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?

Comments

LG G4

[aka_bigred]

Just bought one this week, so far really liking it. I upgraded from my bootloader-unlocked Samsung GS3 w/extended battery that I've been holding onto forever.

Re:LG G4

[danomac]

Second this, my old Galaxy S3 died back in June, coincidentally about three days after the G4 was released.

I spent a day or so looking around at replacement phones, and most are a nonstarter. A portable device that runs on a battery should have the battery itself user-serviceable, period. Anything else is defective by design.

The G4 is the only flagship that still has a removable battery and a SD card slot (up to 2TB!) The quick charge on mine does work, it charges way faster than my old S3. I've also noticed that all the weird little problems with bluetooth, unusual battery drain, and random resets don't happen with this phone. With light usage my phone can last three days, normal use gets me about two days, and heavy use I can still usually get a day out of it.

The only complaint/issue I have is with the touchscreen keyboard, sometimes it doesn't register a key tap. I have learned to type on it now so I don't see that nearly as often now.

Re:LG G4

[TopherC]

I also agree although mine is an older G3. If your Android device doesn't have an easily-accessible battery and SD card slot and cannot be modded, it might as well be an iPhone. My previous phone was an SGS3 too, but it had serious overheating issues. For me the main things I look for are: replaceable battery, SD card slot, thermal management, battery life, and good antenna sensitivity (wifi and cellular). I also found the SGS3 annoying in that I had to hold it in specific ways to not press buttons like volume, power, back, or menu. This meant I could not hand my phone to someone else without buttons getting pressed at random.

For me the main drawbacks of the LG G3 are bootloader protections and the lack of equivalent camera functionality in Cyanogenmod-based builds. LG worked hard to lock the phone down, and this has slowed the modding community quite a bit.

Re:LG G4

[aitikin]

Replaceable battery has 0 to do with requiring more than a single charge. My 18 month old phone's battery is starting to show its age and won't hold a charge for much more than 2/3 what it did when I bought it. Over the course of a few hundred cycles, lithium ion batteries do not maintain a charge.

I'm kind of surprised I have to explain that here, but I can't figure out why else you would be assuming danomac was meaning that he needed multiple charges...

Re:LG G4

[damnbunni]

Dunno about Android phones, but when I bought a brand-new spare battery for my Blackberry Q10 - which was about $30-ish - it came with a little charging adapter. In fact the charger encloses the battery completely and has a tiny short MicroUSB on it, so if I don't want to pull the battery from the Q10 and replace it, I can plug the charger into the phone and boost the battery.

They also sell the battery without the charger, but it was only a few dollars less.

Re:LG G4

[danomac]

So what are you going to do then? Buy a replacement?

Yes, I did that a little over a year ago when my OEM battery on my S3 couldn't hold a charge for more than 8 hours (with very little use).

I bought a new Anker battery, and this battery surpassed the OEM battery.

What finally drove me to replace the phone was the weird resets while using it, and I noticed other things like bluetooth not wanting to connect. Oh, it also refused to wake up without yanking the battery. It was done. My Galaxy S1 had similar issues, I guess Samsung's phones just don't last longer than 2-3 years.

I still see people using the iPhone 4 (and some 3GS), and I see a lot of 5-6 year old LG Android based phones in use today.

Re:LG G4

[fnj]

Apple ... realized that the vast majority of people did not buy spare batteries for laptops ...

Bullshit. Gross gooey bullshit. Apple found it easier and more profitable for THEM to make the batteries non-replaceable. They relied on idiot fanbois to keep buying their shit anyway, and on regulators not to give a fuck about doing their job and keeping waste minimized by REQUIRING all batteries in all consumer goods to be replaceable.

Re:LG G4

[aitikin]

What you need to do is find someone willing to sell you a new compatible battery that's freshly manufactured.

Though chances are, the cost of a new battery would probably be expensive and make you question why you're bothering with your old phone.

Really? Cause I was buying a new Palm Pre battery for 2 years after (as in new, not NoS, which one could argue would still be a massive improvement over a 300 cycle used) the Pre was released for roughly $40. In the age of unsubsidized smartphones, your argument holds very little water.

Re:LG G4

[plasm4]

Full brightness and GPS? Yeah I can understand the utility then.

Re:LG G4

[AmiMoJo]

The OnePlus One might be a suitable alternative, depending on your needs. No SD card slot, but the 64GB version isn't very expensive. In fact it is much cheaper than most other phones anyway. The battery is easy to replace, and mine lasts three days with moderate use (a couple of hours browsing and app use per day).

It's got a good screen, good camera, 3GB RAM, 8 core CPU, runs Cyanogen natively and supports hardware accelerated crypto if you want to encrypt your device with minimal performance loss. Bootloader is unlocked.

If the lack of an SD card isn't a deal breaker it's excellent value for money. The only thing I wish it had is wireless charging.

Buy a battery case

[StormCrow]

I think the ship has mostly sailed on phones with larger batteries. Buy a battery case or just an external battery pack.

Re:Buy a battery case

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, and what good is your phone? The only thing you can do on it well is talk. That's one of the rarest things I do on my phone, and I avoid it whenever possible. For texting, navigation, web browsing, dating apps, voice mail, etc., your phone is useless. You need all those sensors and a big touchscreen to do those things (yes, including texting; texting on a 0-9 keypad is idiotic and unusable) (and yes, including voice mail too; listening to voice mail is so 1990s, these days I read my voice mail with Google Voice).

Re:Buy a battery case

[dotancohen]

I think the ship has mostly sailed on phones with larger batteries. Buy a battery case or just an external battery pack.

The ship has sailed, but you can still catch it. A used Note 3 is cheap. I stayed away from smartphones until just last year when I got the Note 3, and I love it to death. The battery lasts two full days with charging, that includes considerable talking but I turn the GPS and internet off when I'm not using them. In the year that I've been hauling around a spare battery, I've never needed to swap it in. But its nice to know that I could.

And the S-pen is amazing. I just bought LectureNotes about an hour ago, a few days with the trial has turned this phone into one of the most useful devices that I've ever owned. I could not imagine getting another device for 'real work' that doesn't have the active pen.

Just don't get the Spigen Slim Armor case. Mine broke four months to the day after I bought it due to an obvious manufacturing defect, and even though I bought it from an authorized reseller Spigen wouldn't cover it as their one-year warranty applies only to the Spigen online store, not authorized resellers! Lots of other people have had the same case failure that I had.

Re:Buy a battery case

[Grishnakh]

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.

Add-ons

[American AC in Paris]

Getcherself a battery-backup case/portable battery. Alternatively, invest in a few extra charge cables and scatter 'em about your domain.

But then again, you're a power user. You know this already.

Re:Add-ons

[snookiex]

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.

Re:Add-ons

[American AC in Paris]

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.

Sony Xperia Z3

[GWBasic]

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.

Re: Sony Xperia Z3

[Mof-Tan]

Yes, the Sonys have great battery life nowadays. In fact I would argue that they offer the best Android phones these days. But for some mysterious reason U.S. operators are effectively blocking them from the market. When was the last time you saw a high-end Sony at a Verizon or AT&T stand?

Battery Case?

[Lifix]

Get a battery case for your phone!

iPhone 6 user here, two things piss me off: 1. Running out of battery 2. Stupid Apple LIghtning plug. I bought a battery case from Anker, it adds a bit of heft to my phone, but it addresses both of my issues. The battery case charges via micro USB, so now instead of keeping track of this silly lightning cable, I just charge my phone through the battery case with the same cable I use to charge everything else I own.

Re:Battery Case?

[qpqp]

As a side-note, you could also order a usb-lightning adapter. That things fits in a hole in your teeth if necessary.

Re:Battery Case?

[magarity]

There are battery cases for older Note series that do just what you describe. Remove the standard back, remove the standard battery, insert huge battery, place new back molded to go around huge battery.

external battery works for me

[Trepidity]

I find it easier to just buy some decent phone, using whatever criteria you want to shop for on the phone side (price, features, etc.), and then if you want extra battery life, buy an external battery that can charge the phone via USB. They're small/light enough these days that I just keep one in my laptop bag, which I usually have with me. If you're more the outdoor/hiking type, you can get a version that doubles as an LED flashlight. Lets me go about 2x as long without having the kind of big/fat phone you'd need for a big internal battery.

The problem is Android

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:The problem is Android

[ADRA]

You could... I don't know look at the batery meter and tell any red flags to battery life. There certainly are applications on any device that drain batteries pretty well. That said, there is a cost for having basically immediate callbacks to online services and that are largely invisible to the user.

Now maybe your phone was a lemon, or maybe your Winmo phone has a significantly bigger battery, who knows, not enough info. But by far most common reasons for 'idle' power drains (in no particular order):

1. Cell service (bad service areas seem to cause significantly higher battery drain for me subjectively)
2. Wifi (pings, kepalives, receving network broadcasts, etc.)
3. Bluetooth (if the comm isn't v4)
4. Background services (most likely account syncs and such, all OS's do it, but some more heavily than others)
5. CPU usage processing all of the above's callbacks, schedules, non-ideal program's polling

I've had many Android phones over the years, and battery life varied largely. One could barely survive a 12 hour day while another could maybe last 2 days of light use. I've had phones with apps eating 90% background use (it was doing the right thing, but badly), but most of the time, I did something to eat away my batteries.

Re:The problem is Android

[known_coward_69]

android has "real multitasking" just like the fan boys wanted. i've noticed out of the 3GB RAM on my Note 3 less than 1GB will be free most of the time. almost every app likes to run a process in the background. i keep bluetooth off as well as location settings on power saving mode which is good enough.

Re: The problem is Android

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not a shill. Windows phones don't have apps, so he isn't running anything that can drain the battery.

Re:The problem is Android

[danbob999]

i've noticed out of the 3GB RAM on my Note 3 less than 1GB will be free most of the time

Which means your phone is wasting almost 1GB most of the time. RAM should never be free.

Re:The problem is Android

[ThatsMyNick]

I second this, get a windows phone. I switched to Lumia 640 recently. I get 3 days usually with it, and even with heavy internet usage I get 2 days. Windows 10 (which can run android apps) runs smoothly on this, cant wait for the final release.

Re:The problem is Android

[plasm4]

To use Android effectively, you must root your device and freeze/remove unwanted apps. With root, you must also use a firewall to block or limit network access to you still want to use.

You must also mange your radios well - only enable Bluetooth and GPS when you need it, otherwise keep them off; toggle mobile data and wifi when you roam which means don't leave wifi on while you leave your residence or workplace, and don't leave either on at night or for extended time. (Yes there is a lag in the morning when you turn on wifi and all the background apps sync at once to get email, messages, updates, etc. but you trade that for longer battery life by not using as many charge cycles.)

Managing both software and hardware is a bitch, but if you spend a bit of time to learn, you can get great battery life and overall performance (less background apps), and enjoy enhanced privacy (block ads, prevent data leaks, don't respond to wifi/BT pings, etc).

Why bother having a smart phone if you're going to do all of that?

Re: The problem is Android

[ILongForDarkness]

Depends on the user I guess. Win phone has all the big ones (or at least the ones I've heard of, albeit I'm not glued to my phone like the zombies I see walking the street). Facebook, gmail, bbm, kindle, etc etc). I have a Lumia 920, generally speaking I'm not on the phone for more than an hour at a time and at most send say 10 texts in a day so not a heavy user. Never have a problem getting through the day though even with 4 email accounts syncing to it. Not sure if this is good or not but for example I can read on the phone for 1.5hrs on the way to work, with screen at full brightness and use about 15% of the battery, ie I could read for about 7hrs and probably more with the screen dimmed. Not sure how that compares to texting and the like, obviously the antenna isn't in a lot of use while reading but the touch screen is still getting hit every 30s or so.

It might be that Nokia (and it is mostly Nokia in the Win side): never fell in love with the idea of trying to make a phone look like a razor blade. They are (relatively speaking) boxy thick phones leaving plenty of room for the battery. It is also possible that win phone does manage battery better than the others though I couldn't really say one way or another. I think nokia had a few phones that came in both android and win phone versions perhaps battery life comparisons between the same phone different OS would answer that one.

No more..

[bhcompy]

So, no more SD slot, no Note Edge, and no removable battery.. This seems like a downgrade

High-end phones will always be battery hogs

[SIGBUS]

Those fast CPUs/GPUs and large-pixel-count screens are going to suck up the juice. Consider going a notch down instead - a 720p screen and a 4xx series processor can handle things quite nicely. The LG G Stylo has the same battery as the G4, but the battery life is flat-out awesome. With moderately heavy daily use, I rarely see below 60% remaining battery life when I plug it in for the night.

Like the G4, the battery is removable and there is an SD slot.

Keep in mind that the T-Mobile/MetroPCS version is better than the others; it has 2GB RAM/16 GB internal storage vs. 1GB/8GB for other carriers.

The main drawback to the Stylo is that LG purposely crippled the camera; there are very few shooting modes available, and no manual controls, even though it's the same camera hardware as (at least) the G3. Fortunately, XCam LG will run fine on it, even though it was intended for the G3.

Note 4

[The Raven]

The Samsung Note 4 is still a high end phone (until the Note 5 comes out, only the iPhone 6 hase more performance), and a removable back. You can add a monster aftermarket battery on to it. It's likely to drop in price (it's already started) as the Note 5 comes out.

There is no faster phone, that I am aware of, with a replaceable battery.

iPhone 6+

[Theovon]

I'm sure I'll get modded down for this. But the iPhone 6+ has enormous battery life. The 6 is kindof anemic, but the 6+ will last 2 or 3 days of normal usage before needing a recharge, including plenty of Angry Birds. As others have said here, the operating system is part of the equation, and iOS does a pretty good job.

Re:iPhone 6+

[GreatDrok]

Another vote for the iPhone 6+. I've actually run it for five days without a charge just to see how long I could make it last. If you really hammer it with games and stuff then you'll chew through the battery but if you use it to make a few calls, do a bit of e-mail and text then it will last a working week. I do carry one of those little extra battery packs just in case and frankly, whenever I have a chance to charge my devices I take it but knowing that my phone always has days and days of power in reserve is so much better than it was with my old iPhone 4.

Re:note 4

[roc97007]

I mean what's really the benefit of getting the latest phone? Note 4 has a removable battery and a microsd card. It has a great screen, can be used as a vr screen. Honestly why bother getting anything else?

To manufacturers, this is a problem. When phones are good enough that there's nothing substantially better to upgrade to, people tend not to buy new hardware. A way has to be found to force them to upgrade. Hence, the lack of SD cards (no way to put in a bigger one) and the lack of a replaceable battery.

One option - Droid Turbo

[Indy1]

3900 mah battery, and it will give you 36-48 hours of use. Does support QC 2.0, which works as promised.

Re:note 4

[bobbied]

I mean what's really the benefit of getting the latest phone? Note 4 has a removable battery and a microsd card. It has a great screen, can be used as a vr screen. Honestly why bother getting anything else?

Totally agree... I have a note 4 and I'm very pleased with this phone. It has a reasonably strong multi core processor, lots of RAM and a lot of flash that can be easily and cheaply extended with the microSD card. Battery life is not great under heavy use but in standby it will easily last the whole day away from the charger. However, the battery is quickly replaced if you carry a spare or two.

Personally, I carry my Note 4 in a wallet style case that easily stores my two spare batteries. Should I happen to not be near a charger and bored so I'm using the phone for entertainment, I can get around 4 hours out of a battery so 3 gets me a full 12 hours of non-stop entertainment.

If you truly want function over form

[recharged95]

who prize function over form

Then get a phone that has a OS that isn't bloated with eye candy, odd navigation menus, and constant connection for 'guessing your next request'... and crapware that runs in the background 100%.

There was a time not so long along phones ran for at least a day, and we're "zippy", now they're slow & buggy (I'm looking at you Android & WP) or last 6 hrs (iOS). And it's mainly from the OS being used.

Most of the functions I use on today's phone were available on a 2003 Palm Tungsten (email, cal, notes, sms, video, audio): and when I ran a Palm, it ran smoothly (though not as zippy as a 2013 phone), but lasted nearly a whole week before a need to charge. The latest "flagship" phones are so heavily bias to graphics and cloud gaming that kills everything else when is comes to usability.

Imagine a bare bones phone: web browser, video/audio player, sms and workable phone. 3000mah would go a long ways w/just that.

Want function over form: get a phone w/a efficient OS--yep, there's isn't one today.

BlackBerry Passport

[XB-70]

Ok, Ok, I know BlackBerry is dead. EVERY one of my friends' phones has died during the day.

My BlackBerry Passport has NEVER died. End of story.

Huawei Ascend Mate2

[p51d007]

When I got it last year, it was one of those, I play with it a week, send it back to Amazon because the specs are so bad. (I had 2 previous 5+ inch screens Dell Streak 5, Note 1, so the size didn't bother me). I mean, how good can a device be (2014) with only a 720p screen, snapdragon 400, 2gb ram, JB4.3 with a 4,100mAH battery. Well, it came, and WOW was I surprised. It blew me away. Bright clear screen, snappy performance, runs everything I want (I don't play games), video, mp3's, great camera, 2-3 day battery life. Less than 300 bucks! It just got the 5.1.1 LL update toward the end of June, but even if it didn't JB4.3 was flat stable. Best 300 bucks I ever spent on a phone, and I've been buying em since the original Motorola brick back in the 90's. I found out that if you find the right device, you don't have to spend 700, 800 or more just to have a great device. They are out there, if you look. I think too many people are buying on brand name only.

Adaptive Fast Charge

[gl4ss]

it totally works. cuts charge time to like one fifth or sixth or even less.

you can get usable charge into the phone while taking a dump.

(at least on note edge, however note edge if you watch youtube and have it connected to a normal 500mah 5v charger it will barely charge.. ).

anyhow note edge has removable battery too(as well removable backplate and comes with two.. one with the faux leather 'wallet' case and one without.

it's pretty handy. the edge is usable mostly just as a quick launch bar or as a night watch