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Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline?
jfruh writes "Every time a company rolls out a new version of a product, it extols how much better it is than the previous version. Thus, Apple spent a part of its iPhone 5 rollout touting the staying power of the latest version of its battery. But have iPhone batteries really seen improvement since the original came out in '07? Kevin Purdy crunches the numbers and concludes that, while the 5's battery beats the 4S's, we still haven't returned to the capabilities of the original phone."
This is because the original iPhone used EDGE. If you force future version off the 3G network, talk time beats the first generation iPhone easily.
And as competitive as smartphones are today that's close to as good as we'll get for a bit. There IS a type of Lithium-ion battery that can store twice the charge of today's batteries at the same volume, but that's apparently coming to electric cars first; which obviously spend a lot more on batteries per unit and are in far more need of it.
But expect these batteries in phones at some point. In the further future the most promising technology is lithium-air batteries, which offer up to 10x the current charge per volume as today. But there are still numerous problems with them, and so an ETA there would be indefinite but quite possibly less than a decade. Still, imagine a phone that would need charging less than once a week!
"As explained around the web, milliamps hours (mAh) are something like a gas tank, and voltage (V) is the amount of fuel the device is drawing."
I don't know who wrote this bullshit, but they need to be shot.
(Yes, I attempted to read the article; so sue me.)
Did the original iPhone have 225 hours standby?
And the fact that you still get 8 hours browsing, even over LTE, is really impressive. It might be slightly shorter than browsing time on an original iPhone but how much browsing could you have got done on Edge? You could probably read 10x the content on the iPhone 5, so how is it not far ahead?
It comes back to the problem of looking at a raw number on a list, without thinking what that number MEANS to a user on the device.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
iPhone 2G, lasts me 12 hours full use or 4 days stand by (2 days average) - still use it btw with new battery
iPhone 4 lasted me (now my wife) about 8 to 9 hours and a day and a half of light use
iPhone 4S with most battery hungry functions (eg. GPS, notifications) lasts me 6 hours of constant use, or 22 to 26 hours of light use
Now the 4S is in the brink of being unacceptable. It's still convenient and the extra speed is very appreciated. But I always need a power outlet nearby when traveling, and I cannot count on it lasting a full day. It just can't if used for browsing and apps for a couple of hours.
Now, I love the iPad 2 battery life. Puts it in the Awesome Stuff list. I am guaranteed it'll last a day. If they could have kept the 2G life and not up CPU I'd have been more interested in the iPhone 5.
unfinished: (adj.)
ever since i got rid of my work email account off my ipad the battery time doubled or tripled
take 10 people off the street and you will have 10 different use patterns
It's an oversimplification to assume that a company would, or should work to increase battery life. The different features have to be weighed against each other. Performance comes at the expense of battery life. A larger battery would mean a heavier, bulkier phone. Lithium ion batters today have about the same capacity of the batteries which existed when the first iPhone was released, while power efficiency of electronics has increased significantly. They could have used these advances to increase battery life, but have instead chosen to use them to increase performance.
When Apple made the first iPhone they probably had very little real world usage info.
By now they have a good idea how people use their iPhones and what they should target.
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Sometimes it IS necessary to upgrade though, it can save you real money. I used to spend $$ on firewood for sending smoke signals; but then I made a one-off payment by switching to semaphore flags. Simples!
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It remains to be seen if the iPhone 5 can really pull off 8 hours of LTE browsing
Yes, but remember that in every device Apple has shipped (from laptops to iPhones to iPads) the battery life estimates have been pretty much spot on.
as that would be impressive (blow through your data cap on a single charge)
Browsing is not watching media only. Browsing is loading pages, reading them, moving on and reading more. It's not about constant data streaming, so it's not overall something that will destroy your bandwidth - you can only read so much in eight hours!
Yes you could blow through bandwidth fast if you sat watching extremely high quality video for hours on end. But that is why mobile app developers are not giving you those really beefy data streams, instead over even LTE you'll get reduced quality video from most things unless you force the issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The typical iPhone user is only considered with the number 5.
Not really. There will be a lot of iPhone 4s users that skip this update.
Heck, they could just take what they have now, make some ridiculously minor change, and then change the name and have a whole new round of sales to the macfags.
Oh the clever wit of the hater!
Oh wait, they already did that with the 4S.
Nope. Some people did upgrade, yes, but Apple had a lot more new sales. I never got a 4s because it was a minor upgrade. And now the iPhone 5 is an upgrade over the 4s, but not very large... however it is a big jump over the iPhone 4. And that's what is really most important because most people have two year contracts. For the iPhone 4 (and older) iPhone owners, the iPhone 5 is in fact a big deal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.
Humorous.
And yet in that comment lies a revelation of why Apple's supposedly boring updates are not a problem.
Because from the 4 to the 4s, it was not that much of a leap. Or so it seemed at the time.
But now from the 4 to the 5, that is actually a pretty big jump. So even though we might see something like a 5s next year, you can be pretty sure that waiting for that will not be an amazing leap over the 5 - so there's little point to wait. And yet when the 6 does come out a year or two from now, it will probably be a really impressive gain over the iPhone 5.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I was to make a product and I just wanted money, but didn't care about improving society, I'd do a gimmick:
Every release, I'd have some things better and some things worse. Then I could tout,"Improved THIS AND THAT!"
Next release, I could make the worse things better and the better things worse, and tout,"We improved this now!"
The trick is that it can't be things the user easily can see in action like screen resolution.
God spoke to me
You think you're saving money?
After getting a mating pair of carrier pidgeons, my transmission costs are minimal, and my bandwidth just keeps increasing. Sure there are a few lost packets to aircraft, bb guns and Richard Gere, and latency is high, but we're talking reverse data cap here.
The $20 phones from the convenience store have more battery life and equal call quality. If you are looking for a telephone they can't be beat.
If you want to talk about carrying a computer in your pocket, that's a different story, but for pure telephone use, the cheap ones are the way to go.
There is absolutely nothing new here. My Nokia in 1999 had a 10 day battery life and today I recharge my HTC One S every day. It is just a fact of life that we use phones todays for so much more that the batteries just last less. No phone has a 10 day lifespan these days.
There is a very good car analogy here.
Over the years cars have become much more efficient, through various refinements and improvements in the design of the internal combustion engine. We are able to produce more horsepower with less fuel. So, did cars stay the same size and increase in fuel economy over the years? Some have, but especially in the USA, designers instead chose to increase the size and power while keeping fuel efficiency relatively constant. So the engine has become more efficient, yet those gains weren't used to produce a more fuel efficient engine, they were used to make bigger, more powerful, cars that had the same fuel economy.
With the iPhone, the battery definitely has become better of the years. So did Apple choose to increase battery life? Nope. As with the cars, they increased the CPU power, screen resolution, GPU power, memory, radios, etc. They packed more powerful components, more efficient components, into the same size with ever increasing battery technology. So battery tech has to keep improving all the time, just to keep up with the increase in power usage from the rest of the system, and it doesn't even always keep up. It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.
I've not developed this very far and I know there are counter-examples, many came to mind while writing this, yet the analogy is apt especially when we confine our comparison to specific segments of the US car market. I'm pleased that, in recent years, this trend seems to finally be reversing, and the US is becoming more--if only slightly--like Europe with their focus on smaller, more efficient cars.
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actually the iPhone does about the same now as before... the "improvements" have all been incremental... Which is why the iPhone 5 only does what a 1 year maybe 1 and 1/2 year old Android does... They've fallen WAY behind the times. the world just hasn't realized it yet...
But they will...
iphone 5 owner: LOOK I HAVE TURN BY TURN NAV!
Android owner: My last two phones did that...
iphone 5 owner: BUT I have 5 rows...
Android owner: SO do I and my phone has widgets and rotates... yawn
iphone 5 owner: Look at my 4" screen!
Android owner: 4.6" yawn
iphone 5 owner: But its APPLE!
Android owner: and you paid 100 dollars more good job sheeple...
That, my friend, is the iPhone 12 - as was revealed exclusively to me in a morphine-and-"don't worry"-drug-coctail following my (very successful) brain surgery 3 1/2 years ago, a little over a month after the iPhone3G was released.
At this point, sitting stunned in a hospital bathroom, I was pleasantly surprised:
You see, the Interplanetary Patent Office had commited a major temporal blunder, and I held in my hands the fabled iPhone 12.
I'd been looking forward to this, I came to realize, because of the wonderful new function added to this generation of iPhone.
The Replication ability: Simply hold your phone in your right hand, turn your hand around to the left and a duplicate iPhone is created - one which lasts for 12 hours and can be used just the same as the original for that period.
Can you imagine the craze? Lend out your iPhone and keep it at the same time! Borrow an iPhone and buy apps, they'd follow you and not the phone. Lose an iPhone and you could join the begging crowd at the central railway station hungrily gazing at the iPhone Carriers - the source of their only light in life.
The only real problem was that damn bug - those jackasses at the Interplanetary Patent Office not only had committed a major temporal blunder, but they'd sent out a buggy test edition!
The only thing that happened when I turned my hand around to the left was that it made my head *hurt really bad*. I've chosen to take this as an analogy of what'll happen if I (a free-spirited hacker-minded kind of guy) pick up an iPhone... It'll just end in one glorious headache.
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Also, clearly, as evidenced by religious leaders, prophets and other conm^H^H^H inspired people, such drug-fueled visions - especially considering the holy trappings of the event... I'd just had a freaking robot in my brain!
This experience should from now on be considered the one holy truth about the iPhone 12.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the 4S isn't the only model increase that won't be a straight number one... By my calculations, iPhone 12 will be model 43.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
And I'll add that I agree they are useful. Without the battery my iPhone's screen is too dark and I can't hear the audio.
Pidgeons? I use butterflies. Eventually, the ripples cause by their wings will cause my data to arrive at its destination - including all future data.
To smartphone making companies: Stop using the advancements in manufacturing to make the phones slimmer, they're slim enough (I'd say too much), instead use it to put larger batteries. They really need them.
I know some companies have gone that route (some Motorolas have large batteries) but we need more of these.
Happy with homing mosquitoes here. You can carry a lot of them. One tenth of a thimble full of blood keeps dozens of them alive for weeks. They are use once and discard. I paint the message on the wing and the receiver just has to use a scanning electron microscope to read it. Only problem I've had is they fly to the wrong place, or the receiver swats them before seeing if there is a message.
I actually use hitherto un-invented methods to inscribe my messages into the hydrogen protons in a molecule of water. I know there is some statistic about how every molecule of water has been everywhere on the planet, so data loss statistics are very good.
Latency can be a bitch sometimes, especially if it gets stuck in a glacier for a few million years.
Now, if they manage to crack that fusion thing, my packet loss will go through the floor :(
Yup. And they're going to do that.. play catch up. It's inevitable. It's close to inevitable for any market leader to be conservative, since it's hard for them grab more share, fairly easy to imagine screwing something up and losing market share. So they don't do anything crazy. And in the tech world in particular, "innovation" is well described as "crazy that works"... you had this nutty idea, a big chance to what came before, and hey, look, it's working. Like the first iPhone... there was lots of "what came before" rolled into the iPhone. The "crazy" part was selling a smartphone to consumers. Because everyone in the business, Microsoft, Palm, RIM, they all knew, with certainty, that only business folk wanted smartphones.
Add to the natural conservative nature of the market leader several of Apple's standard behavior, and I can pretty much make the case that Apple isn't going to innovate anymore. And for the part, past the first iPhone, they really didn't do that much innovation anyway.
Apple sells a crazy number of devices for a single manufacturer... somewhere between 33% and 40% of all the smart phones sold in the USA, for example. They have a very precise formula -- one new model per year. This does tend to make their business skewed seasonal, but it also allows them to generate huge profits, making just the one model. More recently, they've addressed the lower end market by selling the older products at a reduced price. So unlike every other smart phone vendor, they're not spending a dime to address the mid-range and low-end of the smartphone market. And they're seeding the market for future upgrades.
All of this is dependent on their ability to keep the numbers up ... millions flocking to that same yearly new iPhone. If they were to do something in a new iPhone that drove customers away, their whole franchise could fail. Thus, they're never going to do anything particularly interesting with the flagship. There's also a bit of lock in for any smartphone platform... once you're serious about the iPhone, you're not looking closely at Samsung or Motorola or HTC or even Nokia for your next upgrade... you're waiting for that new iPhone. Apple needs to keep something of a parity with the competition... and that's pretty much what the iPhone 5 did. And about all it did. And I claim, that's more than enough. It doesn't do anything to upset the Apple cart :-)
Companies not in the lead are more likely to take risks. And companies with a broad product line are more likely to take risks. So look at Motorola. They had basically no presence in the smartphone business, they had been hurtin' for years. In 2009 they did the Motorola Droid/Milestone... in many way the anti-iPhone.. even THAT itself was a risk... you can tell, by all of the effort some other companies have gone to in order to make an iPhone-ish product. The iPhone was sleek and smooth, the Droid very industrial, and even with a keyboard. And a higher resolution display, which Apple wouldn't do for another year. This was a big success for Motorola, and led to a huge line of smartphones. But they're still struggling a bit. So last year, they took another risk and introduced the new RAZR. Again, kind of an anti-iPhone. More hard industrial edges. Rather than a phone made of mostly glass, they build theirs out of Kevlar -- the thing's as indestructible as phones get. This was a bit of a gamble, but Motorola has a full line of other devices.
It paid off... so a bunch more RAZR models. In fact, in-between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 introductions, Motorola introduced five different RAZR models, and a bunch of other devices. That's the other thing about innovation, which goes back to my original claim -- innovation is crazy made successful. If you can't afford to fail, you can't take the risk, you can't bring the crazy, and so, you don't do any significant innovations. Consider that the only significant innovation in the iPhone 4S was SIRI, Apple's integrated speech recognizer/actor... software you can swi
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