HTC, Motorola Say They Don't Slow Old Phones Like Apple Does (theverge.com)

After Apple confirmed last week that it reduces the performance of older iPhones to improve battery life, it has left many wondering whether or not other smartphone manufacturers do the same. HTC and Motorola are the two most recent OEMs to say they don't throttle their phones' processor speeds as their batteries age. The Verge reports: In emails to The Verge, both companies said they do not employ similar practices with their smartphones. An HTC spokesperson said that designing phones to slow down their processor as their battery ages "is not something we do." A Motorola spokesperson said, "We do not throttle CPU performance based on older batteries." The Verge also reached out to Google, Samsung, LG, and Sony for comment on whether their phone processors are throttled in response to aging batteries. A Sony spokesperson said a response would be delayed by the holidays, and a Samsung spokesperson said the company was looking into it. The responses begin to clarify whether or not throttling processor speeds is typical behavior in smartphones -- as of last week, we knew that Apple was doing it, but not whether it was common practice among competitors. HTC and Motorola's responses start to suggest that it's not.

Comments

Apple's problem

[DontBeAMoran]

The big problem with Apple is that they take decisions on behalf of users because most of them don't know any better.

However, what they should be doing is giving us options and making their decision be the default setting.

Example:
When your battery becomes older, it will not hold a charge as long as when the phone is new. When that happens, would you like to:
[x] Keep using the phone for the same amount of time as much as possible to the detriment of processor speed and screen brightness
[_] Keep using the phone at the same processor speed and screen brightness with a shorter daily battery life

That's a bit verbose, but you get the idea.

Another example: in the older OS X versions, Preview was able to save files in SGI, SGI, TGA and other older formats. In the most recent versions (at least 10.9 and above), those older formats are no longer listed when trying to save an image. However, if you hold the [Option] key, you get them back. But you have to know that holding this key will magically give you the list of all formats supported by Preview. Why can't they display "(Hold [option] for more formats)" next to the pull-down menu?

Re:nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

This strikes me as similar to the "this accessory is not supported" message when trying to charge with a non-apple cable? Most any charger on the market would be capable of charging an iPhone--but the speed of charging will vary. Apple's decision to give the user a "no charging" experience rather than a "slow charging" experience sometimes left me with an unusable phone. And much to everyone's shock and surprise--padded Apple's wallet with additional sales of chargers and cables that were often no better than the no-name versions.