If I'm just setting my phone down on my desk and it's at 50%, and my cable is right there, I may not bother to plug it in. Especially if I might get up again in 5 or 10 minutes. But if I can just set it down in a particular place and regain a couple percentage points, and I do this twenty times a day, it adds up.
Smartphone battery life is so shit, on every model, that I always plug my phone in. Even if the cable / socket is only going to be around for minutes. So no saving here. In the days of docks, I dropped phone on dock every time I was at my desk.
My first few phone models (Motorola StarTAC etc) had a battery life in weeks, and I usually had a charger/dock with space for keeping the phone and a spare battery fully charged.
So from here it sounds like you've made a feature of going backwards at a rate of knots.
I know many who almost never charge their phones, essentially always living at 5%.
Having a clean looking mat that’s permanently located where I can throw my phone on, without regard to position or orientation, would be awesome.
With the added advantage they were cheaper than wireless, and unlike AirPower actually available.
For someone "on the move" the dock or the wireless chargers are equally unsuitable, for those (most of users I believe) that simply plugin their (smart)phone placing it on their night table when they go to sleep they are pretty much the same, the "you can lay it down in every orientation" doesn't seem to me such a needed feature.
That's why I stopped using a wireless charger.
If it isn't what your really telling us is you couldn't learn how to place a phone on a small surface.
This whole thread is really asinine.
Wireless charging is a seamless, elegant solution to a problem.
It is not the only solution.
It is not a perfect solution.
It is not the cheapest solution.
It is not the most cost effective solution.
It is likely not the best solution for your battery life.
Docks and wires are not an elegant solution.
That's all the argument is.
One is old, painful and requires though, the other, does not.
It doesn't need to be a perfect argument, you don't have to buy into it. But unless you've tried it, please keep your opinions to yourself, because there is unlikely a chance you'll really "get it" and your single sided perspective is really not that useful.
Cables were never old, painful nor requires thought. I see the cable, I plug.
Your side is just that, an opinion.
Just place on a mat is much less effort compared to plug cable.
That's amazing since I'm the opposite. I always try to be near or at 100% (both phone & laptop) while I'm at my desk.
Isn’t this bad for the battery? ISTR you want to keep the battery between 20 and 80 percent. More than that and it winds up heating up the battery during charge. Or is that just for electric cars?
What’s different between them is battery memory effect. With NiCd & NiMH you are supposed to let it discharge until 20%, then continuously charge up, and then repeat.
With Lithium based batteries it’s a recommended practice to charge in short bursts and keep the battery at a medium level.
In any case, most devices now a days will manage the battery in ways that you should not really bother. It’s amazing the conplexity that battery systems have nowadays.
I don't think that's OCD. It's just planning ahead.
Compared to tons of people who couldn't care less on living on 70% or 50% or 20%.
It's not the learning part that's important, it's how one applies what they learned, and the way they act on what they fear might happen that can fall into OCD.
An obsession with being always 100% charged when you leave the house, immediately plugging to charge etc, always checking to make sure, etc, can point to OCD, even if it "makes sense" (e.g. to avoid being ever stuck without charge in an emergency).
Buy a better phone next time. I'm currently using a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 which lasts about 5-6 days on a single charge (10-15 hours of screen-on time), before that I used (and still use when doing 'dangerous' work) a Motorola Defy which lasted almost as long on a single charge. Neither of these phones were the newest or thinnest when I bought them, both of them have a relatively large battery (4000 mAh in the Xiaomi, 1750 mAh in the (> 8 years old) Motorola). Neither phone had the fastest SoC when they were launched.
I also removed all bloat from the devices before using them, either by swapping the default Android distribution for an alternative of by disabling/removing unwanted packages. This alone adds a day or two to the longevity.
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Qi-Certified-Compatible-Fast-Ch...
With the angle it sits at, when notifications come in FaceID will correctly ID me and unlock the device so I can at a glance see what the notification is.
As for syncing? All of that is done to the cloud, so that's not really something I care much about.
A perfect example - to my mind - of where a dock would be better, and probably cheaper.
As far as cloud goes, I realise I'm an outlier - perhaps not so much on HN - but I want local copies and start by mistrusting cloud unless I have adequate redundancy. So iPhone gets locally backed up still. Can't see that changing soon, wireless or no. :)
Very few docks support more than a tiny fraction of the cases available.
In my light use situation, my MotoG4 has aprox 2 days of battery. Under heavy use I can expect at least 12 hours. Add a phone compatible "rapid charger" and you can expect full charge in less than an hour.
My wife on the other hand, has a new Huaweii and it's battery lasts about 8 hours with moderate use. Not a phone I would consider, but she bought it for the fancy camera.
They never seem to have taken off though. My only guess is because it would only fit one phone/ trap a manufacturer into a form factor.
Yes it takes less than a second but you know what’s even more effortless? A wireless charging mat that I can just set my phone onto.
Not sure what’s so hard to understand about this.
With a dock you can see if the message is even worth responding to. I don't need to respond to that text from my bank, and I don't have to waste multiple seconds picking my phone up to discover that.
A charging mat goes on a flat surface that ends up attracting clutter. A dock with phone in doesn't, so when my phone does beep, I don't have to go rifling under paperwork to find it.
So to me a charging mat doesn't seem like the obvious slam dunk you seem to think it is.
Any point where I can’t just charge at night in normal useage means a larger battery is going to win over easier charging.
On the Android side, batteries have gotten bigger with phones but more importantly the OS is getting better at battery management. With lineage 16 (Android pie), I can choose to enable battery saver at 75% battery.
I'm still on a Nexus 6. What has changed in battery technology recently?
I have no idea. I imagine most of the improvements in battery life stem from them being able to fit larger batteries in smaller packages along with hardware and software optimizations as well as improvements in cell reception. It could also be my usage. I listen to a lot of music during the day and perhaps the larger batteries are just able to accommodate me longer than the smaller ones.
I loved my Nexus 6 but I doubt I could still be using it still today so I am impressed. Can I ask what your reasons are for not having upgraded it? I generally upgrade my phones bc of the battery but this time I hope to just get it swapped out in a year or two.
My main excuse is I got it a year after it was launched on a black Friday sake so I want it to last one more year.
On top of that I got to use a Samsung Galaxy s7e for almost a year in 2017.
Mainly, it was probably that I didn't want to spend the money. I can make the excuse that I an saving money toward a new desktop computer but I've been giving myself that excuse since before ryzen launched so I know it is just an excuse in telling myself.
My main use apps at the moment k9 mail, Google voice, slide for Reddit, and Mozilla Firefox. The camera on the Nexus 6 is horrible for current year. Perhaps I'll finally get a new phone this year. Perhaps if xiaomi releases the poco phone F2? 4Ah battery sounds nice.
It's the EP-NG930
If the battery is charging then logically there must be enough residual power to run the phone. If there wasn’t then the battery would not charge at all unless you turned off the phone first, but it obviously does.
Also a phone on a charging mat cannot easily be used and the screen will be off most of the time lowering power requirements.
To keep your battery fresh for as long as possible, always keep the phone connected to a charger. No battery cycles. It will get worse after a few years anyway.
This isn't really true, as far as I know. If you avoid fully charging or deeply discharging a lithium-ion battery, the wear per unit of energy extracted is smaller.
There are some statistics quoted here (https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_l...) showing that if you, say, halve the amount of energy you retrieve from a battery in each cycle, the battery lasts for more than twice as many cycles.
This paper arrives at a similar conclusion (see figure 4): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318292540_Analysis_...
Also, I want to add that what I wrote above is only regarding smartphones. I don’t know how much stress/extra heat etc that EV batteries are subject to, but I imagine they drain/charge at more intense rates relatively.
I so wish manufacturers would offer this option, for those primarily deskbound who do not relish ungluing their battery after a year
Edit: they call it Qnovo Adaptive Charging and they get another minus from me [0] for making it impossible to select text on tye page by long-pressing it.
[0]: they got a huge minus from me back when they added "sponsored links" to my flagship Z3 or what it was.
Thanks for making me aware that such a thing exists.
Fundamentally, wireless charging is less efficient. Theoretically you could be putting 16w of heat into the phone but only getting 8w of charging.
So why not just plop it into a dock?