Hacker News Reader

Comment by listic | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't any phone doing it? (either smart or feature variety)

More importantly: why aren't TVs doing it?

TVs should be turned off completely when you press the button, to save power. After that almost all smart TV boot up quite slowly. Which is sad :(

My GF's Samsung smart tv has to update at least once per week when you power it on. There're regular warnings for service unavailability. It spends time logging on each time you start it. Sometimes it won't even turn on when you press the button. It's a completely awful machine. I'd honestly rather have a CRT.

Can you not turn off the smart functionality and updates to use it as a monitor/traditional TV?

I'm not sure the Netflix/Hulu/HBO Go applications would work if we did that.

Probably because phones are rebooted so rarely - it only happens on an OS update or if your battery runs out.

With my Nexus 4, rebooting every other day is a pretty good idea. Usually fixes my Wi-Fi, 3G, and all sorts of weird bugs for the moment. Don't know how representative this is for Android phones in general, but most Nexus 4 owners I know tell me this is normal.

Oh, usually once a week, sometimes twice a day, the phone will do the rebooting for me. Sometimes when it's in my pocket, sometimes when I try to watch a video that's just too long. Maybe some kind kind of memory error?

I used to have a Nexus 4 and had the same problem. I now have a Samsung Galaxy S3 and still have the same kinds of issues, just not as frequently. From what I've heard from other people I think it's fair to say it's a general problem with Android-based smart phones.

I reboot my iPhone 5s every two or four weeks or so. Sometimes that just the easiest way to deal with some bugs (e.g. Airplay issues). Since it happens so infrequently I don't really mind the boot times that much. But all else being equal, of course faster is better than slow :)

I have a Galaxy S3, and it was rebooting randomly more and more often. At the time, I lived in an apartment. I bought a house earlier this year, and to my knowledge (and memory) this hasn't happened again since.

What you said reminded me of this, because I had forgotten this infuriating rebooting. I wonder if this was related to the building or something else? This is weird.

Wow, that's exactly my experience. Used to reboot 4-5 times a day and now it happens roughly once a week. Did you happen to use Bluetooth more in the apartment by chance?

Huh, this thread has been quite an eyeopener, the stuff people put up with.

The simple answer: Because phones are always-on devices.

Rebooting your phone is an uncommon use case, so it's not optimized.

phones need to load a lot of stuff a boot time - this fast boot times are achieved by stripping a hell of a lot of stuff out

I would love to have a phone with a hell of a lot of stuff stripped out. I guess manufacturers don't.

Sure they do, they're called "feature phones". Wiko sells some decent dual-sim models for $20.

I have included "feature phones" in my original comment. None boot close to 1 second, and these, too, include a lot of functionality that I would like stripped out.

My $20 Wiko Lubi does boot in a second, or barely more (not counting PIN input, I don't know if it's booting the background), and I can't complain about having too much functionality.

It takes a second or two to use my lockscreen, so with some prioritisation that should mean that the lockscreen can show early giving the system more time to boot but also feeling more responsive.

KDE used to load a session in the background when the login screen showed so that you didn't then have to wait after logging in.

On Android without root the system seems to use a ton of resources on background jobs that aren't needed; I imagine that slows boot too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com