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Comment by mainframed | Hacker News Reader

As an owner of a Samsung Galaxy S22, which is not small but seemed to me like the only sane size - feature - price balance on the Android market back then: maybe the reason is battery life?

I'm really underwhelmed by the one of the S22. I barely get a day out of it. When I'm travelling with Google Maps, I have to carry a power bank.

Maybe current android phones are just optimized so bad in comparison to iPhones? And increasing device size allows for a proportionally larger battery size.

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The Asus Zenphone 9 is basically the same size, and two years into it I still average 25-45% battery usage from rising to sleeping for the night. GSam says average per complete battery charge is 2d 16.2h, and Screen On is 11h 58m with an observed maximum of 8 hours 30m.

So battery life and a smallish phone are completely compatible with each other.

Most likely you have the Exynos CPU? I upgraded from a S21 Ultra (Exynos) to a S23 Ultra (Snapdragon).

Battery life is so much better. I use the 80% battery protection option and nearly always make it through the day. Only if I constantly watch videos the battery is flat in the evening.

With power saving and 100% battery I can reach 2 1/2 to 3 days. Loving it.

Doesn't have to be Exynos. The US version has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which had heating and battery drain issues. The Gen 2 solved these issues.

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 solved it by switching to a better TSMC node. The Gen 2 increased performance (on the same node) and got again somewhat less efficient.

Surely with modern processor efficiency, they could get similar or better battery life as small phones of the 2010s? Thinking lovingly of the form factor of the 2013 Moto X.

Yes! That first generation Moto X was the premature peak of the small Android phone. After that everything just got bigger and increasingly less beautiful.

The Moto X 2013 was awesome. It already had some modern smartphone features (AMOLED, always listen phrase) And it was so comfortable in-hand. The Moto X 2014 was already a pretty big regression in that regard (then Lenovo bought Motorola from Google and updates went down the drain as well).

The S22 is notorious for the poor battery life. The S23, for example, is pretty much the same size, faster, and the battery lasts significantly longer.

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