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Comment by sekasi | Hacker News Reader

I don't at all mean to sound condescending, but I'm genuinely curious how much of an issue battery life is for people nowadays?

Using a 6S, I'll comfortably get through a long long day without the need to plug it in.

But that's not my point. The point is I'm constantly around an opportunity to charge my phone. Everywhere. The only times I can see this being a real issue anymore is when you're travelling long distances without lounge access.. maybe? But even then, a battery pack solves all those woes.

I just personally feel like we're at a point now where batteries are a non-issue. Does anyone else have major issues with newer smartphone batteries? I just don't feel like it's a thing anymore.

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You know, it's because of people like you (and a vast mass of people who don't care enough) that we can't have long-working phones. In short, a phone with greater battery life is a boon when you:

* travel a lot. It doesn't have to be often - but when you leave your room early in the morning for a long day in a new town, and use it a lot, it really gives you peace of mind to know that you will be able to make that last important call in the evening.

* forget to plug it in. Seriously: do I really really have to plug this gadget in evry single evening? what if I forget or don't have the means to, every once in a while? It's a flagship device we're talking about; isn't it supposed to make my life easier?

* want your phone to have extra margin of reliability just in case - either to prolong its life when the battery deteriorates over time, or use it in cold weather - I am not sure if it's permanent damage, but battery holds less charge in the cold.

The iPhone is not the worst offender - it's probably slightly above average as far as smartphone battery life goes, but, to me, saying that battery life is not an issue sounds like a blasphemy: we (the consumers) have just squeezed barely adequate battery life from the manufacturers and voicing the opinion that it's enough feels like inviting back the compromises that they (the manufacturers) are far too happy to use.

The battery pack sure solves some woes, but it's not by coincidence we call it a mobile phone: it is supposed to be self-sufficient. Do you like to carry around a second box on your body at all times, just to be able to use a smartphone reliably? I don't. Battery pack should be a bonus that's nice to have, not a requirement to last through the day.

exactly. Those are the scenarios where I always end up needing more battery life. Even a slightly busy day where I don't have a chance to charge after leaving home in the morning can sometimes result in a pretty low battery by the end of the day.

I got an Android phone at Google IO one year that was the latest and greatest. It lasted between 1-2 hours on a full charge. A friend of mine bought the same model and had to carry around two spare battery packs.

Clearly nobody tests phones for normal usage patterns before deciding how much battery is enough. To make matters worse, once the phone is over a year old, battery life is typically about 80% of what it was when new.

I need 3 days battery on low usage (offline maps and IRC, plus checking calendar every so and so often, etc), and one whole day (24 hours) with full usage.

The only way I could get it was by throwing every single Google service out, disabling most location services [1], reducing screen brightness (seriously, fuck Lollipop for the new slider), and so on.

And it was also only possible with the Moto G.

–— [1] if I turn on Google WiFi location, it just ends up constantly enabling GPS, then connecting to the internet, then waiting 2 minutes, then again, I suspect it’s trying to map out WiFi network strength, because no one in my city actually ever ran around with an Android phone with WiFi and location enabled at the same time, and Google never bothered to send their StreetView cars here

My go-to resource for comparison of phones' battery life is GSMArena's Battery life test results. [1] I customize usage pattern to 1h calls, 3h web browsing and 3h video playback (I don't watch much video on the phone, but I believe that power consumption of Skype, GPS navigation, etc. should be somewhat similar)

I feel that today's phones are way too large, so I limit my choice to non-huge ones. So far, last year's Sony Z3 Compact tops the chart: 44% better battery life than iPhone6s in my 'heavy usage' scenario, 63% better in the default scenario. I'm eagerly awaiting the results for the recent Z5 Compact: it might provide even better battery life (72.5 hours compared to 'two and a half days', as tested by The Guardian [2] [3]).

[1] GSMArena: Battery life test results http://www.gsmarena.com/battery-test.php3

[2] The Guardian: Sony Xperia Z3 compact review http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/03/sony-xperi...

[3] The Guardian: Sony Xperia Z5 Compact review http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/sony-xperi...

> It lasted between 1-2 hours on a full charge

That sounds like a huge exaggeration or a broken phone. What model was it? There is no way a phone like this would be sold.

> That sounds like a huge exaggeration or a broken phone.

Neither. The phone was an HTC Evo 4G:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Evo_4G

Link describing the horrible battery life:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/technology/personaltech/17...

I had the phone fully charged, used it to navigate by car from SF to a place in Mountain View, checked email a few times from Mountain View, and the phone was completely dead for the ride back.

If a single person at HTC or Google had tried to use this phone for any kind of normal utilization, I think it's quite likely it would not have been launched.

If I'd purchased the phone instead of getting it as a giveaway, I would surely have been irate. As it was, I sold it to someone via CraigsList for a few hundred bucks.

This is why I predict Apple will continue to dominate. Android and the Android ecosystem still have many of these same kind of lapses and warts. My Nexus 7 is very greedy on battery and does not go into any kind of hibernation, which means that if I forget to charge it, it's dead after two days with no use at all.

I see, still seems like something was way off with the specific mode. It also mentions that an update increased the battery life - although not by how much.

> something was way off with the specific model

It seems odd that nobody would have done real world testing of the device.

> an update increased the battery life

Perhaps, though since it was not a google phone, it was likely at least a year until any software updates were available.

I like to hike in the National Parks, and it's nice to be able to put my phone in airplane mode and have it last a few days. That way I have the time, and alarms to wake me up and signal when I have to turn around to make it back before dark, and an HDR camera. My iPhone 1 would go a week on airplane mode. My 4S goes about 10 hours. Not an improvement.

Is that 10 hours being used or 10 hours just sitting in your pack? I've taken my iPhone 5 on a couple 5-10 day hikes in airplane mode & it's done pretty well.

Sitting in my pocket. I'm glad hear the iPhone 5 is much better, but that doesn't help my 4S much :(

... I've got a bigger Huawei phone with a 4000mAh battery. My wife has a smaller Blu with a 5000mAh battery.

Not having to charge feels revolutionary. I only need to think about it once every two days. I can go out and never have to worry. Fall asleep whenever and never worry there phone won't be available when I wake up. It's quite a nice feeling.

If Apple had the decency to ship phones with a 24h+ battery, everyone would take it for such an obvious minimum standard there'd be no discussion. But since Apple's expensive phones don't do this, people have developed this Stockholm Syndrome where they feel fine that their high end device constantly runs down. Gift I've been thanked the most for? External 10,000mAh battery for an iPhone user.

> If Apple had the decency to ship phones with a 24h+ battery

Huh? I hate my iPhone 6 but the battery has never been an issue. I've gone 24h+ multiple times.

Is that typical? I've never owned a modern Apple device but the people I know that so seem to generally be rather mindful about battery levels.

People have simply been trained to plug in their phones frequently, and especially at night. They've further been trained to replace their phones after a couple of years, before the battery fully wears out. And to me it seems the typical smartphone user is compulsive about checking things. For everyone else whose behavior hasn't been formed around the ideal needs of a smartphone, a longer battery life would be nice, like the 4 weeks my feature phone gets.

It's still a massive issue for me. My Z3C is the first smartphone I've ever owned that pretty much always makes it through a day, even days with heavy usage and I'm stuck trying to make a call at 2AM.

Most smartphones would crap out anywhere from noon to 6-7pm - and my usage isn't that heavy on typical days, maybe 1-2 hours of screen on tops and an hour or two of bluetooth audio.

Sure, I'm often around sources of power, but that means I now have to carry cables, chargers, and battery packs around as part of my daily routine or when going hiking and biking. No thanks. With my Z3C, I no longer have to carry all that junk around, and I know I'll still be able to use it in an emergency even if I get stranded somewhere.

And even if I carry all that crap around, just because I'm usually around sources of power doesn't mean I'm always around sources of power.

I don't own a car and walk a lot. I also have a very limited amount of bag space- I carry a small bag that can't hold much more than my computer, phone, and wallet. Being able to have my phone run all day long without hassling with carrying a spare battery is nice.

Right now my 5 does okay; it usually only needs a recharge on a day when I spend a lot of time with terrible reception. But it'd be nice to not have to hassle.

And... well, I really love not having to carry a power brick for my Air any more unless I'm going on a multi-day trip. One less battery pack and cable in my bag would be a nice thing. Less is more.

When I get around to switching to iOS9 (I like my jailbreak), I'll probably use low power mode a lot on days when I know I'll be draining the battery.

My Galaxy S4 decided to melt its usb port in a car charger about a year ago. Since then, I've bought a couple of extra batteries (much cheaper than expected) and a couple of external chargers. Whenever I get around to upgrading and get a phone with a working charge port, I expect I'll continue my current practice. I'd much rather throw a spare battery that's little bigger than a credit card in my pocket than faff around with usb cabling or hope I make it through the day. Also the external chargers top a battery off much more quickly than charging through the USB ever did.

Have you considered getting a wireless charger attachment for your S4? That way you don't have to shut down your phone to fill up the battery, at least at home or in your car.

Haven't really thought about it. With the spare batteries at hand, it's only a few seconds to swap them. Have to be careful to shut it down completely before popping the old battery, or it will occasionally think the SD card needs reformatting.

If I don't use my phone (5S) it will make it three days. But if I am sitting around surfing the web, using Snapchat and Facebook, I can burn the battery up in six or seven hours. I get up at 7am and I've had days where I was at 20% by 1pm if I used it enough.

Then you have the mystery usage when the phone gets hot to the touch just sitting in my pocket and I can almost watch the percentage drop.

It depends on where you are - cellular quality is a huge factor if you don't have wifi or string 4G – and how much you use the phone. One really big factor is the way judiciously pruning your installed / background app list: take any non-savvy user's phone and you'll probably see significant usage by things they rarely use.

I completely agree. I'm either at work/home with my phone plugged in, or I'm traveling, and if I'm traveling I'm going to carry an external USB battery anyway because no practical smartphone is going to last for, say, a 7 day backpacking trip.

It seems like the only people who would be complaining are those whose required battery life is in the narrow window greater than current phone battery lives and less than the point where it's more practical to carry an external battery. I wouldn't think that would be all that common, but I might just not be thinking of people's use cases. Two obvious examples I can think of would be frequent business travelers (those with trips in the narrow window I described) and people whose day jobs are not near plugs or require a lot of moving around with the phone (i.e. not desk jobs).

> and if I'm traveling I'm going to carry an external USB battery anyway because no practical smartphone is going to last for, say, a 7 day backpacking trip

Same here.

Basically the only situation where I'm still unhappy at this point is when I can expect to spend all day out doing stuff, but where an external battery pack of the bulky kind I have for extended travel still feels like overkill.

One simple example - going to a theme park, where I want to have as little weight with me as possible, and will be heading back home or to a hotel room at the end of the day, but will be regularly referencing maps on my phone, maybe taking pictures, texting to coordinate meetings with friends or family, etc.

Honestly, I'd be really happy with an iPhone that was completely identical to the current one except for being 1.5x or 2x the thickness, with that space filled with battery.

Get a battery case.

It depends... in my family life (gf, live together, plan things like dinner so I tend to know when I'm home in the evening) it's no issue. But in my student life, it'd often suck. Come home from college around 5 pm and get a text from a friend who wants to eat out somewhere, alright... leave the restaurant around 7, go to a bar for some drinks around 10... if I go home at this point, no problem, but I'd already be in battery saving mode by now. If we then decide to meet some other friends for drinks and then go clubbing, around 12 my phone is dead and checking to see which bus or taxi can take me home around 4 AM is a no-no. Crashing at someone else's place for the night? Let's hope he has the same phone (trivial for android nowadays, even iPhone users tend to have micro usb laying around).

Anyway in some ways it's very much an edge case (how many people are students who find themselves in the above situation often?). Still battery issues are still something I run into and the idea of carrying a charger anywhere I go didn't fit my lifestyle for a long time. (generally went places without a bag, and even if I did have a bag I'd go to different places I didn't own in some way or stayed for long (like an office space where I could keep a spare charger and plug in for most of the day). Today it's not an issue, I spend most of my day at the office or at home, have chargers in both places and tend not to be away from either for more than 10 hours. But I still feel a bit restricted, visiting my parents over the weekend used to be jumping on the bike and going there whenever I felt like it and deciding to eat and perhaps even sleep over would be a spontaneous decision once I got there. Now I have to actually plan ahead for that or be stuck without battery on a phone I rely on nowadays, it may seem trivial but I'd still love to pay a substantial amount for a better battery, and would very much welcome modern phones to be 10-30% thicker/heavier, filled with battery. Take the first iPhone, that was 12mm, today we're at about 7mm. I totally wouldn't mind to go to 9mm and get 28% more volume which'd probably be at least 40% more battery. Hell wouldn't mind the iPhone 6 performance in the 6S, either but that's just me. Combined it inches closer to the 2-day usecase, or day, night and early morning usecase that I feel should become a minimum standard in 2016, that has the priority over dropping below 7mm phones for me. The iPhone 6 for example was 6.9mm, the 6S are now 7.1mm, nobody in the world cared their phone got thicker and is 14g heavier than the 6, which was 17g heavier than the 5S, again nobody shed a tear over that, < 8mm is good enough, < 200g is good enough, for me anyway.

Pretty much. I have a 5S and it makes it through a full day of moderate use or two days of light use. The only time battery life is a problem is traveling on the road, where it seems to burn through battery roaming (I assume). But, if I'm in a car, I can probably charge. In the woods, I have the same problem, but using airplane-mode solves it - if I'm in the woods, I don't want to answer email or phone calls anyway.

Traveling in Japan over the summer, I bought a powerbank. It was useful because I was moving a lot, taking a lot of pictures with my phone, using it a lot for other stuff without charging it. Plus I always had a 4G modem with me.

However, more than 25% of the Japanese I met were using Powerbanks too. Look around you at a smoking area, in the subway,... and those numbers may confirm themselves.

Battery life has got worse and worse though. For me it's less than a day if I'm using my phone heavily (which I often am e.g. on public transport I'll watch videos or browse the web). If I'm going out after work then it's work -> bus or train -> theatre -> bus or train home, if I haven't charged my phone since that morning then it's dead by then. So I've taken to leaving a charger at work but that's got its own awkwardness (unapproved device, other people "borrowing" it). I don't really want to carry a charger around in my pocket (if that's the alternative, I'd rather have a heavier phone with more battery life).

it's definitely an issue if you have background refreshing enabled on a lot of apps.

or any of those motion tracking / gps apps

I'm not sure why but Google Maps kills my battery so fast (iPhone 5s). I had to return a rental car and drove 30 minutes with directions, the battery went from 86% to 38%. I then had to figure my way back to the Airbnb I was renting via public transport, when I got home the battery was 8%.

To answer OPs question, no I don't find battery is usually an issue but when I need it then it is.

I know at least 5 people off the top of my head who gave up with Google maps because of battery life. Apple Maps is not great, but it doesn't totally kill my phone.

Thanks I'll try it next time I drive. Unfortunately in my city Google Maps is the only app that provides public transport directions.

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