Telecom Firms Skirt Worst Damage; Most Users Manage to Stay Connected

Cellphone networks that were crippled or overloaded in past disasters held up relatively well in the wake of Sandy, but iPhone-toting residents of the Northeast are closely monitoring a new source of stress: battery power.

People in the region hammered by the storm leaned on their smartphones for news of the outside world even after the lights went out. For those outside of hard-hit Lower Manhattan, where phone service was badly disrupted, the trick was keeping the batteries alive on devices that typically don't make it through a long work day. The scramble for a place to charge smartphones underscores a conundrum of modern life: People have more newfangled computing power at their fingertips, but it takes old-fashioned electrical power to keep it going.