Battery icons shape perceptions of time and space
phys.org
phys.org
Are people really like this? If so, I think we need to pump the brakes on phone usage for children because this is out of control. People are literally slaves to their phone.
Imagine the absurdity of a 1960s equivalent:
> People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their book away," said the study's lead author
Maybe we just need some combination of bigger batteries, more efficient devices and easier charging.
Like, what does it say about me that I bought a car charger for my phone before a recent long drive? Am I hopelessly addicted to my battery meter or am I just vaguely prudent?
I would argue: unless you have a paper map and know how to use it, buying a car charger for your phone would be a symptom of you not knowing how to get there and/or expecting to call to ask for directions.
Everywhere I would want to go would be 5,15,30,45,60 and further increments of 30 minutes after that.
Now? 30 minutes on the Subway, even standing room only seems normal, even though I've only gone a handful of miles, not 30 miles.
(In steady state, of course, I expect someone's first 30 minutes on the NYC subway to be a shock if they haven't experienced it already.)
I find driving to be a relaxing almost meditative experience while not in traffic. My parents are just short of terrified of driving in normal-for-cities traffic.
Standing room only public transit is still like my own personal hell. Standing in a box that jerks me one way or another jammed between people going to a place where there will be no space which is "mine" and no escape nor self determination besides through a repeat reverse journey many hours later. Honestly I think I would prefer being locked in prison 14 hours a day than have to go back to commuting by public transit to a city center.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that I would start using my battery as a unit of distance or time, but I definitely memorized the battery consumption of my evening commute more precisely than the distance.
But second, the best trick is just to turn your phone to airplane mode whenever you're on transportation. My iPhone goes from 100% to about 80% if I spend the whole day at home. It goes from 100% to 20% by mid-afternoon if I take a few subway rides. Your phone constantly searching for a new signal drains the battery more than anything.
It makes me wish there were a setting to reduce the aggressiveness of connectivity -- if the accelerometer has figured out I'm in motion, and I'm not using my phone at the moment, then only bother searching for a signal only once every, say, 5 minutes. I don't care about getting calls immediately when on the move, but still want text messages to come through every so often. (Obviously not true for everyone, so doesn't need to be a default -- just a setting.)
I wonder how much priming they had to do to get that response. Sounds like we can cure the world's anxiety with a $20 battery backup.
Perhaps an anthropomorphic icon that looks like its getting sleepier and sleepier, or something Tomagotchi-like.
Maybe battery-low messages that are less blunt and more friendly, like "We know you're busy, but your device is working hard and needs a recharge as soon as possible. Thanks for connecting me to a power source as soon as you can manage."
Of course maybe the fact that I have smartwatch means I'm not playing with my phone quite so much whenever a new notification comes through... hmm.
Me neither, but a different reason: my laptop battery lasts 6 hours or so, and for my phone I just carry a tiny USB cable to charge my phone from my laptop. I'm already carrying around this 97Whr battery in my laptop, might as well use it to charge my phone.
And who in the world measures their commute in batteries? Ten miles will stay ten miles; half a battery could mean very different things from one day to the next.
(The phone is a Huawei Y7 that I bought in Bogotá in Dec 2017. It wasn't available in the US at that time, and I never really found the specs online -- only for models that seemed likely to be similar.)
I always have a wallet, keys (in a coinpurse which sometimes has coins too) and a phone, and very rarely anything else. Sometimes I pack light, sometimes heavy -- enough so that I've been made fun of for both.
I carry a backpack around a lot, full mostly of a laptop, umbrella and jacket. Bogotá rains a lot.
> We show that energy gauges on portable technology (e.g. battery icons in phones) are a key to energy hysteresis. Through “hermeneutic reflection” on the battery charge in portable technology and information about accessibility of infrastructure outlets in the city, consumers adapt practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 99) in order to ‘re-embed’ or ‘pin down’ infrastructure, technology and social relations (Giddens 2013:79). The aim of these practices is to attain ‘psychological comfort’ in vulnerable circumstances (Giddens 2013: 155). However, rather than a return to equilibrium as in Phipps and Ozanne’s (2017), single domain context we see energy consumption through portable technology as leading to a system of contingency planning that anticipates disequilibrium (see figure 1).
Scary.
I just have a Caterpillar Tractor phone with 3 days of battery life, and don't worry about it much.
The OEM crapware is an issue, but from a quick google it seems like Cat phones are rootable, yes? So it should be possible to fix that manually.
Nowadays every CPU and peripheral does automatic power throttling all the time and no one pretends it has anything to do with being environmentally conscious.
I suspect they asked mostly mobile users, maybe even a subset of that, because from my experience either this study isn't relevant to my neck of the woods, or people are so taken aback and scared by this person from the wilderness reading a book, that they instantly become fantastic at acting as if they don't care at all.