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I was very skeptical of Google Now originally, and disabled it after a week on the Nexus S. It never gave any useful info, and indeed made it unlikely the battery would last the day.

But with the Nexus 4 I left it on, and have been finding it useful regularly ever since. Zero-action directions and timetables for getting home after a night out. Directions to local places I've recently searched for on maps. The automatic "hey, you need to leave now for this event" notifications. And yes, the whole experience with taking a trip outlined in the post feels closer to magic than any other technology product ever.

At this point I'd probably leave Google Now on even if there were issues with battery life. But I'm easily getting 3-4 days per charge, so it's a total non-issue. (Right now I'm at 41% battery, with 3 days 3 hours since the last recharge).

Yes, very early on in my use of my Nexus 7, Google Now pointed out that there was a concert coming up for a band that I love in my city. Bought a ticket right then. Would have been disappointed to miss the show.

That's not a very location-aware use case (at least not GPS-granular-location-aware), but I dig Google Now for that kind of thing. Also when it shows me when my wife's flight is delayed or something, all because she forwarded me a flight itinerary from her travel agent. One of those things that seems like magic--which is kinda silly because like most folks here I obviously get what the code probably looks like. But still seems like magic. I think that's what I like about Google Now--the little bits of occasional delight that it pushes down to me.

Right. The magic is, when you search for example, some place, Later you will be surprised your phone pushes some notifications about the weather of that place, how and how long time to get there...

You don't need to tell google where you want to go or what info you need, Google Now provide all necessary or maybe-useful info to you automatically. But yes you can trigger it off.

And it is not so smart as we except, kinda like AI. I hope it will be the REAL personal assistant, not just like Siri, you have to send order before it acts as smart.

Three days of battery life on the Nexus 4? That sounds like a dream. Do you put it on airplane mode when you're not using it or something?

No, it always has a WiFi or HSPA data connection, and I haven't disabled any of the usual suspects (e.g. syncing or location services). Of course the display is off most of the time, and that's the big battery hog. The screen is on maybe an average of half an hour a day.

That’s a nice trick, making the battery last longer by not using the phone. I’ll try it myself.

shrug. That's my usage pattern. I find it hard to imagine having the screen on for more than that on an average day, even if the phone is in active use more than that (e.g. when listening to podcasts, or taking a GPS trace during a workout). And of course there's the passive use of just having it constantly syncing. With previous Nexus devices just the passive background noise of Android was often enough to use up the battery in a day.

He could be running long term processes in the background. You don't know :3

I had to laugh at this :)

I would agree with that. I get great battery life from my Nexus 4, around 3 to 4 days.

I get great battery life with my iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus when I don't use them for 3 or 4 days...

iPhone5 requires charging at home, work and in the car. I maintain on average about 80% battery.

With my usage patterns the battery would probably last an entire work day on a single charge, but I have heard this is not the best way to run the battery.

My perspective on smart phones changed hugely when I recently travelled to a new city. Suddenly all of the features which I had paid little to no attention to before, such as maps, directions, business search, and recommendations, all became crucial. It's the difference between going to a crap restaurant and being overcharged, just because you're not a local and don't know these things, and going to a place which serves great food at a good price. The better your phone is at this sort of seamless deduction, the smoother your travel experience is and the more you can focus on more important problems. So for me it's an efficiency problem, one which is only going to become more important as international travel and tourism increase.

I'd argue that the existence of "Hotel Tonight" implies that other people lead lives different from yours. :)

(Maybe not "most", but enough!)

> Yet the problem with your phone doing all of this location-aware intelligence is that you wind up with the dead-battery he started his article out with.

Unlikely. The main culprits in high battery usage are the screen, the gps, and the radio when there's not very much signal. Google Now does not ever show up in my top-five battery users list.

An app itself doesn't use much battery unless it's doing something CPU intensive. Android reports the actual thing that was using the battery. For example, if I watch YouTube until my battery's dead, it won't say YouTube used the battery, it will say the screen did.

That is not actually true, because YouTube is quite CPU intensive. If you perform the experiment you just proposed, you will find YouTube has used a significant portion of the battery. But I see what you mean.

You could also try this: if Google Now is waking your phone up any significant portion of the time, it'll show up in the list as a low percentage app. You can click on it to see how much time it's keeping the CPU awake, keeping the screen on, using the GPS, etc. I believe Google Now processing is accounted to the Google Search app (because that is where all its output shows up). On my phone, which has Google Now enabled, it shows zero active time for GPS, screen awake, CPU, etc.

Actually, Now's time goes under Maps- at least the location services, which are the big draw. I have all of the tracking enabled, and maps uses between 20 and 30% of my overall.

Oh, in that case, yeah, it is using a fair amount for me too -- don't get me wrong, I'm still at 85% after charging it this morning, but maps is showing about 30% of that.

Lucky :) Even if I don't use my phone at all, it'll be below 80% by this time, and Maps & co seem to be a major culprit, since Now keeps on chugging even when the phone hasn't woken in a long time.

Interestingly, GSam battery monitor (which I just got last week, and is really neat!) shows the number of times each app woke the device. I've been on for 4.5 hours, and Maps is at 441, with the next Android System at 85 and Google Search (which is Now) at 53.

Android System has also shown up more in usage % since I started having Now.

I think there's definitely a significant drain with Now. I've had it enabled since the Verizon release, somewhere around 12/20, but I think I will disable it at the start of next month and keep an eye on how it behaves. I certainly feel that my battery life has gone down since the upgrade.

Isn't that what he said?

He's saying he doesn't think Google Now uses much power because it doesn't shown up in the battery statistics, but he also says that GPS shows high usage. I was saying that Android doesn't report an app's usage of GPS etc. as battery usage of that app.

Does Google Now even use GPS? Passive wifi/cell tower location will probably work for almost every feature I can recall.

Not on the HTC Evo LTE (Basically the One X). When it got Jellybean battery life too a nose dive. I often see Maps accounting for 70% of the battery usage with Google Now.

Now doesn't kill your battery and although some Androids don't have as good battery as the iphone, many are just as good and some are much better. Honestly if battery is the only thing holding you back, get a Razr Maxx and enjoy double the battery of an iphone. I'm still using an HTC Sensation with Cyanogen/Jellybean and I get about 2 days of battery with moderate use.

In any case, the article's use case is just one example. In general the interoperability and the deep integration allowed by android provides many great features that long time apple users just don't even realize they are missing.

Sharing anything between apps is one perfect example and by itself is reason enough for me to never consider iOS ever again.

> In my life, I don't ever anticipate winding up in a new city without knowing where I was going to sleep that night beforehand.

You're only one missed flight away from that happening. My wife and I were in that exact situation a year ago in Europe. AirBnB saved our butts on that occasion, but an app with preloaded data that was just checking availability on the (extortionate roaming) internet would have been invaluable.

I see both sides. I agree with you, I'm the same in that I plan very accordingly and would probably go crazy if I was in a "Hotel Tonight" situation. However, I like to know that if I was ever (somehow) in a "Hotel Tonight" situation, the app is there and ready to use for my convenience.

To add to your battery life point, I wish there was more exposure to how apps eat battery life on your iPhone. It would be nice if Apple somehow exposed that to the user to see where and how apps are eating up your battery life. I know there is some apps out there that sort of tell you, but no where near the level of details I think Apple should expose.

I'm the exact opposite. The anxiety I get from needing to stick to a regiment/ itinerary destroys me. One of my favorite parts of travelling (to cities like LA/ NY where Hotel Tonight is relevant) is hopping off a plane, heading straight to a meeting, and figuring out where to sleep on the fly.

There's definitely other kinds of people out there!

I feel like it's worth pointing out that Android makes this kind of information easy to get to - BetterBatteryStats[1] and GSam Battery Monitor[2] are both amazing in tracking down and fixing power leaks.

I think that this is sort of the core of the Android vs iOS difference; iOS says "don't worry about it, trust us to get it right", and Android says "here's enough rope to hang yourself with, but you can also use it to climb out of that pit if you want".

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.asksven.be... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.b....

Apple makes it very easy to create location aware reminders. So I don't think this is the problem you think it is.

I'd argue that Apple makes it possible to create location-aware reminders, but not necessarily "very easy."

Say I want to set up a reminder to pick up some dish soap next time I'm near my neighborhood grocery store. I could open the "Reminders" app and try to do it, but that only works if the store is in my address book for some reason or I know the address. Otherwise I have to search for the grocery store in Safari or Maps, copy the address and paste it into the "address" field for that reminder.

So I've learned my lesson - next time I open the Apple Maps app and search for my neighborhood grocery store, thinking I'll add a reminder from there. But you can't.

Software is super hard, and I get that, and I still love and use geofenced reminders every day. But this particular set of interactions is too complicated for, say, my mom - who just got her first iPhone (and smartphone) - to use, which makes it kind of a problem.

It's very easy in Siri: "Remind me to take out the trash when I get home."

Arbitrary locations aren't easy, but the fixed "work" and "home" ones are... and for the purposes of this discussion, they all use the same battery life.

You really use geofenced reminders every day? I've found them useful once in a while but every day seems excessive. Maybe you were being sarcastic, it's hard to tell.

I have one that reminds me to check-in to GymPact when I go to the gym, and then I set reminders like my example above a couple of times per week probably. I definitely wasn't intending to be sarcastic but probably could have expressed that better.

there is also an App called Travelload which agregates all necessary travelling information and compiles it in a handy list.

Those location aware reminders are not so helpfull imho, if I am in a hurry switching trains, or afraid that there might be a traffic jam, or unsure at which gate my plane departs. Must take hours to prepare those with location aware reminders esp. in such huge areas like airports.

Isn't the problem that your phone should make the reminders for you?