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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

Batteries that last a week would be nice in current markets too! Not just emerging ones.

I personally still don't understand how flagship phones costing $100s barely make it through the day but still get rave reviews. I can't count the number of times Galaxy and iphone touting friends have become unreachable in the evenings because of this - I would have trashed those in a review, who cares about fancy features if you can't even call your friends on a night out because the battery doesn't make it past 10pm...

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I recently went camping in an area where there was no data reception. My iPhone 6+ still had 17% battery left after 5 days of using it like a normal phone (voice and SMS). Smartphones have short battery life because we do so much more with them. I'm sure those friends of yours could have made their phones last through to the end of the evening by switching off data once they hit 30% battery, but they preferred to have access to all that functionality that data provides, knowing there was a risk of running out of charge.

The point being, people have the power to make that choice with their current hardware, and they vote overwhelmingly to accept the lower battery life for higher functionality tradeoff.

I remember once when I was roaming at exhorbitant cost, I was regularly turning off data to save money and my battery life was greatly improved. I wish I could have finer control on the polling frequency and volume of most apps...

It should be doable to build an Android app that turns data on every X minutes. Does such a thing already exist ? Does it really help with battery ?

Tasker can do it, but it might require a rooted phone to be able to toggle the mobile data setting.

Personally, I tried to get it to do a "turn data on when I have the display on, otherwise turn data on every X minutes/hours", but handling all the corner cases was difficult.

Plus, programming in the Tasker UI is fiddly.

According to this [1] StackOverflow answer there is no API support for enabling/disabling mobile data, but it can be done using reflection. Process requires CHANGE_NETWORK_STATE permission.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12535101/how-can-i-turn-o...

Yes, and yes. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gyagapen.c...

It essentially disconnects data when screen is off (the algorithm is a bit more complex, but that's the basic idea). Especially in areas where my phone passes between 2G/3G/noSignal often, I see much improved battery life.

This is one of the major things that JuiceDefender on Android phones did, though the app has apparently been abandoned (last updated more than 3 years ago). I suspect that there are newer apps doing the same things, at least on rooted phones.

JuiceDefender does this. It can also disable Bluetooth until you start to make a call, and other tricks. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.latedroid....

Sony Xperia devices have a Stamina mode that turns off data and wifi right after the screen is turned off. Big difference in battery life if one is not really interested in push notifications, etc.

+1 for this, my z3 compact with stamina mode on lasts almost a full week(!) even though i do a few calls, check emails, browse a bit etc. Performance while using it actively is still 100%, so not like many other lame battery saving modes that reduces the frame rate to 1fps and brightness to 0.01% making the phone unusable.

Only drawback is that background downloads get canceled when the screen dies but i don't have any downloads outlasting my active usage sessions anyway so i don't care really. Many people wouldn't like missing the push notifications from the mailbox but for me that is just another good reason to activate it.

It's true that it's a tradeoff, I just don't understand why people put up with this, why it's apparently still more desirable to shave 0.5mm of the thickness rather than have more reliable power. Or my pet peeve - reviewers who compare 2 phones with high density screens and clearly state that you can't see pixels with the naked eye on either one... then proceed to mark down the one with fewer pixels, even though it would be more power efficient.

If this is how reviews go, it's not surprising we see impractical tradeoffs.

Quite simply because longer-life phones would get trashed even more for not having the features they traded to get longer battery life.

Imagine what the reviews would be if the next iPhone is twice as thick and double the weight. That it goes 3 days without a charge for most people would be a footnote to an otherwise poor review.

That's because the reviewers - and users - have been conditioned to think that thinner and lighter is the ultimate feature, even if it means sacrificing a ton of other things. The less material in a device the less it costs to make, and the more fragile it tends to be, meaning more profit for the producer. It's all about the marketing - convincing the consumers in the direction the companies want, so they can extract more money from them.

For a good example of this look at the new "portless wonder" Macbook and all the controversy around it...

With smartphones, the fact that I've seen many people put theirs in huge thick cases - and some of those cases have batteries too - indicates that we've probably passed the point of optimal size already. Personally I find it hard to pick one up or hold it comfortably by the edges if it's below ~10mm in thickness.

The irony of course is that after the Apple engineering team spends months trimming off that extra millimeter of thickness, most of their users still go out and get an otterbox that triples the thickness.

Of course, even if they designed an iPhone only twice as thick with triple the battery life and no need for a case, it would still be panned.

That's not really irony, is it? A thinner phone in an Otterbox is still thinner than a thicker phone in an Otterbox. Also, there are plenty of people (myself included) who do not use cases, and instead prevent their phones from being damaged by not dropping them. I suspect that "most users" do not use a case anywhere near the thickness of an Otterbox.

Also, the lower weight makes the phone more resilient to drops. Anecdotal evidence: I've never seen a cracked iPhone 5, but cracked iPhone 4's were common.

Less volume means less mass, which means less kinetic energy that must be absorbed by the frame when dropped on the floor.

Thin and light phones don't need a protective case like thick and heavy phones do.

iPhone 6 models in my workplace (sample size 2000/12000) are about 4x more likely to break than 5/5s models.

Interesting. I remember people complaining that the iPhone 6 was slippery, and of course it is heavier than the 5/5s. Do you also have numbers for 4/4s and 6 vs. 6 plus?

We don't have a lot of 6+. We may deploy more later as iPad Minis age out. FWIW, I dropped mine from a belt clip to the pavement and it shattered -- my first dead iPhone ever, and I've dropped my phones dozens of times from the 3gs up.

5/5s was better than 4/4s, but not dramatically so.

The irony is that the iPhones are designed to be broken from falls so that consumers are motivated to buy new cases.

Anecdotal (as an iOS dev), yes, but how hard would it be to add back a fraction of a mm in casing above the screen to protect from falls?

The irony being people then have to shove them in massive cases, often with built-in extra batteries, because the thin phones are vulnerable and have crap battery life.

iphone and android battery life are heavily dependent on use.

the typical user has wifi on, bluetooth on, full brightness, taking and 4G-uploading photos and videos, browsing the web and messaging non-stop for hours on end. let's not forget the ridiculous gaggle of background apps that track everything constantly. oh, and it's a phone.

try not doing any of that, and you'll find that your phone lasts for 2 or 3 days just fine. i've stretched it for longer than that when i'm on vacation and need only analog cell and text messages.

There are plenty of phones which last a week or 4, usually in packages smaller than the average smartphones and costing a fraction of the price (without subsidies, because $100 is not the unsubsidised price of a flagship phone, it's off by a factor of 5 to 10).

The smart part being the one that's missing, you can't power multiple radio antennas and systems (GSM, GPS, bluetooth, WIFI, ...) for 4 weeks, let alone multiple antenna bound to a gigantic, bright and power hungry screen and a CPU which wouldn't have been out of place in a desktop computer 10 years back which keeps being woken up to fetch new data. We just don't have the battery technology.

Hell, if you just shut off all the smart part off and keep the thing in your pocket without powering the screen you'll get multiple days out of the average smartphone easy. No reason to buy one though, you can just get a $20 candybar it'll do the job better.

> I can't count the number of times Galaxy and iphone touting friends have become unreachable in the evenings because of this - I would have trashed those in a review, who cares about fancy features if you can't even call your friends on a night out because the battery doesn't make it past 10pm…

Well that's great, you've got your priorities and they've got theirs. Nobody's forcing you to get a smartphone.

You can buy them for less than $20. I bought a refurbished Tracfone LG 505C about 2 years ago. I use it daily. The battery lasts about a week.

Edit: I paid $9.99 for the phone.

Exactly. I carry two phones - feature phone for, you know, calling people, and a smartphone for its apps (perpetually in airplane mode). The bonus is that if I happen to run out of battery in feature phone (which still happens, though rarely), I can still stick my SIM card in a smartphone. Also, both phones last much longer this way.

I must admit I've never had this problem, but I do leave my phone to charge most of the time.

You can, however, pick up a phone with long battery life if you want. The Nokia 106 for example – specced for over a month on standby, 10 hours talking.

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