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Ask Slashdot: Best Big Battery Phone?
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung's announcement today of the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6+ was a disappointment to a lot of power users. The phones both use a 3,000 mAh, non-removable battery. This is presumably part of Samsung's quest for thinner and thinner phones, but it's bad news for those who prize function over form — particularly from a phone line that is ostensibly made for power users. So, those of you who have the pulse of the mobile industry: what's my best bet for a high end phone that doesn't compromise on battery life? Are there any devices on the horizon that are likely to have big batteries? I'm also wondering if I should just get a cheap phone to tide me over to the next generation of flagships. My current device is old and doesn't have the fast/quick-charge tech that modern ones do — does that work as advertised?
I've had a Sony Xperia Z3 for 6 months, and the battery capacity is shockingly giant. Idle, browsing, and reading on Kindle hardly use the battery. GPS and talking also are rather gentle on the battery. The only thing that eats battery is copying 100 GB of music over WIFI. The phone has a stamina mode to help throttle applications as well; but IMO, I'd rather only use it in emergencies.
No, I will not work for your startup
I think the biggest problem is having Android as a starting point. In my experience, Android is just terrible on battery life. Something about the way it works that just lets apps suck down the battery. I had and Android phone, and replaced it with a Windows Phone
My old Android phone would easily be out of battery by the end of the day with a similarly sized battery. I usually plugged it in at work because otherwise the battery wouldn't make it to the end of the day. The Windows phone with the same usage patters isn't even below 60% by the end of the day most days. It's also really nice in the fact that if I just leave it sitting on the desk all day, the battery will only go down about 5%, whereas Android would still drain the battery even if you didn't touch it.
After I got the new Windows phone, I did a factory reset on my old Android phone, it easily had a battery life of 3 days. Until I logged back into my Google account on the thing (just connected my account, not even installing apps). Then it was back to it's old tricks and draining the battery over the course of a single day, just sitting on my desk doing nothing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's interesting how, the same way we are going back to the old concept of mainframe with the cloud thing, we're also making our "mobile" phones wired again.
I mean, if you think of a smartphone as a souped-up cell phone, then yeah, you're gonna be charging a whole lot more. Alternatively, if you think of a smartphone as a stripped-down Internet-connected laptop you can carry in your pocket, then not so much.
A smartphone is only a phone these days in the sense that one (or honestly several) of umpteen different apps it has allows you to make telephone calls.
Cell phones were never meant to be computing devices. They were mobile telephones with some truly horrid additional functionality bolted on top (the most successful of which was texting, which was simply horrid experience on a numeric keypad, T9 or no.)
We're not re-wiring our mobile phones. We're stratifying our computing across devices, and relegating telephony--a formerly essential function that used to require a dedicated device--to the status of a supplemental application that we tend only to use on our more mobile computing devices, if at all.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Texting on a touch screen keypad is idiotic. Yes, it's an improvement over a 10-key, but just barely, i.e. it still sucks compared to more useful input devices.
Wrong. Yes, it sucks compared to a real keyboard, but I can't fit my Model M into my pocket. When you're away from your desk, what alternative is there? In its time, 10-key texting was useful for some cases, since it was better than nothing at all. But now it's obsolete just like floppy drives, so it's dumb to continue using it when superior alternatives exist and are commonplace.
the platform has a long way to go before it can supplant telephony.
Yes, you probably can talk a lot faster than you can text, but the problem with telephony is that it requires both parties to be available to talk at the same time. When they aren't, you wind up playing telephone tag, or exchanging voice mails. Of course, Google Voice (and other speech-to-text enabled voicemail systems) make this a lot better. But still, if you want to get a short message to someone immediately, with a high probability they'll see it right away, nothing beats texting. With a phone call, you have to hope they'll pick up, and if they do, you're interrupting them. With voice mail, there's a good chance they won't bother to read/listen to it for a while. But with a text, it shows up right away on their phone and is nearly impossible to miss. This doesn't mean it's great for having long conversations however; I have no idea why a lot of people do that instead of just calling.