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It's Not Your Imagination: Smartphone Battery Life Is Getting Worse (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: For the last few weeks, I've been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year's top models underperformed last year's. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year's iPhone X. Google's Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2. Phone makers tout all sorts of tricks to boost battery life, including more-efficient processors, low-power modes and artificial intelligence to manage app drain. Yet my results, and tests by other reviewers I spoke with, reveal an open secret in the industry: the lithium-ion batteries in smartphones are hitting an inflection point where they simply can't keep up.
"Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about 5 percent per year," says Nadim Maluf, the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm called Qnovo that helps optimize batteries. "But phone power consumption is growing up faster than 5 percent." Blame it on the demands of high-resolution screens, more complicated apps and, most of all, our seeming inability to put the darn phone down. Lithium-ion batteries, for all their rechargeable wonder, also have some physical limitations, including capacity that declines over time -- and the risk of explosion if they're damaged or improperly disposed. And the phone power situation is likely about to get worse. New ultrafast wireless technology called 5G, coming to the U.S. neighborhoods soon, will make even greater demands on our beleaguered batteries. If you want a smartphone that excels in battery life, you pretty much have two options: Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 and Apple's iPhone XR. According to The Washington Post's tests, the iPhone XR and Note 9 topped the list with times of 12:25 and 12:00, respectively.
"Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about 5 percent per year," says Nadim Maluf, the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm called Qnovo that helps optimize batteries. "But phone power consumption is growing up faster than 5 percent." Blame it on the demands of high-resolution screens, more complicated apps and, most of all, our seeming inability to put the darn phone down. Lithium-ion batteries, for all their rechargeable wonder, also have some physical limitations, including capacity that declines over time -- and the risk of explosion if they're damaged or improperly disposed. And the phone power situation is likely about to get worse. New ultrafast wireless technology called 5G, coming to the U.S. neighborhoods soon, will make even greater demands on our beleaguered batteries. If you want a smartphone that excels in battery life, you pretty much have two options: Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 and Apple's iPhone XR. According to The Washington Post's tests, the iPhone XR and Note 9 topped the list with times of 12:25 and 12:00, respectively.
All that has to happen is that smartphone makers (Apple I'm looking at you) need to stop the obsession with making every device thinner than the last one and add a bigger battery pack or make a decent interface for a battery case that doesn't involve a clumsy and bulky pass through of the USB port.
There are a lot of us (myself included) who wouldn't mind a modestly thicker device in exchange for a bigger battery, better camera, etc. I'm going to put a case on anyway so why not facilitate putting some real utility into the case while we are at it? In an elegant way rather than the clumsy hacks we've seen to date. It would be trivial to allow people to add the audio jacks to the case for those who want one while permitting those who don't care to add something else. As big as the market is currently for smartphone accessories I think it could be a LOT bigger than it currently is if Apple and others would get their head out of their designers asses and look at how people actually use these things.
Stop trying to make the thinnest phone. Make them thicker, use the extra space for a larger battery, and make them durable enough to not need a case. They'll still be thinner than you end up with today.
It’s amazing how the entire thing dances around the elephant that fills up 90% of the room because he had to eat all the food that the retardphone makers denied their products.
None of the non-mainstream phones have a battery life problem. You get phones with 10Ah from a load of manufacturers now.
The "problem" is, that you can't cut your wrist with them because they're not thin like a knife for no freaking reason, and you can't hold them like a boom box because they're so impractically oversized. They may weigh a bit, but that's because they got actual batteries in them. And actual tough cases, if you want. And "worst" of all, they don't cost $1000 e-penis fee on top of the $150 manufacturing costs, so you can't compensate your tiny dick/tits with them.
Sorry, if you buy that "thinspiration" crap, you got only yourself to blame. I hope you slit yourself on them.
user replaceable battery
Make phones thick and OS/software light again! Back to basic please.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
If you happen to prefer iOS, there's not much choice. Are there a lot of chunky Android smart phones out there with increased battery capacity?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The contemporary phone scene is extremely bizarre.
Why are people buying thinner phones? Why are they asking to remove useful features as for a few millimeters? Or a tiny bit more screen real estate?
"Smart" phones are losing tons of useful features in the name of.....what exactly?
Make it a little thicker, beef up the battery. Get rid of nitches, make the screen normal and add in a headphone jack an removable storage.
Why are most manufacturers not doing all these things?
Why are consumers voting for worse devices by buying crap ?
I have a Moto G4 running LineageOS with GAPPS Mini on it. No social media. Chrome, Spotify, Amazon, Strava, Signal, Chik-Fil-A, Weather Underground, Waves, banking stuff, and tons of other apps... but no social media.
Guess what? My battery lasts for 2-3 days. I tried putting FB messenger on it because one of my church groups uses it, and all of a sudden, I'm having to carry a battery pack around with me. So, that got killed real fast.
Get rid of the social media and you'll instantly get twice the battery life at least, maybe more.
"...the lithium-ion batteries in smartphones are hitting an inflection point where they simply can't keep up."
Lithium-ion performance tends to degrade when processing bullshit features no one asked for, to include Bendgate-grade designs. Perhaps vendors could do us a favor and stop giving us more "innovation".
Of course, that might result in more reliable products that could last longer. Greed N. Corruption won't stand for that shit, and consumers don't care enough to change the inevitable path towards the destruction of ownership. The obvious solution is to rent you shitty hardware instead of improving it.
It takes a lot of battery power to collect every conceivable piece of data on you and monitor you constantly so they can sell it to ad companies...
At least in regard to Android Google is obsessed with adding new background daemons which wake up your phone a lot more frequently than it was done in the past and, consequently, your battery life starts to suck a lot.
Does a new Android phone do much more than its 3 years old ancestor? I don't think so, yet Google Play Service have gotten almost a magnitude bigger (wrt to RAM/CPU usage) and while your old device spent most of its battery on its screen, nowadays if you are a light Android user (e.g. use your phone for less than two hours a day) then the two first and most battery offenders are Android OS and Android System by a large margin. And it doesn't even matter that your cellular data is off, GPS is off, Bluetooth is off, play market doesn't autoupdate apps and NFC is off.
Of course, batteries cannot keep up with this shit.
Does increasing the resolution of the screens increase the battery usage? I ask because manufacturers keep increasing resolutions completely pointlessly, and if it comes at the expense of battery life I want them to stop.
Trying to think this through: It would use more RAM, and more CPU to update the screen. On the other hand, the biggest battery drain is probably the backlight which remains the same. In the case of OLED, the pixels themselves product light, but it's the same overall luminance and surface area. So maybe it doesn't really make a significant difference. Does anyone here know for sure?
Why do you have to choose from these overpriced phones? There are plenty sub 200 dollar phones with 3000-400mAh batteries.
Why do we even need a separate case? All those super thin phones are pointless if you need to put them into a bulky case to protect them.
The modularity of the cases has actual utility. It's cheap to replace a damaged or worn case. Plus it provides an opportunity for people to personalize their device both aesthetically and functionally. The problem is that Apple and others have ignored the function component of cases. It's a huge missed opportunity.
And some people like the thin phones and some don't bother with a case. So by making cases as functional as possible you increase utility to the largest quantity of smartphone users with the fewest trade-offs. Speaking for myself I'd like a case with a bigger battery and better camera optics. Other people would probably like a 3.5mm audio jack or a SD card slot. By making a way for the case to provide this functionality people can get the device they want and Apple/Samsung/etc can focus on making the core device as tight as they like.
How about making a phone with an easily replacable battery so you can carry a spare? That way you can watch it as long as your eyes can stand it.
It is funny that you call out Apple when they trend for iPhones has been towards increasing thickness for the past four years. The iPhone X is thicker than the iPhone 5.
The difference is 7.7 vs 7.6mm. That is hardly what I'd call a meaningful difference. Actually I just took a pair of calipers to my X and it was 7.62mm. And let's not pretend that Apple doesn't keep bragging about how thin their devices are every time they announce one. They are thinner than is functionally necessary.
There already are cases that use wireless charging instead of a pass-though connector
That's fine but it is both A) inefficient and B) doesn't transmit data. I can't put an SD card or other equipment onto a case and make use of it unless the case has a clumsy and bulky USB pass through.
iPhone battery capacity has been trending up for for the past nine years.
The battery pack capacity has modestly trended up but has been offset by more power hungry devices. Functionally I have effectively the same amount of battery run time as I had 8 years ago - i.e. about a day.
Basically, the things you want already exist.
What I am suggesting most certainly does NOT exist. There are crude and clumsy approximations of what I am proposing and nothing really properly supported by the OEM smartphone makers. What I want is a set of low profile contacts on the back of the case that provide an interface for high speed data and power transmission from a case to a smartphone. That does not exist on any smartphone currently on the market today that I am aware of. Preferably the interface would be standard between devices but that's probably never going to happen.
While this may seem off-topic, it may hold more insight into this article's topic than one might think.
Are there a lot of chunky Android smart phones out there with increased battery capacity?
Yeah, but they are loaded down with so much unremovable bloatware - often you can't even disable it - that usage goes up and down. I don't know what happened last month, but something that had been running all the time was nixed, and my phone battery life improved.
I mean, "GlanceViewMk" is supposedly something about "Notification listener in use. Tap Settings to manage it."... tapping settings does nothing. My fingers itch at the idea that some swivel-eyed middle manager has more of a say in what runs on my phone than I do.
Dude why don't you just root your phone lolol
Because I shouldn't bloody have to.
Consumer reports did the same sort of tests and reports the opposite finding at least on the iphone X series.
What did they do differently? well consumer reports uses a robotic finger to run the test suite the same way that a human finger would. The Washington pose it appears used programatic control to drive the phone.
It appears that perhaps the User interface engineers have discovered how to let the phone rest between finger taps or to anticipate what finger taps follow others such that it actually improves power efficiencny.
Now as for your comment about case modularity. Well it's a nice thought and the argument makes sense down to the point where it defeats the overall objective. Here things have scaled down to the point where the case is taking up a significant portion of the volume. Having two cases is nuts when you could have a bigger battery in the same volume.
One could imagine having a replaceable cover on a phone without a structural inner case.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
One could imagine having a replaceable cover on a phone without a structural inner case.
That's how phones actually are in general now. Flimsy AF but with an included slim case that gives it basic physical integrity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Want long battery life and rocket-fast internet? Turn Javascript off. Yeah you can't interact with the social-media spyware plugins or comment (or read mobile slashdot) anymore, but unless one needs a piece of web outside W3C, Javascript not worth it at this point. Megabytes of analytics and useless videos wrapped in code that loops phone into a heater half the time...just from trying to read an article on CNN. Add it all up and its like tenth of the degree that will kill us all by 2050 or whatever, and that is what Javascript is doing to us from the browser today.
For years it's been a given that this year's computers have more available resources than last year's. This goes for processor speed, RAM, storage, GPU speed.
So the usual MO for many has been to use those extra resources to the fullest extent, leaving only a small gain in functional speed for the consumer to notice.
Apparently it hasn't fully sunk in yet that battery capacity (like pretty much everything else in life) does not conform to Moore's Law and that including the kitchen sink software-wise is going to drain the battery faster.
Big batteries are one of the best features of a cellphone.
Get rid of the curved screens, too! I already broke 2 screen protectors on my Galaxy Note 8. I liked the Galaxy Note 4 Better.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I just "upgraded" because my Samsung 5 started to be unreliable. I'm still not sure that it wasn't because of a Verizon "security update". But, I got a Kyocera. Every bit as good as the Samsung, submergible down to several feet, Qi charging, and rugged. Still thin enough to carry in my pocket.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
There's a middle ground between 4GHz hexadeca-core CPUs and $100 devices that is completely underserved. That said, I think it's even worse at the high end, where everything is derivative and you have no options to get a device that works for you unless you happen to want exactly what the manucturer tells you to want.
If smartphones used native apps rather than simulated computers, they'd probably retain power for longer.
Removing autoincorrect might help.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now as for your comment about case modularity. Well it's a nice thought and the argument makes sense down to the point where it defeats the overall objective. Here things have scaled down to the point where the case is taking up a significant portion of the volume. Having two cases is nuts when you could have a bigger battery in the same volume.
There are several problems with your argument. Here are just a few: 1) None of the smartphone makers are going to change from the current case paradigm for a variety of reasons. 2) There is utility in a second casing since the device remains useful without the outer case. This allows multiple cases for different purposes. 3) Obviously people are fine with adding secondary cases. 4) User applied cases are going to have substantial problems with water and dust proofing. (they definitely won't be waterproof) 5) Phone manufacturers would incur substantially increased warranty costs from users mucking around with the internals.
In principle you are correct that having a second case is wasteful of the space budget but there are important practical reasons why this does not matter so much.
One could imagine having a replaceable cover on a phone without a structural inner case.
You could imagine it but it wouldn't be a very good idea in day to day use for most people.
Sony engineer: We cane make it smaller if we leave out the recording function.
Sony marketing Exec: No one will want a tiny cassette tape player without a record function.
Someone decided to try--
Apple removed the floppy and every howled.
taking away things that have always been there isn't always a bad thing,
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It works perfectly fine with my Fairphone. I think it's a good idea.
judging by sales you are in a vanishingly small minority. Please note I'm not being critical of your choice of device, just observing the reality that most people demonstrably have approximately zero interest in repairing their own device or digging around in the guts of them or dealing with the tradeoffs involved. It's cheaper and easier for most of them to take their phone to a store and get a warranty replacement or whatever accessories they need.
Still using my Samey S5. It still has the original battery.
I did...my last 3 phones have had 4,000mAH batteries, and were great!
Hopefully the technology will become available in consumer devices at a point when it still has the power to impress us with a charge that can last a few days.
Because I shouldn't bloody have to.
Yet you sound like one of the very VERY few people who specifically have a use case to tinker with the inner workings of your system.
Yes you should definitely have to. If one thing has been proven time and time again by an internet full of infested malware it's that average users are not able to be trusted to maintain their own security.
I still remember hooking up a Windows 2000 machine directly to the internet to prove a point several years after Blaster first came out. It lasted a whole of 10 seconds. literally years after the biggest malware event to date made the rounds in the news the internet was still full of unpatched and malware ridden machines spreading Blaster like a zero day with no resistance.
Yes users DEFINITELY should need to root their phone if they are going to start doing anything beyond installing a few apps and playing around. Hell I laughed at the idea of the internet drivers license when it was proposed in the 90s, but in retrospect yeah users should be saved from their own stupidity until they can prove they are able to do what it is they want and understand the consequences of their actions.
Most people have never even heard of the Fairphone, and just buy from major brands.
And it seems unlikely they ever will. I like the spirit of the thing. I just think economic reality is going to bludgeon it to death in its crib. (though I'd be pleased to be wrong about that) The problem is that designing a product that is modular and easy to repair costs extra and most people don't seem to care much about that these days.
The Fairphone is far from perfect, mind you, but the modular approach seems like a good idea.
Modular can be a very good thing and I think their approach is a reasonable one. But modular comes in many flavors and the on the Fairphone has taken is just one of them. I think it's unrealistic to expect Apple and Samsung to follow their lead but there are reasonable if lesser forms of modularity that they might be willing to entertain. I'm suggesting one of them which would require fairly modest changes to their devices that maybe they might consider. (doubtful but not impossible)