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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.
Make phones thick and OS/software light again! Back to basic please.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
"...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.
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.
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.
This is the simplest and most reasonable answer to this problem. This was a non issue 10 to 15 years ago. For obvious spy on you reasons, most manufacturers will not allow this anymore.
First they take away your battery, then stupid problems arise, and we have to read stupid articles about something with a very simple solution to battery problems, which again, were a nonissue.
Second answer in addition to above is stop the stupid app craze that has access to everything and sends data at 5am when sleeping, etc because they can and dont give a shit, and abuse youur phone cause os makers don't care...
When Apple released their iPad with retina display I read that the additional pixels require more electronics in the display which block some of the light. This in turn means that a stronger backlight is needed to have the same light output compared to a lower resolution display. For LCD it was an important factor at that time. For OLED, this might not make that much of a difference unless some of the connections would be on top of the pixels or due to a minimum border size per pixel.
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.
That would mean to reboot your phone everytime you change the battery.
If only... a phone had some sort of capacitor built into it, that could let it maintain its settings after you remove the battery, for, say, sixty seconds, or however it takes a thumb-fingered fool like me to swap batteries...