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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> The biggest benefit this could have is a smart-ish phone with multiple days of active use battery life. Instead they specced a 500mah battery

Take any Android phone, uninstall all messaging apps, disable all other forms of background transfers and sync (increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS).

Enjoy your 3 to 4 day battery life.

You said active use, but this phone doesn't have any active uses, by design.

Standby time on modern smart phones isn't half bad, if you get rid of everything that wakes up the device!

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This.

Go to Settings / Battery and you can prevent or minimise a applications background cpu usage. Then go to your Data usage, from there you can prevent or minimize background data transfer.

This has greatly improved battery life on my phone.

Turn off data and just use it for calls and SMS and it’ll last even longer (just like old Nokia phones used to).

Android used to let you disable 3G/4G data and just limit the phone to 2G data - - low bandwidth but adequate for syncing email and other tasks, much lower power usage. Unfortunately that option seems to have been removed.

That's because 2G networks are shutting down (together with 3G ones) and 4G/LTE ones are moved to lower, more efficient, frequencies previously taken by GSM.

Disabling 4G these days can often be counter productive for signal strength and battery life.

Huh! That never occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Oh well. :/

Actually, 3G will be shut down first because so much relies on 2G networks.

> Disabling 4G these days can often be counter productive for signal strength and battery life.

You can always have peace of mind with airplane mode or whole data disabled.

>increasingly hard to do as Google adds more and more of their services to the OS

You can get rid of most, if not all, of that with Lineage OS.

I was judging active by their standards. It's still very short.

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