Power-Starved iPhone Users Unite

I'm sitting at LAX surrounded by plugs. And cords. And power starved people with plugs jammed into weird "Recharge Here" power kiosks everywhere.

In the midst of a long stint of travel (some vaca and some business) I'm finding I hunt for plugs in restaurants, peering beneath tables and picking eateries based on their number of outlets.

What the heck is going on here?

It seems the smarter our phones get, the shorter the battery life. Note to Apple: This is not helpful to the average Joe trying to live and work out in the real world.

In just a 10-minute period, two power-hungry peeps stuck their cords into a community outlet for just a handful of minutes, desperate to get enough juice to play a game for 2 minutes or check an email before the mandatory up-in-the-air ban on personal electronic devices.

During a 16-hour family road trip I stupidly forgot our EXTRA cigarette charger thingy, so all four of us shared my son's, with alternating battles erupting over whose device deserved the cord at any one moment in time. (Yes, mom always trumped the car.)

It was sick watching my husband, whose iPhone actually will no longer charge at ALL for some strange reason, plug in futilely, hoping to change that slim red bar to green.

Being a child of the Loma Prietas earthquake, the possibilities of being powerless for days always looms in my subconscious. What will the smart-phone world DO in that situation?

We'll be absolutely frickin' helpless, that's what will happen. I can't even take a four-hour flight without plugging in somewhere. What will happen if our power is out for four days?