I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.
I think our culture is really wasteful with batteries. I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%. Studies show that you can decrease battery wear to negligible levels by doing this. Yet my Android e-ink tablet, my iphone, my smartwatch, and my laptop all do not support a hard battery cap.
At least I can install al dente on my laptop, and root my tablet. Everything else I just have to manually take off the charger before 80%!
source (one of many): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf
I keep my EV charged to just 50% most days for this reason, get below that step change.
Still, perhaps I should buy ex-landfill sites on the cheap, so my descendants can mine them.
I feel like the batteries nowadays are just made to last 2-3 years to get to 85-80% capacity no matter how you treat them
They have a "smart charging" setting which is poorly defined. It says it limits charging to 80% sometimes using AI. I think the idea is it charges to 100% overnight, and 80% the rest of the time.
But i agree, it would be nice if it had a selector switch. Some laptops have a "aim for 60%, 80% or 100% battery charge" option.
They do the same thing for Macs, but it’s way, way too conservative IMO. My M1 MBP sits on my desk on a dock with a charger pretty much all week, and it eventually figures out that it should just keep it at 80%. Until a brief period where I use it on battery, draining maybe down to 70%. When I put it back on the dock, it charges back to 100% and stays there for the next 2 days.
I would be happy with a “Don’t bother trying to learn, just cap it at 80%, I’ll tell you when I change my mind” setting.
I too agree that I would prefer to have a manual/scheduled charge setting system.
1. Caps charging to 80%
2. Pauses charging if it gets too hot, until it's below 40°C
If you sporadically need full capacity (travelling, etc), just hit the "charge once to 100%" button and you're good to go.
However, that does not leave me with workable alternatives. I respect what Fairphone is trying to do, but €500 for a replaceable battery phone with internals several years old isn't the right choice for me.
But.....why? It's hardly any effort. Saying "I won't fiddle around with a screwdriver" is a stance as respectable as someone saying they are proud of not being able to do maths or know basic geography facts.
My 3 last phones have been samsung, and after using /e/ I have no intent of getting an original samsung software again
OS updates make or break devices long term.
Considering that I've got the phone in June 2019, I paid less than 100 Euro per year. If I had to buy a new phone to have Android 12 (and I don't understand why I should - I'd be fine with Android 8 or even 4 if I'd get security patches), 100 Euro per year is acceptable. The big problem with buying a new phone is that I'm not buying from Apple and I'm not going to find an Android one as small as the A40, which is already too big IMHO. I wish it was 3/4 or one inch shorter (2 or 2.5 cm.)
Every time, I waited until the phone started to shut off or rapidly drain below 20% battery. Replacing the battery fixed that and brought my battery life back to original (impressive!) longevity each time. As in, I can reliably use my phone for 2 days without charging, as opposed to barely making it to midnight of the first day.
You do have to "recalibrate" the battery by fully charging it, sitting on the charger for a few hours, then fully discharging it, letting it sit dead for a few hours, and finally recharging to 100% uninterrupted afterward. Maybe if you leave that out it takes a lot longer to see the impact?
I have less fond memories of waiting all day for a newer phone to run out of battery when the same thing happened.
Non-removable batteries are still stupid though.
However, I do know of some slightly older HTC devices that would have the EEPROM straight-up completely die, leaving the device permanently trapped in a "hard-brick" state unless someone felt like doing some BGA soldering.
Modern phones do have a lot of stuff running under the hood that makes it a lot harder to mess things up, but once you go off the beaten path things become much less certain.
You can definitely mess it up really bad, but I don't know if you can get to a point where there's no reset path. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
This is one of the worst design trends (perhaps the worst) of modern-day devices.