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posted by cmn32480 on Monday July 01 2019, @02:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-a-charge-out-of-life dept.

An article from c|net has their list of 5 Phones with the Best Battery Life:

From 5G and folding displays to pop-up cameras and in-screen fingerprint readers, this year has been a dynamic time for phones. But whether or not these technological trends are here to stay, one phone feature always ranks at the top of the list for users: a long battery life.

Now that we've reached the middle of 2019, it's time to take a look at some of the best phones so far. After all, the last thing you want is for your phone to run out of juice when you need it most. Usually, a phone lasts a full workday with moderate use. But if you use it heavily, you'll need to recharge it more often. Batteries also lose steam over time, running down faster the longer you've owned the phone. The possibility of losing battery -- and therefore losing your communication hub -- is frightening and real.

If you feel your phone's battery seems to be stuck in the '90s and doesn't last as long as you'd like, you're not alone. So if a long-life battery tops your list of needs, check out these top-scorers -- they lasted impressively long during our lab tests for continuous video playback on Airplane mode.

Wait. In Airplane mode? So that means that there are no radio circuits active. No phone calls. No internet (LTE or Wi-Fi). That makes these results questionable for real-world use, but it may be somewhat indicative of comparative longevity. With that caveat, what were their results?

Apple iPhone XR:
19 hours and 53 minutes
Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus:
21 hours
[*] Samsung Galaxy S10:
18 hours
Huawei P30 Pro:
22 hours and 57 minutes
[*] Huawei P30:
21 hours and 31 minutes
Samsung Galaxy Note 9:
19 hours and 20 minutes
LG V50 ThinQ:
17 hours and 49 minutes

[*] Related model that was also tested.

I do not use FaceBook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social media site (except SoylentNews, of course). I also use my phone as a local hotspot to get on the internet when at home -- but it is usually in my charger when doing that. Further, I activated all the battery-saving measures I could find. That said, I generally have about 50% charge left on my Galaxy S7 at day's end.

How does your phone usage and logevity stack up?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 01 2019, @04:01PM (2 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday July 01 2019, @04:01PM (#861998) Journal

    Wait. In Airplane mode? So that means that there are no radio circuits active. No phone calls. No internet (LTE or Wi-Fi). That makes these results questionable for real-world use, but it may be somewhat indicative of comparative longevity.

    Okay, I normally wouldn't post about this, as linguistic usage is a mess, and I normally just go with the flow. But the editorial comment makes me want to register a final objection about English word usage before I just retire this bit of pedantry, since these arguments are generally useless.

    A "phone" or telephone is a word coming from Greek roots including -phone, meaning "voice" or "sound." This article is NOT about phones or phone battery life: it is about so-called mobile "smartphones," which are almost never used as phones anymore.

    I have multiple people in my extended family who own phones. Not smartphones -- telephones. They don't use them for anything other than voice calls. Some of them own mobile phones without a monthly plan -- they just pay by the minute. Their phones are simplistic and cheap, but they work fine for voice calls. Their batteries last a fairly long time. Many people in my family also have land lines, with PHONES. Those phones (not mobile phones) are almost all cordless and also have batteries, which last a fairly long time.

    I mention this because an editor complaining about using airplane mode brings up the real tension here -- what exactly should the metric be for "phones" these days? I recall reading cell phone reviews online 15 years ago, and when it came to battery life, they would generally give stats for battery life during calls (how many minutes) vs. when inactive/sleep or whatever. That was it. These were reviews of PHONES.

    I have a smartphone and have had various ones for a decade now. I almost only use them as phones, and that means I use them increasingly rarely, since only people above the age of 60 or so tend to make voice calls anymore as a preferred method of communication. I would tend to only turn navigation on very occasionally when I was lost (as I don't see the need to be tracked continuously all the time by my phone). I would occasionally make use of it for checking email or looking something up on the internet when I wasn't near a wi-fi network and needed info immediately. But when I say "occasionally," I mean maybe briefly once per week or something. In general, by default, I just avoided the whole problem of apps doing weird crap by just having mobile data OFF by default all the time.

    Given that usage pattern, my phone battery generally lasts over a week, and that's been standard for years. If you're going to review battery usage for a PHONE, perhaps that's how we should think about it.

    (Admittedly, in the past year or so, I have been using my phone more for other tasks, partly due to the fact that my tablet I previously used for other non-voice-call things -- since it has a much superior form factor for most tasks -- is getting older and slower, and I haven't bothered replacing it.)

    Anyhow, here in TFA we have a benchmark for "phones" that actually turns off the phone part of the "phone" to determine battery life. The article begins by talking about cool "phone features" like pop-up cameras and in-screen fingerprint readers.

    I have nothing against smartphones. I didn't even object to the term when it first started being used for devices that were still primarily thought of as phones. I do dislike being with a group of people who seemingly can never disconnect from them, but in general, I recognize their utility. I prefer a tablet since the size seems more reasonable for almost every non-voice-call task, but to each his/her own.

    But TFA simply omits the "mobile" and "smart" descriptors and just claims to talk about "phones." TFA is not about phones though. Very few people use them as phones, and when they do, it's probably less than 1% of their usage time.

    It's likely too late for English usage, but can we just come up with another word for these pocket computers??? Rather than just dropping "smart-" from them, and calling them something they're not? Then again, phone terminology is one of the most laden with archaicisms in the English language. When have you last used a phone with a dial to "dial" a phone number? When have you last had a hook up on a wall somewhere where you would "hang up" your phone when done with a call? And now, absurdly, we're going to be stuck for eternity puzzling over why we have a "phone" (again, from Greek word for "voice" or "sound"), which in olden times was called a "telephone" ("tele-" meaning over a distance) to watch a silent video in airplane mode (hence playing local content)...

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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday July 01 2019, @04:22PM

    by acid andy (1683) on Monday July 01 2019, @04:22PM (#862019) Homepage Journal

    It's likely too late for English usage, but can we just come up with another word for these pocket computers??? Rather than just dropping "smart-" from them, and calling them something they're not?

    We already have other words. Palmtop would be my first preference. Personal Digital Assistant sounds too pretentious to me. I don't find "smartphone" too objectionable (as a term, that is. I find the devices increasingly objectionable due to all the data mining) as I consider it important to know whether a device can connect to a mobile network or not (If it can, it can phone home when I don't want it to). I understand where you're coming from though.

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 01 2019, @04:23PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 01 2019, @04:23PM (#862021) Journal

    One thing to recognize is that a smartphone with a bigger battery could perform worse than a smartphone with a smaller battery, if there is a problem with the OS. Samsung and others customize Android with their own software and proprietary features.

    The way to compare them is probably to take them out of the box, fully charge them, and run the same task(s) on all of them until the battery is fully depleted. And you may have to retest the same phones for years in order to do new comparisons.

    Testing in airplane mode removes pesky variables even if it is not a typical usage scenario. What if you try to play YouTube videos as your test? Two phones could receive the packets differently even if they are being used at the same time inches away from each other. If you use them at different times, YouTube could be serving content faster or slower. Etc. Playing a downloaded movie on loop should produce a result based primarily on the battery size, ARM SoC used, and display power consumption.

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