It’s the battery, stupid: The looming 4G smartphone crisis | Hacker News Reader

It’s the battery, stupid: The looming 4G smartphone crisis

pandodaily.com

48 pointsLazare47 comments

  Notice also that the new LTE-enabled iPad doesn’t sacrifice 
  battery life compared to its 3G predecessor.

Between generation 2 and 3, the iPad battery increased in capacity from 25 watt-hours to 42.5, a 60% increase.

It's a safe generalization to describe the iPad as "a large battery with a thin layer of electronics wrapped around it": http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-3-4G-Teardown/8277/3

But that probably isn't the whole story.

Has anyone done any battery comparisons between the LTE model and the wifi model? My bet is that the wifi model doesn't get much better battery life than the LTE model, at least not 60% more. A good reason for that increase in battery capacity is likely needed for the video upgrades, both the screen and the quad-core graphics.

A better comparison would be a LTE model running on LTE and then a similar comparison of the same model running on 3G instead. This would tell you what the difference in the two would really be like. My guess, it's probably not insignificant, but it probably isn't as bad as we see on Android phones.

How do many or most women feel about women's fashions and how they fit on the average woman?

Is that a problem with cotton?

How do most people feel about battery life on an iPad compared to an iPhone or droid?

Is that a problem with batteries?

The problem is in design and marketing, designing women's clothes for stick figures and boys, and designing and marketing the thinnest phones ever.

Would you prefer a) the phone you have now, or b) the phone you have now but 1/8" thicker and with a battery that lasted 30% - 50% - 100% longer that you didn't have to baby?

Whatever happened to "form follows function"?

God yes. Who decided 'thinnest phone ever' was something to aim for? Nobody asked me...

The Galaxy Nexus extended battery does exactly this... I guess the device couldn't just ship with the good battery because god forbid you add any thickness to the device.

Phones 30% to 50% larger would be disastrous. Uncomfortable, just too big. I think the way phones are now is about right. Still a bit too large to basically disappear in your pocket, but small enough to not be annoying.

It's not about fashion. Making phones larger would be a stupid idea indeed.

i disagree, my nokia 3210 was 100% thicker than my galaxy s2, but it was still comfortable to carry in my jeans pocket. i bought the extended battery for the galaxy s2, but would still buy a larger one if i would find one that provides the same confidence that the original Samsung one does.

The 3210 has less volume. Being huge in three dimensions the deal breaker. Volume is the name of the game, and the screen constrains that.

Also: The 3210 is still annoyingly large.

I couldn't disagree more. The function of a phone involves being carried around everywhere, and size, especially thinness, is crucial here. This is the essential function of a phone, and everything else should follow from that. Throwing in a huge battery doesn't solve the problem, unless the battery can be charged faster.

4G is the fashion right now, but it has ever so little every day function compared to 3G. It's important to spec-sheet fashionistas, but for most people, the 1/8" is much more useful and valuable.

I agree, I absolute don't care about the thinness of my phone (within reason). It wouldn't bother me in the least if my phone was say...an inch thick. I would probably actually enjoy the heft of such a device. When I'm holding it as a phone or using it as a portable computer, there's a huge gap between the back of the phone and my hand. If I'm holding it horizontal and playing games on it, it's already too thin to hold comfortably.

Now my tablet...I think it could be lighter since the use cases for it are very different.

One of the biggest problems with LTE on most phones nowadays is that you're forced using LTE and CDMA at the same time, with no option to only use LTE, as no carriers support VoLTE (Voice over LTE), only voice over CDMA.

Unfortunately, Google or Samsung haven't included an LTE-only mode on the Galaxy Nexus because of this, so I must pay for a constant CDMA connection with my battery whenever I want to use LTE, even if I'm using SIP over LTE (e.g. Google Voice, so I only need a data plan for data/texting/calling).

Just curious, which gateway are you using to get SIP service via Google Voice?

I've tried a few, but ultimately gave them all up due to reliability and performance issues. It seems like the latency was always too much for me.

I don't use the official Google Voice SIP server as I didn't have a Gizmo5 account before it was shut down. I just use an sipgate.com account added to my Google Voice account. If you're worried about latency, you could try using the undocumented Gmail Google Voice API through GrooVe IP (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gvoip) to get a direct connection to Google Voice.

VoLTE support is on the way. But even so, I'm not sure I'd want an LTE-only device for the next few years. LTE is new enough that there must be areas with CDMA coverage but not LTE.

The big advantage of VoLTE over a straight TCP/IP connection is a packet priority scheme that will give you latency guarantees for VoLTE that you can't get from SIP, so voice quality should be more consistent. Are you getting decent voice quality from SIP?

The author asserts that "The first company—whether it’s an incumbent phone maker or Ph.D.-laden start-up in a garage—that figures out how to solve the smartphone battery problem will see enormous gains."

Nope. Blackberry has had battery life nailed for years and they're steadily losing market share in the U.S. I owned a Blackberry 9700 for a couple years and recently replaced it with an iPhone 4s. When using for a similar set of apps and voice calls, I get less than half the battery life I did with the Blackberry 9700.

I wrote a detailed comparison between these two devices (http://www.filterjoe.com/2011/12/23/blackberry-vs-iphone-4s-...) and there are actually a few ways Blackberry beats the iPhone 4s. The most important to me is voice call quality, where the difference is stark and impacts me every day.

Battery? I just keep it plugged in when I'm at home or at the office. Problem solved.

I believe that the Blackberry 9700 has a 624Mhz processor, 256MB or RAM, and a relatively low resolution 2.44" screen. The battery is about the same size as that of a modern smartphone, though (1500Mah).

I don't think it's fair to say that they have battery life nailed, as their approach to nailing it (low hardware specs) is one of several things that is killing them in the marketplace.

Fair point but the 9700 is over 2 years old - and when it came out it had better battery life than the competition. The 9900 which recently came out has better specs and still a good battery life. What's killing Blackberry IMO is that it's nowhere near as good a pocket computer as iPhone or high end Android devices. The apps are much more difficult to install and upgrade as far too many reboots are required. And the difficult app development environment means there are far fewer apps.

I think consumers have spoken: "We love great pocket computers and we're willing to sacrifice voice quality, battery life, and data efficiency to get it."

The 9700 is over 2 years old, but it had a smaller (much less power draw) screen and a slower CPU even by 2 year old Android/iPhone standards. The 9900 has better specs, but still has a small screen and a single-core CPU. If they fix those limitations, the battery life will likely drop to iPhone levels.

I don't really think they can be competitive in applications without fixing the hardware, though.

Right now, almost all LTE chips everyone is using are from Qualcomm. Qualcomm has voice features that integrate with their CPU's - without that you don't get voice over over the cell network. The MDM9600 in the "new" iPad is this way, so an even newer chip would be needed in an "iPhone 5":

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4925/why-no-lte-iphone-5-blame...

Right now, pretty much every 4G LTE phone has two entirely separate cell network chips, antennas, etc. which is the main reason battery life is so bad. When we get better integration of components and smaller chips, we'll get over the "bad battery life" hump.

That's a bit of a simplification. Because VoLTE is still being standardized, phones must keep multiple modems active and multiple receive portions of the transceiver ASIC powered on in order to be able to receive voice calls when on LTE. This can be mitigated some on UMTS, because I believe a LTE device can get paged over to WCDMA when a voice call comes in through CSFB, but that cannot be done with the current deployment in traditionally CDMA networks. There was a proposed standard for CSFB to CDMA 1x voice, but I don't think it was adopted by any of the carriers due to some concern with call setup delays and delays to being able to deploy LTE.

Aside from that, you're perfectly right about how power-hungry the current LTE implementations are, because they're early implementations. They will get better as time goes on, within reason.

Another thing that's probably hurting battery life right now is the relatively large size of LTE cells. While coverage is pretty good, if you're a long way from a cell tower your mobile has to transmit at a higher power.

Obviously it's good to focus on having as big as possible a battery in a device, and since the RAZR Maxx I thought all phones should have at least a 3000+ mAh battery, but it shouldn't be the #1 priority. Energy efficiency should be a higher priority than that.

The new iPad is just highly inefficient because of LTE, GPU and resolution. The chip is made at 45nm, so is the LTE one, and the resolution is very battery consuming.

I think you mean that the iPad is demanding on batteries because of the combo of LTE/GPU/Resolution.

Relative to most electronic devices (outside of some phones and specialized devices), it is a model of efficiency.

Actually, in most cases 4G (LTE) data should use less energy per bit to transfer your data than 3G. This may not be true for some of the early radios released since they are not as mature as 3G chipsets yet. It'll also take some time until the networks start using all power saving features available. But when devices and networks mature a little 4G should in general be more efficient.

However, since you get faster speeds you tend to use more data, which of course will use up your battery faster as well. But if you'll use it the same way you do today you'll just get faster access and should see about the same battery life, so there's nothing to be afraid of.

Poor 4g battery life is not a core property of the technology. The radios in current phones are still made on an outdated 45nm process. That will change to 28nm this year which will improve things quite a bit.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4925/why-no-lte-iphone-5-blame...

I can't imagine that it is the CPU, more likely the radio required for 4G.

I see this misconception propagated a lot - that process node only affects the AP's power draw in the main SoC.

This is a fallacy simply because the baseband is itself another SoC. Take the MDM6x00 family inside the iPhone 4 CDMA and iPhone 4S. Inside is an ARM1136 at up to 512 MHz, and two QDSP4000s at ~150 MHz for modem. It is an SoC itself, but for cellular, and thus moving from one process node to another will change power draw.

The fatter traces in some of the ASIC in the transceiver and the PAs after that front end is one thing, the power hungry baseband is another.

I have a Droid Bionic with 4G LTE.

I bought the extended battery right away.

However, I am considering going back to the regular one.

This phone has the best battery life of any I've used to this point. I come home at night with plenty of battery left.

Now of course this is anecdotal and YMMV.

I think apple's problem is fitting enough battery power in the iPhone form factor. You just can't go get an extended battery.

> This phone has the best battery life of any I've used to this point. I come home at night with plenty of battery left.

This is the singularly, most unbelievable thing I experience with my "new" smartphone (iPhone 3GS). I was used to going 1-2 weeks without charging my dumb phone -- Now I have to think about it every 1-2 days. My smart phone is great for internet, and is great as a phone; as long as I charge it every night.

In a way it's easier though. Now I instinctively remember to plug in my phone every night, whereas on a dumb phone I wouldn't have a good routine for charging it and would often have it die at inopportune times.

Heck I have to do the same with mine but really if you just plug it in before you go to bed it should be fine.

And if I really wanted longer battery time I could just pickup a dump phone with the contents of my small change jar.

Apple solved 4G (+retina) on the iPad with a 70% larger battery.

But I think they'll solve it differently on the iPhone ("4GS"?): using Cortex-A15 + PowerVR G6200 (Rogue), both drastically underclocked, to give the same performance (or slightly better) than now. The A15 has x2 the efficiency of the current A8; the G6200 is x5 (five) as efficient as the current SGX543. Performance does not seem to be particularly an issue since the 4S went double core, so instead "spend" this improvement on power consumption. It will be hard for tech-focused competitors to make this trade-off.

4G efficiency will also improve slightly (or maybe a breakthrough); perhaps a slight increase in battery; and they might even delay the next iPhone until 4G is efficient enough. After all, it has limited coverage so far (I was surprised they put it in the iPad, since it's of no benefit to most users so far).

I have the same phone (a year-and-a-half-old iPhone 4, I'm writing this comment on it now) and I can easily make it through a day on one charge. If I use my phone a little less, I can make it through about 40+ hours on a single charge. Maybe this guy just needs to turn his brightness down?

Any chance we'd see hot swappable batteries? (i.e. with a tiny backup battery to keep the phone running for a couple of minutes). I don't mind carrying a spare for my Galaxy s but I hate waiting for the boot.

Not quite as convenient as a hot-swap battery, but I carry one of these in my general bag: http://www.dabs.com/products/veho-vpp-002-ss-pebble-smartsti...

It holds enough for a full charge for my phone and extra. If they seem a bit steep keep a watch around special occasions as they (or identical devices) have been half price both last Christmas and the one before (when I bought mine).

There are models with larger capacity too, like http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.208-7092.aspx?utm_source=GoogleS...

While more hassle than a hot swap battery (while charging you've got a device hanging off your phone) they have the advantage of not being phone specific so can be used to charge a variety of devices rather than just being a spare for one.

Cool idea, I'd definitely make use of this feature it was available. However, I don't think we'll ever see it, manufacturers won't consider it something people want.

I agree that battery life is one of the most important aspects of smart-phone selection (or any mobile device) but I think the bigger issue is that China, one of the main suppliers of certain rare-earth metals used to mae modern high-performance batteries, is now choking the supply: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/business/global/20rare.htm....

You can buy spare phone batteries on eBay for $2 each. Carry one or two around with you (they're small, of course, since the phones are thin to begin with), and you're set. You'll likely need extra chargers for them too, so a little more money spend there, but eBay provides there as well.

Of course, iPhone users (such as myself) can't do this because the battery can't be easily removed.

Making the phones a bit thicker probably couldn't hurt at this point either...

I got a backup 2800 mAh micro usb charger for under $12 on Monoprice. Has worked just fine for all the times when it looked like I'd want a bit more charge.

Pretty cheap compromise to me.

Perhaps smartphones need to degrade gracefully to a dumb phone when battery hits 20%.

Blackberry devices do this. It is infuriating.

Yes, it would be infuriating wouldn't it?

That's interesting, because once a phone runs out of juice, is it because we tend to see it as "dead", and no longer fret over it. However - if it still runs, but with some disability, we'd be constantly reminded of our loss every time we made a phone call.

I don't understand these articles. There are TONS of people very happily using 4G phones right now. Sorry iOS users, you're just late to the party. My friends mocked me when I was excited about the 4G in the Galaxy Nexus I was buying. I bought the extended battery (still the thinnest phone I've seen save for my mom's RAZR) and it easily lasts me an abusive full day of use.

Combine that with the fact that many people work desk jobs or spend 20 minutes in the car at a time, it's not unreasonable at all to think that a 4G phone can last plenty of time.

I mean, sorry for the iOS comment, but the 4G/battery naysayers seem to always be coming from the iPhone angle and, my Galaxy Nexus gets only slightly worse battery life than my father's 3G iPhone and he only checks his email on it.

I've got a 4G phone. When I go out to the bars on the weekend, it NEVER NEVER NEVER makes it until the end of the night. Which, oddly enough, happens to be exactly when I'm most likely to need it to find friends and regroup from the chaos. (Even when I turn off data to try and stretch it out, it'll die..) My phone also gets buggy, and seems to flake out at the exact movement I actually need to text someone. I'm not buying another 4G/android phone again for a long time, I"m switching to a 3G iPhone for my next phone, hands down.

Yeah, my roommate has a 4g phone and has to charge it everyday after work... And he turned 4g OFF to save battery

This is a lot of words to pursue a false premise. There's nothing inherently more battery consuming about 4G. It's just the way the current phones chipsets are done.

This seems like an odd re-framing. You could make the same claim about any technical specification - e.g. there's nothing inherently more battery consuming about 10 petaFLOPS, it's just the way current hardware is done.

We can take it as given that any article talking about the weaknesses of a current technology is referring to its current hardware implementation.

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