I’m testing out a Motorola DROID II
from the good folks at Verizon Wireless PR (very rare to write a sentence that includes both “good folks” and the name of a mobile phone carrier!). By 6:30 pm the phone is squawking “plug me into a charger”, though my usage is not terribly heavy. I’m wondering why smartphones are designed with such wimpy batteries. Is it so that they will seem sleek when consumers are playing around with them in the store? And only after they’ve signed away their souls for two years do they realize that the phone cannot be used as advertised?
[An interesting peeve with this phone is that when you’re capturing a video and a new email arrives, the phone plays a loud “new email” alert over its speaker…. which is promptly picked up by the microphone and added to the video for all time. I would have expected that a low-priority alert such as this could be held by the phone for the typical minute or two that a customer might be spending making a video clip. Are the iPhone and Blackberry OSes smarter about this than Android?]
The iPhone does indeed suppress notifications during video recording.
Hey, Philip,
I’ve noticed my iphone’s battery runs down much faster when I’m further away from a strong network signal. I assume the phone boosts it’s receiver under such conditions.
Are you currently in the sticks?
Jeffrey
Jeffrey: The Sticks? I don’t think my Millionaires for Obama neighbors would classify our town quite that way. And they certainly support the construction of mobile phone towers so as to provide all Americans with access to secure and reliable communication… as long as none of those towers are built in our town. Thus the nearest towers are about five miles away in neighboring suburbs. Inside our house we have a little bit of Verizon coverage, a tiny bit of AT&T, and none from T-Mobile.
You can permanently turn off notifications’ sound in Settings -> Sound. All notifications will still show up in the notifications bar.
Poor battery bothers me as well, especially now that we converge so many devices in a small phone. Of course there’s no incentive for the manufacturers to come up with bigger batteries: small devices are sexier and the small batteries are cheaper to manufacture. With current technology this won’t change unless consumers change their behavior and I don’t think there’s much chance for that, I remember people making fun of the bigger devices all the time, starting with the original Nokia Communicator. Even Pocket Loox T830 which is a smartphone from 2006 in many ways still unmatched (can anybody point me to a current windows mobile smartphone with usb host?) was said to be a good “badger deterrent” in respect to its weight and form factor (both not that bad IMHO). If more heftier devices would be accepted on the market this would pave the way to much more capable devices, for example with cameras that don’t suck so much.
Now for the coverage: most drain from poor signal is caused by 2G-3G handovers that require quite a bit of power to negotiate (especially when you’re far from the tower). This can be kept under control by forcing 2G-only (if acceptable).
I don’t mind the notification sound, it just adds a bit of “real life” to the recording; even if you would use the most expensive recorder you would still hear the notifications from all the phones that aren’t muted around you, phones ringing and so on. Of course YMMV.
Jeffrey is right in that all phones boost radio power when coverage is weak. BlackBerrys’ are highly customizable about notifications. I’m sure Android has some setting, perhaps not the default, that lets you turn off aural notifications.
To the main point, most phones have less battery capacity due to weight and size for pocket use. You could always carry a spare battery unlike the iPhone.
Phil, I’m guessing your question is rhetorical, but my *guess* as to why mobile phone companies and carriers ship with really wimpy batteries is similar to why competitive athletes aggressively purge before “making weight” — to be able to claim really low device weights in their marketing materials.
I’m sure that under some very specific, limited usage pattern, the device can achieve the advertised battery life with the wimpy battery they market with. But, real-world usage? Never. Ever. But, claiming “only X ounces light!” with the standard 1500 mAh battery and “gets over Y minutes of stand-by and Z minutes of talk time!” helps sell product, and it’s an arms race between devices.
What this really says is that the market needs a disruptive technology to come along that can store more juice in a lighter, smaller form factor. Simply increasing weight and thus battery capacity isn’t going to really work, since consumers are already expecting devices at the current form factor and weight.
Time for a new battery startup?
Folks: Thanks for the tips on how to turn off notifications. I was aware that it was possible to disable them permanently, but that’s not what I want. I would like to get “new email” notifications EXCEPT when I’m talking on the phone or making a video or doing something else where an extra noise is predictably unwelcome.
Dossy: I buy into your theory to some extent, except that in the laptop world the consumer is able to choose between the lightest possible weight and a reasonable battery life. The same laptop can be purchased from the vendor with different-sized batteries. So Dell, for example, can advertise “only 4 lbs” but then let the customer bump it up to 4.5 lbs. and enjoy a full day of usage.
Oh, sorry, Philip, I didn’t realize you were at home. I thought perhaps you were out gallivanting around. Sounds like you have a NIMBY-challenged network there at your residence. Maybe the new Motorola is like the new iPhone, and you’re just holding it wrong. With the model development cycle of phones being so short, one has to wonder if they go through enough QA before being released, with Steve Jobs’ latest iPhone being a notable example. How could that phone have made it all the way through production and have reception problems? Sometimes the manufacturers get it right with batteries. I’m simply stunned at the battery life on my Cannon SLR I purchased in 2008. The ‘li-ion’ battery in it is rated at 1080mAh, and it drives the flash, servos and electronics in this camera for longer than I would have thought possible.
Jeffrey
The iPhone 4 easily makes it through the day plus a good part of the next, even with fairly moderate usage. For all the valid criticism of Apple, they got the iPhone 4 right in many ways (sadly, the “phone” part is not one of them). A good portion of the phone’s footprint is actually a big lithium polymer battery.
I’ve been looking at Android phones also, and was thinking I would just have to resign myself to plugging into a car charger when driving and USB while in the office, just to keep it running non-stop.
Earlier cell phones did have an option to buy an “extended battery”, my first Motorola could switch to a battery that was an extra 1/4″ deep, sticking out the back. Very much like today’s notebooks.
One item I’ve seen, but don’t know if it would really help: Duracell sells a LiIon battery with a USB port. The idea is that you just plug into that to top your electronics off. Just looked at Amazon, seems to get good reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Duracell-Instant-Charger-Lithium-universal/dp/B002FU6KF2
============
I’m still blown away by all the technology packed into a smartphone. At least four radios: 2g/3g/4g?, gps, wifi, bluetooth. Plus all those nifty sensors.
You say your are “testing” it. That likely means “more than normal” usage. If I were to take my iPhone 4, and spend several hours recording video, playing games, surfing the net and watching movies, I wouldn’t expect it to last the day either. When I just got it, I used it late afternoon to shoot about 20 minutes of video (edited down to under 4) of flying my friend Garry’s R44 over the Adelaide Hills and Riverlands. After that exercise, there wasn’t too much charge left in it.
Under normal use, it lasts me up to two days. (though I usually plug it in overnight)
If you are using it as you would normally use a phone right now and it still runs out of batteries before dinner, I would be worried. (About you or the phone, I am not sure.)
I can’t believe I’m advocating for Blackberry. But on both the battery power and the “don’t notify me when I’m doing something damnit” counts, their phones are decent.
The trade offs: you can tinker & play w your Android phone endlessly & heaven knows there are tons of applications for it. BB has nutty UI but for phone calls, email and note taking it’s surprisingly competent.
There’s a healthy secondary market supplying high capacity batteries, both with and without extended cases, for most smartphones. The best part about upgrading the battery is carrying the charged original in your wallet. More than doubles your effective battery life.