I finally couldn’t live with my Samsung Galaxy S7 due to the limited battery life, though I think that was mostly due to a combination of (a) apps I had loaded, and (b) Android’s willingness to let any app do whatever it wants, including run the battery down. Among other things I wanted a bigger battery and inherent toddler-proofing.
Samsung has released the S7 Active, which has… 33 percent more battery capacity and a toddler-proof package: dpreview. Only on the AT&T network, unfortunately.
[Separately, given the mindset of many app programmers (“My App is the Most Important”), I don’t see how Android can ever compete against iPhone without somehow putting every app on a power budget. It seems to be the case that iOS will protect the owner against an app that wants to run every 15 seconds in the background but Android will not. Apple at least bothered to ask the question “How should a battery-powered device’s operating system be different from that on a device that plugs into the wall?” Here’s some email from a friend who loves his Samsung S7 and is willing to put some effort into it:
Regarding your S7 battery-drain post from last month: I just discovered that the mediocre battery life on my Note 5 was because the phone wasn’t going into deep sleep mode when idle. Using the CPU Spy app, I discovered that the phone wouldn’t sleep with Bluetooth enabled, and tracked the problem down to my Pebble or Health apps (or some interaction between them).
After reinstalling everything, I have deep sleep working properly and it makes a huge difference–essentially zero battery drain when the phone is idle (despite having WiFi, BT, GPS, etc turned on, my Pebble watch connected, and various social-media apps standing by for messages).
… [one day later]
Speaking of debugging effort, it turns out I’d mis-identified the source of the BT wakelock. It wasn’t the Pebble or fitness apps; after some web-searching, I found out it’s the CVS app.
CVS recently installed BT beacons in their stores to bombard your phone with ads about products you’re standing near. Apparently they decided it’s a good idea to keep your phone from ever sleeping, lest you miss a nearby ad. No matter if you’re not even in CVS, or not even using the app–it autostarts, and runs all the time.
It turns out you can solve the problem by disabling in-store notifications in the app’s settings–provided you can figure out to do so. Almost everyone, of course, will have no clue it’s CVS that’s cutting their battery life in half. They’ll just think their phone sucks.
How many consumers will have the computer knowledge and diligence that this guy had? And why should a phone owner have to do the kind of performance engineering formerly the exclusive domain of Unix server sysadmins?
Here was my advice to a non-tech friend who couldn’t resist getting an S7: “I would install just one application at a time. Maybe one every 3 days. If the battery life falls apart, throw that app out or configure it so that it can’t run in the background.”]
Readers: What do we think? Can Tim Cook take a sufficiently long break from his Social Justice War to supervise the development of an iPhone 7 that is a better practical photography tool than this new indestructible Samsung?
Simples – install
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oasisfeng.greenify&hl=en
and
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ryansteckler.nlpunbounce&hl=en
My Samsung S5 (still on android 4.something) is doing wonderful power management. Ie – phone left overnight without charging may drop only a few % in battery.
Rush Limbaugh is always complaining that apps or configuration options or something is always killing the battery life on his iOS devices, and he only gets a couple of hours on a charge. He says that he has had experts look at it.
You lost me at “Rush Limbaugh…”