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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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?

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.

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.

I had to laugh at this :)

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

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.

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