1

The sad news for Nintendo fans is that the company will be seeing very little revenue from the franchise they created.  Right now, the projected income from Pokémon Go is so insignificant that Nintendo does not expect their financial estimates to change no matter how popular the game is.

2 This game stands a significant chance of getting augmented reality regulated to the point of a practical ban. Hordes of people wandering around looking at the world through their cell phone screen?
Imagine how many lethal accidents that's going to cause.

3 Except they don't. Not only is the AR piece optional and frequently turned off to save battery life (the game has caused a real boom in external battery packs...), it only kicks in during the brief periods when you're actually "catching" a critter. The rest of the time, it's no worse than "walking while texting".

-j

4 J, however, running your GPS pretty much constantly will burn the battery, and even just having the screen backlight on continuously is a big power drain.

5 ...hence the battery boom. There's someone on Etsy (actually, probably half a dozen someones, and a bunch more knockoffs on their way over from China right now) making custom pokeball cases for external battery packs, so you can chase pokemon in "style".

-j

6
Perhaps this will actually lead to extended life electric car batteries. What a Win!

7

I doubt it will have any effect. The economic value of better batteries has been very, very clear for at least 40 years, and the chemists have been working hard on it.

The reason we haven't gotten the kind of improvement in batteries that we've gotten in semiconductors is that battery technology is fundamentally very difficult. It's going to take an entirely new technological approach, not merely a refinement of existing technology.