Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

unfocussed_mike

> a smaller device will alway have 'poor' battery life or use a less powerful cpu to keep the battery life on par with bigger phones.

I am not convinced by this -- not least because it will also have a smaller and lower-resolution screen, which brings with it power savings.

Before I switched to iOS, I had a Sony Xperia Mini Pro -- the second version. Slide out keyboard, absolutely tiny. And it was _very_ powerful indeed for its price and size in its day, with surprisingly good battery life (from a really tiny battery) and an incredible display.

A contemporaneous review was here: https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_mini_pro-revie...

Can't tell you how many admiring looks it got even from iPhone owners. Decent camera for the time (and a hardware shutter button), and a fantastic little thumbs keyboard.

I then had an iPhone 5S and SE. The 5S was an older device by the time I got it, but the SE was/is very capable and it has excellent battery life (especially by Android standards), again because it's driving a smaller, lower-resolution display.

It might be a tough sell in the Android market, but I think it could be done again well technically.

There just isn't enough interest to persuade app developers to support a smaller screen format, and web developers won't do it either.

> I am not convinced by this -- not least because it will also have a smaller and lower-resolution screen, which brings with it power savings.

having a smaller display (and possibly downgrading/downclocking the gpu accordingly) saves some power, but the power draw of other components doesn't scale with the size of the screen. the display doesn't account for enough of the overall power budget to offset having less energy to power everything else. it's possible to make a small phone with "acceptable" battery life, but they'll never compete with bigger phones on that front.

btw, apple doesn't have some magical solution to this scaling problem. their small phones have significantly worse battery life than their larger offerings. it's just that their overall efficiency advantage makes a small iphone more viable than a small android phone.

> btw, apple doesn't have some magical solution to this scaling problem. their small phones have significantly worse battery life than their larger offerings. it's just that their overall efficiency advantage makes a small iphone more viable than a small android phone.

Agreed. Am currently in the SE 2020 and its battery life is terrible. Apple is expected to announce a SE 2022 and I'm curious how the battery life will be with it supporting 5G and a better SoC. If it's the same/worse, I'm going to upgrade to the 13 mini.

Not sure I can agree. I’m using an iPhone SE (2016), the original, and my battery life is still pretty darn good. Routinely outlasts my SO’s Pixel 4a, and her 3a before that. I have swapped out the battery twice since my original purchase, but I’d do that for any phone.

I briefly had a 6S, before I grew so sick of the size that I got my current SE. The SE’s battery is 90% the size of the 6S battery, and the 7/8/SE 2020 only increases the battery size incrementally past that point. The SE 2016 is about a mm thicker than those phones and that makes all the difference.

The Sony Xperia Compacts routinely had great battery life compared to the larger models, too — all for an extra mm or two of thickness that I, at least, cannot perceive. Phone manufacturers are just so hooked on making “7mm” phones with a 2mm camera bump they’ve forgotten that they could just omit the camera bump, curve the edges a bit if necessary, and dramatically improve battery life.

> There just isn't enough interest to persuade app developers to support a smaller screen format, and web developers won't do it either.

On iOS supporting smaller screen sizes is fairly trivial as long as you’re using the apple-blessed layout APIs and not doing silly things like using static widths. It’s a bit more hairy on Android (simply due to the overwhelming mediocrity of Android Framework) but not anything too terrible.

It might be more annoying with cross platform frameworks though.

I loved the Xperia Mini Pro. Gorgeous form factor.

Yep -- a really lovely thing.

I donated mine to the Mobile Phone Museum because they only had the earlier X10 Mini Pro.

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com