android battery life: left hand not talking to the right hand

[Eug]

As mentioned before, Android also has a much bigger issue with apps causing high battery drain. This is not non-existent on iOS, but it's much more prevalent on Android. This should be reigned in.

 

[dguy6789]

Anecdote time! Downloading 250MB of data over cellular with the screen on the entire time brings my Droid Razr Maxx HD from 100% to 99% battery.

 

[Eug]

I wish they sold the MAXX HD in Canada, but they don't. So, I bought one of these to complement my portable devices (on trips):

http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10831&cs_id=1083110&p_id=9283&seq=1&format=2

 

[Zaap]

I don't care "what if" but "what is".


Errr... The iPhone 4 has pretty mediocre battery life. Nobody's denying that. However, the iPhone 4 came out in 2010.

Has nothing to do with anything. The same was true with my Droid X vs. the iPhone. Removable battery= INFINITE use. Non-removable battery= downtime spent tethered to a charger. Unless there's some way of instantly charging a phone, there's not much way around this.

 

[Mopetar]

Removable battery= INFINITE use. Non-removable battery= downtime spent tethered to a charger. Unless there's some way of instantly charging a phone, there's not much way around this.

Charger case? Want infinite use, just buy a few of them. Apparently they're not terribly expensive.

 

[Zaap]

Charger case? Want infinite use, just buy a few of them. Apparently they're not terribly expensive.

Ok granted, if you want your phone looking like a fugly brick. Kind of laughable in light of the exaggeration troll assertion that keeping a spare battery around is some sort of hardship. An entire case (or worse multiple) is better? Also a pretty bad 'solution' if your phone is already in a case.

 

[Zstream]

Ok granted, if you want your phone looking like a fugly brick. Kind of laughable in light of the exaggeration troll assertion that keeping a spare battery around is some sort of hardship. An entire case (or worse multiple) is better? Also a pretty bad 'solution' if your phone is already in a case.

Keeping an extra battery with you is just as dumb. No offense.

 

[Red Storm]

Keeping an extra battery with you is just as dumb. No offense.

I wouldn't call it dumb, but yes, I consider both to be an inconvenience that's not worth the hassle.

Luckily my phone can last me two days if need be, so no need.

 

[Zaap]

Keeping an extra battery with you is just as dumb. No offense.

That's akin to saying "having a charging cable is dumb". Everyone has a charger of some type, somewhere, so saying one type is dumber than another is just silly.

With a removable battery phone, only the battery is tethered, not the entire device, which is logical. I don't have to keep anything extra with me unless I want to. If I come home after my phone's been in full use for so long the battery is low, and I still want to go out and continue using it, I can just swap in a brand new charge and I'm good to go. Instantly. No down time.

Someone with a non-removable battery either has to plan their usage around how much time it'll take to tether the phone to some charger, or carry around a half-dead or ready to die device that may not make it through an extended outing. I see it happen all the time people I know so I don't buy anyone's bullshit about any of this.

 

[Mopetar]

Ok granted, if you want your phone looking like a fugly brick. Kind of laughable in light of the exaggeration troll assertion that keeping a spare battery around is some sort of hardship. An entire case (or worse multiple) is better? Also a pretty bad 'solution' if your phone is already in a case.

If you're the type of person who wants infinite battery life, do you really care how fugly your phone looks or how much of a hardship carrying around an extra battery is? No, you wouldn't. Because if infinite battery life is that important, you'll make the necessary trade-offs. Any time you want to take some aspect to an extreme you're likely to end up with a result that's less than elegant in other aspects.

 

[SpongeBob]

Someone with a non-removable battery either has to plan their usage around how much time it'll take to tether the phone to some charger, or carry around a half-dead or ready to die device that may not make it through an extended outing. I see it happen all the time people I know so I don't buy anyone's bullshit about any of this.

With most phones I would agree with you except for a Maxx or Maxx HD. I can go three days with my Maxx HD with normal usage. Within 3 days I am either at home or at work at least once (have charger at both locations). For the rare occurrence of a long vacation I would be making plans about lots of things, phone charger included. I am dead serious when I say I never need to worry about having to charge my Maxx HD.

 

[Zaap]

With most phones I would agree with you except for a Maxx or Maxx HD. I can go three days with my Maxx HD with normal usage. Within 3 days I am either at home or at work at least once (have charger at both locations). For the rare occurrence of a long vacation I would be making plans about lots of things, phone charger included. I am dead serious when I say I never need to worry about having to charge my Maxx HD.

Which to me is just another reason why this whole subject is just one big non-issue. The phones with the absolute best battery life are Android phones, and it's Android phones with the removable battery advantage. (In the case of the Note 2- best of both).

 

[isekii]

I don't think i'd touch anything motorola to be honest.
1. Lack of updates
2. Severely laggy skinned OS
3. Tied to verizon and other carriers devices simiply suck.
4. Besides the razr maxx and hd all their other devices are huge battery hogs and just plain crap.

I've played around with numerous Motorola devices including; the Droid, Droid 2, 3, Droid Pro, Droid X, X2, Cliq XT etc.. All garbage devices.

I'm currently on a GS3 and looking to move to the Note 2 due to larger screen and battery life. I also have the iphone 5, but prefer the GS3 at the moment.

 

[MrX8503]

I didn't say that you personally were. I'm only talking "generally" about all those that quote and use "hours/WhR" ratings like it's some kind of gospel.

How do you know that the OS is not optimized for battery life?
Again, until Apple makes 4.7" or 5" iPhones or the Android manufacturers make a 4" Android phone that isn't a PoS, none of these battery life figures can be compared.
My screen alone accounts for anywhere between 50-80% of my battery use on both my Nexus 7 and Galaxy S II. For every single device I've ever used and tested, the screen consumes more battery than everything else combined, including the OS and apps.

If Android OS was really that inefficient or not properly optimized, I would be seeing double digit percentages listed under "Android OS" in the battery statistics.
Lets normalize those results "hour/WhR" results to "pixels per hour/WhR" for each OS and see how far we get.

Has there never been a 4" Android phone?

 

[Eug]

I don't think i'd touch anything motorola to be honest.
1. Lack of updates

RAZR MAXX HD and RAZR HD already updated to Jelly Bean in the US. Jelly Bean is coming to the RAZR HD in Canada in February supposedly. (MAXX HD not avail. in Canada.)

2. Severely laggy skinned OS

The MAXX HD and RAZR HD have one of the least skinned Android OSes in existence actually.

3. Tied to verizon and other carriers devices simiply suck.

I'm on Fido in Canada.

 

[dguy6789]

I don't think i'd touch anything motorola to be honest.
1. Lack of updates
2. Severely laggy skinned OS
3. Tied to verizon and other carriers devices simiply suck.
4. Besides the razr maxx and hd all their other devices are huge battery hogs and just plain crap.

I've played around with numerous Motorola devices including; the Droid, Droid 2, 3, Droid Pro, Droid X, X2, Cliq XT etc.. All garbage devices.

I'm currently on a GS3 and looking to move to the Note 2 due to larger screen and battery life. I also have the iphone 5, but prefer the GS3 at the moment.

Droid, Droid 2, and Droid X(which blew the iPhone 4 and Evo 4G away) were all the best Android devices on the market in their respective categories during their reign. It's the post Droid X phones that Moto really started doing what HTC is doing now and letting their phone quality slide.

The current Razr HD and Razr Maxx HD are some of the best Android phones on the market(With it being quite easy honestly to argue that the Maxx is overall the single best Android device even among company like the Optimus G and Note 2). Their build quality is unmatched(kevlar, aluminum, water proof), their UI is extremely close to stock Android, and their battery life makes every other phone on the market look like a joke.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Ok granted, if you want your phone looking like a fugly brick. Kind of laughable in light of the exaggeration troll assertion that keeping a spare battery around is some sort of hardship. An entire case (or worse multiple) is better? Also a pretty bad 'solution' if your phone is already in a case.

You probably look fugly with pockets full of batteries too. Come on. The population who carriers extra batteries and swaps them on the go is almost nonexistent. I can count maybe 3 people out of my friends who do that. The others carry battery packs like in Asia where they're selling rampant in the markets.

I carry one of those too, but only when I have a jacket to tuck them away into, or if I'm going on some ridiculously long nonstop day with poor reception. Yeah, then I'll try to pack that 7500mah pack somewhere. Otherwise daily commutes? Weekend outings? It's enough to carry a separate camera if I'm going somewhere cool. Not going to stash all these other things in my pocket too.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

"fundamental issue here is the lack of GPU rendering" Why do you keep spreading this BS when android has GPU acceleration? http://www.extremetech.com/computing/107995-the-truth-about-hardware-acceleration-on-android

I never said Android has no GPU acceleration. The UI itself isn't completely GPU accelerated. Some elements are. I'm not that technical in terms of this stuff, but it's been discussed by some experts here already, and that iOS and Windows Phone are locked in terms of hardware and so are more optimized in terms of hardware acceleration. Android is a one size fits all for all the hardware out there.

YOu look at some software out there and you see it run real well on Android. For example, TouchWiz browser was fully accelerated and blew the stock browser out of the water in terms of smoothness. My iPhone 5 will load webpages and pan around The Verge far better than my Nexus 4 does. Apps like Facebook scrolled like crap in HTML5 prior to going to native code. Tapatalk and GoSMS scroll like absolute TRASH even in their menus which have nothing but a few lines of text.

You can launch thousands and thousands of apps in iOS and they're smooth as hell. They probably use the same hardware acceleration the basic UI is. Meanwhile, someone can explain to me why some apps are choppy as crap on Android while others run smooth as hell. Yes blame the app developers or whatever, but it's pretty obvious some apps require oodles of CPU power, while others sip on it.

Just making scrolling smooth on an Android phone seems to take more CPU power than an iPhone. Even if you don't look at it from a technical perspective, how is it that a 1ghz phone like a Nexus S will appear to run at like 20-30fps, but an iPhone 4 scrolls on the homescreen at 60fps? Is that because my Nexus S is capped at 200mhz while scrolling or is it more likely the phone isn't fast enough because a Dual Core SGS2 or a Nexus 4 can blow through those homescreen animations no problem?

Look at the end of the day I'm not trying to say omg ANDROID EVIL. I'm just saying it's not the most optimized OS out there. Whatever the reasons are, it's not running like a well oiled machine that WP8 and iOS is. It's a fact and Google will continue to struggle with this. If you deny fragmentation is a challenge, you're living in la la land.

He spreads this FUD and anytime he gets called out on it, he is mysteriously absent.

Do you even have ANYTHING useful to say or do you just focus on personal attacks all day long?

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

If you can't link us credible reviews showing massive difference in battery life between JellyBean and ICS on a Galaxy Nexus(or any other phone really), then I'd say that you're talking out your ass regarding Project Butter, Android GPU rendering, and almost everything else in that post.

You really think the Android geeks on XDA wouldn't have noticed a massive difference in battery life by now between JellyBean and ICS if Project Butter was as shitty implementation as you claim it to be? Really?
Show us battery performance stats on ICS vs. JellyBean(both with Google Now enabled and disabled) on a Galaxy Nexus. That would determine if Project Butter is as shitty implementation as you describe it to be.

But I'm not. It's just logic.

I never said JB is worse than ICS. Those two OSes have other differences too. I'm saying once you implement Google Now, how is that NOT going to use more battery?

Now you need to keep track of the user's location and constantly feed traffic information. There's other data that gets pushed to the user too. A lot of it is done on Google's server's, but there's still data it needs from the phone. So Google Now versus no Google Now = no difference in power? Come on.

Part of project butter IS ramping up the CPU to be more responsive. If you look at kernel development on the N4, a lot of it is focusing on the hotplug driver and how to not use 2 cores blasting at 1ghz each. Franco's spent a lot of time and he's gotten the phone to use just 1 core for most of the UI. Is it choppier than the stock kernel? Yeah. He admits it too. He's basically tuned the governor to ramp up less easily.

If Google came out and said PB is going to use full GPU rendering to achieve 60fps, then yes it's quite plausible battery usage goes down.

I'm not saying JB vs ICS = massive battery differences, and how do you test that anyway? Battery tests are looking at reloading webpages, playing video, wifi tethering. Is that invoking project butter or Google Now? Now what do you base on? XDA nerds as you say? There's only maybe 5% of the population on XDA worth talking to anyway. Go read the CM nightly threads. "OMG tonight's nightly is SOOO much better. I get 5600 Antutu versus 5594" (forget the concept of variance in runs. teach these guys statistical analysis?). Now they say the same thing about battery life one nightly to the next when no significant commits have been made. I've seen devs put out placebo builds and people claim this and that.

So really, are you saying that based on the general word of XDA that there's battery life difference? Forget the fact that I never mentioned comparing two OSes. I'm comparing features of the OSes and the battery consumption required. Forget the fact that no one actually studies battery usage of Google Now alone or Project Butter. Forget the fact that in OS updates, the kernel gets updates too, and typically battery life is improved through kernel advancements as product life progresses. And forget the fact that I never said this would be a "massive" difference.

I'm saying you can think these things through logically just by analyzing how different technologies work. Yes it'd be nice if people did tests and published these things, but I'm not sure how you can say otherwise given how Google Now or Project Butter works.

I could make the same argument that newer iOS revisions (like iOS5 and forward) have a weather widget that uses additional battery life. Yes now Apple has to keep track of your location and constantly update the weather. While most of it is pushed, your phone's location data is still needed. Apple may have optimized battery life going through each iOS update, but this doesn't change the fact that newer revisions have additional features that can suck battery life (Gamecenter, Passbook, widgets in the notification bar, Find my friends, etc.)

 

[cliftonite]

I never said Android has no GPU acceleration. The UI itself isn't completely GPU accelerated. Some elements are. I'm not that technical in terms of this stuff, but it's been discussed by some experts here already, and that iOS and Windows Phone are locked in terms of hardware and so are more optimized in terms of hardware acceleration. Android is a one size fits all for all the hardware out there.

YOu look at some software out there and you see it run real well on Android. For example, TouchWiz browser was fully accelerated and blew the stock browser out of the water in terms of smoothness. My iPhone 5 will load webpages and pan around The Verge far better than my Nexus 4 does. Apps like Facebook scrolled like crap in HTML5 prior to going to native code. Tapatalk and GoSMS scroll like absolute TRASH even in their menus which have nothing but a few lines of text.

You can launch thousands and thousands of apps in iOS and they're smooth as hell. They probably use the same hardware acceleration the basic UI is. Meanwhile, someone can explain to me why some apps are choppy as crap on Android while others run smooth as hell. Yes blame the app developers or whatever, but it's pretty obvious some apps require oodles of CPU power, while others sip on it.

Just making scrolling smooth on an Android phone seems to take more CPU power than an iPhone. Even if you don't look at it from a technical perspective, how is it that a 1ghz phone like a Nexus S will appear to run at like 20-30fps, but an iPhone 4 scrolls on the homescreen at 60fps? Is that because my Nexus S is capped at 200mhz while scrolling or is it more likely the phone isn't fast enough because a Dual Core SGS2 or a Nexus 4 can blow through those homescreen animations no problem?

Look at the end of the day I'm not trying to say omg ANDROID EVIL. I'm just saying it's not the most optimized OS out there. Whatever the reasons are, it's not running like a well oiled machine that WP8 and iOS is. It's a fact and Google will continue to struggle with this. If you deny fragmentation is a challenge, you're living in la la land.



Do you even have ANYTHING useful to say or do you just focus on personal attacks all day long?

Article says Android has full hardware GPU acceleration from 4.0 onward. If some apps are working fine and are flying while others aren't how is that Androids fault?

 

[Obsoleet]

I don't think i'd touch anything motorola to be honest.
1. Lack of updates
2. Severely laggy skinned OS
3. Tied to verizon and other carriers devices simiply suck.
4. Besides the razr maxx and hd all their other devices are huge battery hogs and just plain crap.

I've played around with numerous Motorola devices including; the Droid, Droid 2, 3, Droid Pro, Droid X, X2, Cliq XT etc.. All garbage devices.

I'm currently on a GS3 and looking to move to the Note 2 due to larger screen and battery life. I also have the iphone 5, but prefer the GS3 at the moment.

Pretty much my sentiments. Motorola is dead to me. Don't care if others choose to continue to buy.
I could give 2 shits less about Samsung vs Apple. I like both current flagship phones, and all the old iPhones were great. No others for me.

Article says Android has full hardware GPU acceleration from 4.0 onward. If some apps are working fine and are flying while others aren't how is that Androids fault?

If all iOS apps are smooth, then I guess you can place the blame on Android or Google's process. Doesn't really matter where the finger is pointed, the only thing that matters is that it's a failing.

 

[Skurge]

Pretty much my sentiments. Motorola is dead to me. Don't care if others choose to continue to buy.
I could give 2 shits less about Samsung vs Apple. I like both current flagship phones, and all the old iPhones were great. No others for me.



If all iOS apps are smooth, then I guess you can place the blame on Android or Google's process. Doesn't really matter where the finger is pointed, the only thing that matters is that it's a failing.

I guess it's one of those time were you call it a Jack of all trades and a master of none. Android will run on anything and you can do almost anything with it, it has very few limitations and is not as strictly regulated. It has the potential to outperform iOS (PDFs and Excel), but that requires more work on the devs part.

This next part isn't directed at you.

I've had more performance issues with with my Lumia 800 than my Gnex. iOS apps are also not completely smooth. A friend of mine is a doctor and she uses a lot of medical apps. A lot of them have performance issues her IRC client is also terrible laggy. So there are Lemons on iOS too. Although there are more on android.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Pretty much my sentiments. Motorola is dead to me. Don't care if others choose to continue to buy.
I could give 2 shits less about Samsung vs Apple. I like both current flagship phones, and all the old iPhones were great. No others for me.



If all iOS apps are smooth, then I guess you can place the blame on Android or Google's process. Doesn't really matter where the finger is pointed, the only thing that matters is that it's a failing.

iOS apps are not all smooth. Hell iOS isn't even perfectly "butter" throughout its OS. There are still slowdowns that are extremely evident, just like Android.

 

[Red Storm]

iOS apps are not all smooth. Hell iOS isn't even perfectly "butter" throughout its OS. There are still slowdowns that are extremely evident, just like Android.

This. "iOS is 100% smooth" is about as tired an argument as "only poor people buy Android phones".

 

[isekii]

RAZR MAXX HD and RAZR HD already updated to Jelly Bean in the US. Jelly Bean is coming to the RAZR HD in Canada in February supposedly. (MAXX HD not avail. in Canada.)


The MAXX HD and RAZR HD have one of the least skinned Android OSes in existence actually.


I'm on Fido in Canada.

Still doesn't change my perception of Motorola. Don't get me wrong I was a huge fan of them when they had the Krzr/Razr and others before the smartphone craze. Probably the best around at the time being.
Also I would expect their flagship devices to get the latest OS but what do you think the chances are of these two devices MAXX HD and RAZR HD getting the next android OS.
I'm betting slim to none.
Not only because it's Motorola, but being on Verizon they're not exactly quick about getting updates out there.
If you want a great example, look at the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon.