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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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: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.

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.