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Comment by cloakandswagger | Hacker News Reader

Everywhere I go I see people charging their phones: at work, at the airport, in coffee shops, in the subway station..

Modern consumers seem to be perfectly fine with trading all-day battery life for better display, and manufacturers are perfectly fine with the higher margins that come with better displays.

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"Modern consumers seem to be perfectly fine with trading all-day battery life for better display"

No, they're not. Plenty of people bitch about how frequently they need to charge their phone, and only tech-savvy people realise how large of a factor screen choice is on this battery drain.

you've got that backwards, bigger phones with bigger screens also have longer battery life. The increase in battery capacity by using a larger case is more than the decrease due to the extra screen space which needs to be lit up.

Not true though is it. Let's use the Nexus line as a case in point. Galaxy Nexus, great phone, terrible battery life. Nexus 4, another solid phone, bigger screen, bad battery life. Nexus 5, the pattern repeats again. Thankfully Motorola tend to understand battery life better than most and have bumped the mAh specs up nicely on the Nexus 6.

Or put a different way, default Nexus 4 battery was 2100mAh, default Nexus 5 battery was 2300mAh. People were already complaining about battery life on the Nexus 4, so why did they only bump up the battery capacity by so little for the Nexus 5? For comparison, note that a phone known for great battery life, Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, came with a 3300mAh battery and was still a slim phone.

My point is, just because it's the right thing to do to bump up battery life when using a bigger screen, doesn't mean that the manufacturers will go far enough when doing so.

As a tech-savvy person I'm not so certain about that. For example I see processors simultaneously get faster and more efficient year after year.

Do we have any hard data on this? What is the power draw of a 720p display vs a 1080p or 1440p display? A cursory google search doesn't bring up much.

As I understand it, the proof is how tightly they pack the pixels. If you need a stronger backlight to illuminate the screen, and more power to push all the pixels, it stands to reason that a more detailed screen e.g. 1080p instead of 720p, in the same form factor, is going to use considerably more battery. It's part of the reason why the iPhone 6 does better in battery life tests without gimmicks to extend the battery life as the phone hits Low Battery warnings, the screen's resolution is just over 720p instead of the Nexus 5's comparable 1080p screen. This difference is highlighted by how the Nexus 5 had a 2300 mAh battery while the iPhone 6 has merely 1810 mAh, 20% smaller. In battery tests for the 1080p Nexus 5, under L, it lasts roughly 8 hours. The iPhone 6 gets about the same playing movies, maybe two hours longer otherwise. I'd argue the screen plays a huge role in this.

Do you have an Android phone? If you go to the settings you can look up battery usage. As a general rule of thumb, battery usage is the top consumer of battery capacity. For example, on my GNex I've just checked the battery usage, screen is at 52% (and that's on a very low brightness setting, low enough that I don't bother using it outside).

A trade implies choice. What are the phones with amazing battery life? There are some DROID phones (MAXX, etc.), but is that it?

The newest Blackberry phones (Passport, Z30) have excellent battery life as well, far surpassing a full day's use, under heavy usage.

Passport display is 4.5" w/ 453 PPI

Old Blackberry phones are renowned for their battery life. If that's truly your chief concern then I would look into buying one.

From reading reviews of the BB Passport it sounds like new Blackberries are too - just be sure to avoid the middle ground, the last few years they haven't been good at all.

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