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Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

This is what I never understood, even slightly. Why not just give an iPod / iPhone dock without all the wireless bullshit? I prefer a dock as it holds phone at a handy angle, syncs, and doesn't have the myriad of drawbacks of bluetooth.

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.

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Many people are not like you. I personally don’t plug in at my desk even though a cable is there, as it’s one more thing to do. It’s also then tethered, meaning I have an extra step if I want to walk away and bring my phone with me. It’s also tethered meaning I have a loose cable now dangling in my way, which aside from functional issues is also ugly to look at.

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.

All of which is covered by having a dock as the act of picking it up breaks connection.

With the added advantage they were cheaper than wireless, and unlike AirPower actually available.

Your buying Apple. Price as an argument is long gone.

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.

You need to take your own advice.

Cables were never old, painful nor requires thought. I see the cable, I plug.

Your side is just that, an opinion.

Nope, his side is pretty solid.

Just place on a mat is much less effort compared to plug cable.

MagSafe was in the sweet spot IMO. Doesn't require too much alignment, symmetrical pinout, disconnects quickly and safely, low mechanical wear from use.

I've taken to buying magnetic USB cables for this reason. Plug a connector into the bottom of phone/tablet, put a cable at work, in car, and next to the bed, and it's super easy to connect and disconnect, with no worry that the Micro-B connection is getting bent (with cats and a child we've gone through way more USB Micro-B cables than I would have expected).

There are also magnetic USB-C adapters that do USB, power, and HDMI. I use one to dock my laptop.

I can see one significant improvement for the wireless mats. The number one part of my phone to fail first has always been the charging port. The mat reduced the wear and tear on that port which could extend the life of my phone.

I had a dock and replaced it with wireless charger as soon as they were available. The ease of just placing your phone on a surface vs. lining up your phone with the dock is well worth it.

You mean lining it up precisely on the surface?

That's why I stopped using a wireless charger.

The two Qi chargers I've used don't really require much lining up. With the Pixel Stand the alignment is obvious, I've never missed the alignment on that. I also have used Samsung's round, flat charger. Its a circle. Its hard to miss the center of the circle.

The Qi wireless charger for my Galaxy S5 has a noticeable precision requirement for placing the phone - it doesn't charge at full speed unless the phone is accurately placed, which is infuriating and makes me cut back my use of wireless charging; I've confirmed this by having a USB power meter attached and watching the current draw change as I move the phone around the pad.

Might be using the wrong wireless charger, I've heard this complaint and its all it could be.

If it isn't what your really telling us is you couldn't learn how to place a phone on a small surface.

Yep, and curiously enough it is exactly the way cordless phones have been designed for years.

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.

You can’t use the phone while it’s in the dock, and putting it in and taking it out is actually quite annoying. I’ve had several docks in the past, I wouldn’t go back.

> I know many who almost never charge their phones, essentially always living at 5%.

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.

That's called (mild) OCD and ordinary people don't suffer from it. Don't feel bad, I do the same, it seems to be a common trait in IT (anyone writing code kind of has to have it...).

If I don't keep my phone at 100% while at my desk, and then I go out somewhere after work, there's a chance my phone will run down to 0% while I'm out, potentially stranding me somewhere.

I don't think that's OCD. It's just planning ahead.

People who always plan ahead to a T (to keep their phone 100%), have some OCD. I should know.

What kind of phone do you have? I get 2 full days use on a charge. Surely you need a new battery instead?

If I'm in an area with good connectivity I can easily last two days with my OnePlus. On the move, though, or in bad signal areas, and 20 hours might be the limit.

I used to live life at the edge and only charge my phone at 1%. Then a relative had a medical emergency and I had to stay at the hospital for hours, and my phone lost power so i couldnt call anyone. Now I always try to keep it fully charged. So no this is definitely not OCD.

You only did it after a medical emergency. If the drive to do it was innate without any "hard lesson" required, it would be OCD.

Compared to tons of people who couldn't care less on living on 70% or 50% or 20%.

Learning from other people's mistakes is OCD?

OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder. Learning from people's mistakes is unrelated.

People with OCD still learn from their own and other people's mistakes and adapt their own behavior.

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).

I do this too, so don’t take this as criticism.

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?

That was the case, I think, with old NiCd batteries, but with lithium ion batteries, you maximize battery longevity by keeping it mostly charged, I read recently.

Not really, that’s still the sweetspot for most lithium batteries as well (being under 20% is much more critical than being over 80% though).

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.

My solution is to get a phone that hold a charge for the day, Motorola makes some.

I'm still annoyed that Apple made an excellent dock connector, it became widespread especially in hotels, it was ideal for use with external speakers, and then killed it off.

Widespread, and only for apple product.

You mean the (IMO) inferior 30-pin? In order to make the phone smaller, they had to ditch it. Also, they were running out of unused pins to assign to new functions

> Smartphone battery life is so shit, on every model, that I always plug my phone in.

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.

I don't use Apple products, but I do use a wireless charger for my Samsung phone. The reason is that I keep it in a rather beefy protector case and fiddling with the charging port flap is annoying, which would also impede it working with any kind of dock, and I'm not about to carry a naked phone - I can't trust myself not to drop it.

The one distinct advantage of wireless charging is that my Galaxy S5 has the same waterproofing flap over the USB port, and I've already worn through one of these (thankfully Samsung had the foresight to make them very easy to replace when the clip breaks), so the charger does not require opening the flap.

Here's a wireless charger from Anker that sits at an angle that I use at my desk:

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.

Quite - why complexify and lower the charge efficiency it by making it wireless to hold it in exactly the same position as dock?

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. :)

My iPhone can wirelessly back up to iTunes on my Mac Mini while charging on my wireless dock using WiFi.

A great many people use cases for their phones.

Very few docks support more than a tiny fraction of the cases available.

All docks I’ve seen require careful insertion of the phone, to a) hit the spot where the cable goes in and b) not to scratch the phone if I miss. Wireless: just slam the phone on the puck (or stand), carelessly.

maybe you use your phone agressively, but consider picking a phone with a good battery.

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.

I need two hands to unplug from my dock.

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