Why Battery Life Should Be The New Smartphone Battleground - Polidicks

The Nexus 4 has pretty solid battery life imo.

I don't think it is as big of a deal as a lot of people make out but I would definitely rather have a good battery than a phone that is 4mm thinner. As long as I remember to plug it in every night I don't have any real problems with battery, although I am not a very heavy user and browsing the internet can take its toll.

[QUOTE=MightyLOLZOR;43333657]The Nexus 4 has pretty solid battery life imo.[/QUOTE] I have N4 and I feel like the battery is awful. It's fine on idle, music and surprisingly talk but when it comes to browsing, reading or anything that involves screen the battery falls rather quickly. According to battery usage info screen always drains most of it. Even on low brightness it still hogs battery like no tomorrow (and there isn't one if you don't charge it)

Nexus 4 has pretty sorry battery life honestly.

Battery life will be the battleground, but it won't be because of new battery technologies (unless we move from Li-ion or Li-Pol). We've reached a peak of battery technology - so battery life will come down to power savings. If that be in software, or new hardware / chips which use less power. We're pretty much screwed on battery sizes unless people are willing to allow a larger battery and thus a larger phone.

Original Droid razr…help. The da

You do get phones with bigger batteries, such as the Droid Maxx, but they're chunky as fuck. You can also buy bigger batteries for phones with that option such as the Samsung Galaxy series. The options are there if you bother to look.

Phones are fine now programming wise mostly so battery levels are definitely something to deal with. Sure, you can charge in many places, but you shouldn't have to charge it in 6, maybe 14 days when idle, instead of 1-3 days. Some phones are seemingly so shit with holding a charge they actually die in 1 day just doing nothing.

[QUOTE=garychencool;43332825]Just an FYI this article aims mainly at North American and I guess European consumers. In South Korea and some other Asian countries phones come with 2 batteries in total in the box to combat this issue. Also it depends on who uses the phone and how much. You could be blasting away with Max screen brightness in an environment that's dark, on 4G data instead of wifi. There could be a poorly coded app that drains battery.[/QUOTE] Or have a 3 hr commute each day. That's a lot of Bloons TD eating battery I drain my S3 battery in about a day when i commute, mainly due to podcasts, music, some games and just browsing stuff, but i can get 3 days out of it when using it only as a phone. CPUtuner and Greenify really helps

Considering this is probably the century in which we'll put bases on the Moon, we're gonna need things that are built to last, with big monster-power batteries that keep going for weeks or months without needing to plug into a wall-socket. You couldn't get away with a battery life measured in hours up on Luna; you'd get thrown into the protein vats so that you'd provide valuable resources as payment for the man-hours wasted and potential lives put at risk.

battery life should be a battleground instead of shaving off milimeters of space or adding inches to the screen, but unfortunatly phone manufacturers aren't really able to develop batteries which means they are at the mercy of whatever the suppliers can offer. now apple and samsung are probably exceptions, samsung owning the battery production and apple insisting on personally developing every component that goes into the phone, but even they still can only put in the phone what is commercially available

My iPhone 5's battery is terrible. Doesn't even last a night out anymore.

Nexus 5 battery is amazing compared to my S3 4G. Samsung did two things with the S3 4G, they took a regular S3, added one gig more of RAM and 4G capability without putting in a more powerful battery. It could drain 20% with 4G in 20 minutes.

I can only play sonic dash for like 3 hours before my battery dies its a disgrace

My iPod's battery lasts exactly ONE day from 100% with WiFi, SSH, the whole ordeal turned off and then running a music player. Come on, you can do better than that.

Recently got an S4 and the batter life has been fine for me so far. Hell, it hasn't even dropped below 50%

[QUOTE=MightyLOLZOR;43333657]The Nexus 4 has pretty solid battery life imo.[/QUOTE] Yeah really solid I went to the city and had my 3G on, i used it time to time, i took a few pictures, went on the internet and listened to music and i didn't have it on for that long I came home to 0% battery I was out for 5 hours

I agree that battery technology needs to be worked on very much. It wasn't until I bought a MacBook Air a few months ago (with the 13 hour battery life) that I realized how incredibly important battery life is to the user experience of the product. Due to the insane battery alone, that notebook has become my favorite notebook of all time.

[QUOTE=jA_cOp;43332932]The article argues well [i]why[/i] battery life is important, but it misses the two major reasons for battery lives being so bad on recent devices. The first is that lithium-ion battery technology has reached a plateau - the capacity to size ratio isn't going up. Take the iPhone for example; the original has a capacity of 1400mAh while the 5S has 1560mAh (and I bet that's mostly due to a size difference). The second is that newer devices consume more power. Newer handheld OS versions generally use more power than older ones due to more features and such (that are enabled by default), and newer devices often have more complex SoCs with faster processors and more antennas and sensors etc. As it is partly a software problem, there is much room for improvement here, but it's not the forte of most manufacturers. The two coupled together means that smartphone manufacturers don't really have a choice; the lack of new battery technologies forces them to use lithium-ion, and to keep newer devices desirable (when facing competition) they want to use the latest software. The only thing they could really do is put in a larger battery which significantly increases the size of the device, but then most people would probably prefer separate battery packs. The article makes it out as if manufacturers would be betting on battery life, they just need to realize how important it is - but the reality is that they're either waiting for newer battery technology, or themselves trying to develop better technologies than lithium-ion, which may or may not bear any fruit (I'm guessing Apple is probably in the former, and Samsung is in the latter).[/QUOTE] You are completely right. There simply haven't been many major breakthroughs in the field of batteries when compared to other fields, like touch screens, hardware and sensor size. This means that we have put more and more demanding hardware in phones that we use more than ever. Right now designers hope that engineers can get a breakthrough, so they can do more in terms of small scale and mobile computing.

[url]www.zerolemon.com[/url] Turn your phone into a brick that lasts several days.

the other problem is unlike screens where technology developed can usually make it to market in a year or so, with batteries its about 5 years from the lab to your device

my flip phone used to last a week I want phones to last like my kindle lasts

[QUOTE=jA_cOp;43332932]The article argues well [i]why[/i] battery life is important, but it misses the two major reasons for battery lives being so bad on recent devices. The first is that lithium-ion battery technology has reached a plateau - the capacity to size ratio isn't going up. Take the iPhone for example; the original has a capacity of 1400mAh while the 5S has 1560mAh (and I bet that's mostly due to a size difference). The second is that newer devices consume more power. Newer handheld OS versions generally use more power than older ones due to more features and such (that are enabled by default), and newer devices often have more complex SoCs with faster processors and more antennas and sensors etc. As it is partly a software problem, there is much room for improvement here, but it's not the forte of most manufacturers. The two coupled together means that smartphone manufacturers don't really have a choice; the lack of new battery technologies forces them to use lithium-ion, and to keep newer devices desirable (when facing competition) they want to use the latest software. The only thing they could really do is put in a larger battery which significantly increases the size of the device, but then most people would probably prefer separate battery packs. The article makes it out as if manufacturers would be betting on battery life, they just need to realize how important it is - but the reality is that they're either waiting for newer battery technology, or themselves trying to develop better technologies than lithium-ion, which may or may not bear any fruit (I'm guessing Apple is probably in the former, and Samsung is in the latter).[/QUOTE] This isn't completely true; newer SoCs have more sophisticated battery saving technology built in too. Such as envelope tracking on the radio

I don't have too much an issue with battery life. What I'm preparing for is to keep my battery life good for a long time. I don't charge my phone overnight because it only takes 2 hours or so to fully charge my battery, so then that leaves 6 hours of charging at full battery, which I heard isn't good for the battery. So I charge it whenever it's low, but never put it on the charger at max. Also keep it from getting hot.

The key to longer battery life is to have as few apps running as possible. Especially bloatware keeps running in the background, waking up the phone from sleep, resulting in loss of battery power. My phone currently lasts 3 days with 15 minutes of use every day, and a whole day if I use it a lot. It's a galaxy S2.

Nuclear Batteries. They've already been made, they're tiny to moderately large. Certainly small enough to fit in today's cell phones, they last longer than your phone will physically survive, and they're no more dangerous than a normal battery

I can't stand these new light phones. I need something bulky otherwise I can't feel it there and I think I forgot it.

[QUOTE=TheTalon;43335578]Nuclear Batteries. They've already been made, they're tiny, they last longer than your phone will, and they're no more dangerous than a normal battery[/QUOTE] Except they're still dangerous and their power output is way too low to operate a phone with.

[QUOTE=jA_cOp;43332932]The article argues well [I]why[/I] battery life is important, but it misses the two major reasons for battery lives being so bad on recent devices. The first is that lithium-ion battery technology has reached a plateau - the capacity to size ratio isn't going up. Take the iPhone for example; the original has a capacity of 1400mAh while the 5S has 1560mAh (and I bet that's mostly due to a size difference). [...][/QUOTE] Generally speaking, there are a nice handful of new battery chemistry around the corner but funding/attention is rather lacking beyond the acedemic community. I.e. [URL="http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/graphene-nanoribbons-bring-new-twist-to-liion-batteries"]Li-Ion batteries augmented by Graphene nano-ribbons[/URL] And hell, Graphene is dirt easy to make, it just needs to be brought to the attention of battery manufactures. [editline]28th December 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=Dougz;43334338]Recently got an S4 and the batter life has been fine for me so far. Hell, it hasn't even dropped below 50%[/QUOTE] Keep in mind, capacity drops with use after awhile.

Here's a dumb fix. Provide the consumer with more than one battery. This way they can swap out the dead batteries in their phone and use the spare batteries whilst the dead batteries charge.