Author here.... I'm actually really interested in what we can do about the battery situation. The vision I laid out is clearly more battery intensive than your average phone is today. I do have some ideas about breaking apart the compute and display components, allowing the compute (and wireless) to go in a bag (or something) and connect up to a hefty battery while the human interface components are lighter weight.

Carrieng extra weight in my backpack and remembering to charge it all the time sounds pretty annoying. Why would someone do this, compared to using a remote computer? Maybe a home server, if they really hate cloud?

Maybe if solutions to dock a phone and use it as a workstation (along the lines of Samsung's DeX or some other open source projects which exist today) were more commonplace, it would be more convenient to recharge continuously over the course of the day. Extra charge cycles mean the batteries themselves would wear out faster, of course, as would the additional thermal load of using the device all day for various compute-intensive tasks.

I have certainly noticed that USB charging ports have become commonplace in the past few years. Maybe it could become equally common to see wireless charging pads ubiquitously in public spaces? They aren't as energy-efficient as a wired charging solution, but you don't need to remember to bring a cable, and they can be neatly hidden in various kinds of furniture. The hardware isn't inherently that expensive, especially if it is standardized.

Portable "repeater" units with storage, compute, and larger (swappable?) batteries than fit in a phone might be another alternative. It could fit the same kind of use case that cellular tethers for laptops do today, except with a different purpose. Downside here is needing to bring an extra device with you for long excursions.