.

But when I'm using power — e-mail, web browsing, listening to music, I can drain the battery in about six hours. Android has a cool feature that lets you know just what is eating your battery, so I was able to see that my screen was using up about 66 per cent of my power.

So I toned it down. That got me an additional eight hours of battery life, which still meant that my phone would be dead by the evening without a recharge.

But now Motorola wants to roll out an even more power hungry chip, which will improve the performance of the one thing that is already draining the battery. This isn't a condemnation of the phone or Motorola. Every Android-based phone I've used has had the same issues to various degrees.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like an issue that will be fixed anytime soon. Batteries have been a sticking point for the phone and notebook computer industry for about four years. Attempts to put more power into a smaller space have resulted in more than a few recalls.

No phone maker wants to try to push the envelope with an experimental battery. But if companies like Motorola are going to continue to push processor speeds, they are going to have to develop their curve ball.