Yeah, I can't wait for the backlash trend, where everything goes back to being smaller, but thinner this time.
I really wanted to sign up for Google Fi, but I want a phone, not a tablet.
I really wanted to sign up for Google Fi, but I want a phone, not a tablet.
They already have an inexplicable obsession with it. I'd rather have a slightly thicker phone and more battery
I don't have a problem with the larger phones, personally, but I think it's interesting to see how quickly the industry has come full-circle.
i.e. a 50% smaller screen doesn't use 50% less battery for the screen, let alone cut 50% battery.
For one, part of the screen is powered by a controller that's pretty similar whether it's a 4 inch or 5 inch screen. So if you cut the screen in half, you save maybe 40% battery going towards powering the screen.
But then the screen is only a fraction of the power usage, let's call it half. So cutting the screen in half drops battery usage not by 40%, but 20%. And then the screen is off half of the time while the phone is still using battery, which is why it's even lower than that.
So half as big a screen might reduce total battery usage of the phone by say 20-30% tops. And that's without taking into account that a big chunk of a phone's internals are going to be non-battery (e.g. flash storage, cpu, ram) which don't get bigger (or at least anywhere near 2x as big) if the screen is twice as big, and so the battery-to-volume ratio on a bigger phone is bigger than on a smaller phone.
In short, while yes obviously smaller phones have smaller screens that use less energy, overall bigger phones have better battery life because they have comparatively bigger batteries.
As for tablets vs phones comparison, it's an apples/oranges comparison as they do different things but, no way.
If you want to make the comparison, top iPad has a 42 watthour battery, iPhone 6 has 6.9. About 6x battery difference, despite the fact the 9.7 inch vs a 4.7 inch screen. That iPad has 3x as many pixels to power but 6x the battery to do it.
But again, it's apples/oranges.
Compare the iPhone 6 to iPhone 6 Plus. According to you the reason tablets get worse battery life is because they're bigger and have bigger screens, which are the main battery sink. So the 6 Plus should have worse battery life, according to you under the same principle.
But it's wrong, the iPhone 6 Plus has 60% more watthours of battery, despite being 32% bigger. And if you look at Apple's references (usually pretty good), they rate for the Plus vs the standard iphone: 10 hours more talk time, 34 hours more standby, 2 hours more internet time on 3G or LTE, 1 hour more on wifi, 3 hours more video playback and 30 hours more audio playback. Note the video (where the screen is one of the biggest battery sinks you can imagine), it's got a battery lifetime of 27% more despite a 32% bigger phone, for all the above mentioned reasons that a percentage increase in screen size has a somewhat larger percentage increase in extra battery volume.
So I'd say that the notion that bigger phones have better battery life, in general, is true. And when choosing the plus version on the iPhone, the battery life is a benefit. While choosing say the mini version on android phones (even as they're often underpowered, such as the Galaxy S mini series), tends to diminish battery life.