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Iphone Power Hardware

Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline? 222

Posted by samzenpus from the more-time-please dept.
jfruh writes "Every time a company rolls out a new version of a product, it extols how much better it is than the previous version. Thus, Apple spent a part of its iPhone 5 rollout touting the staying power of the latest version of its battery. But have iPhone batteries really seen improvement since the original came out in '07? Kevin Purdy crunches the numbers and concludes that, while the 5's battery beats the 4S's, we still haven't returned to the capabilities of the original phone."
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Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline? More

Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline?

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  • False Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:36PM (#41330309)

    This is because the original iPhone used EDGE. If you force future version off the 3G network, talk time beats the first generation iPhone easily.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Firehed ( 942385 )

      It would be a false comparison if people switched their 3G (or LTE) phones to use EDGE. They don't.

    • Re:False Comparison (Score:5, Informative)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @10:00PM (#41330895)
      What comparison? Despite all the blabbering there is actually no comparison in the article. Here's the key part:

      Synthesizing the rumors and supposed leaks about the iPhone 5[...essentially baseless speculation.] Tests and assessments from reviewers and pundits will come next week, but will undoubtedly deviate from Apple's numbers.

      In other words, nothing is known.

    • Re:False Comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by arekin ( 2605525 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @10:15PM (#41330963)
      I think the comparison is one of Battery life not keeping up with battery usage in newer devices. Technology is not increasing at the same rate, but the expectation is still there, especially for people who previously owned earlier versions of the iPhone. What most people see is not "my iPhone battery consumption is high because of increase demand from data networks", but rather "I never had to charge my old iPhone this much." Its like comparing movies sales in 2012 dollars, its a perfectly valid statement to make, even though we all know what causes the reduced data usage.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Penny pinching to maximise profits and also the ability to tout light weight are creating the urge to under size batteries against expected use. Stop blaming the customer that crap is straight up marketing bullshit. Apple knows full well the expected use and is simply short changing the battery to pick up a few more cents profit.

        Much the same as the change in screen size. Apple marketing was disturbed by people standing an iPhone up against a Galaxy Nexus and in comparison commenting the iPhone looked li

        • Re:False Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Friday September 14, 2012 @12:21AM (#41331553) Homepage

          Apple from a profit standpoint would much rather have a big cheap battery than the incredibly expensive light thin batteries they have. Heck they would rather sell the phone hooked up to a car battery and give you 1000 hrs talk time. Light and thin is costing them money, this isn't about penny pinching.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sd4f ( 1891894 )

            Pretty much every phone these days has either lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries, that's to get the highest reasonable energy density in the battery. Apple isn't doing anything differently in this regard than any other phone manufacturer.

            However, as a consumer, i'd rather a design concept like the motorola razr maxx, prepared to have a bit more thickness if it means the phone will last a weekend without charging.

            • Re:False Comparison (Score:5, Interesting)

              by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Friday September 14, 2012 @08:18AM (#41333267) Homepage

              Apple isn't doing anything differently in this regard than any other phone manufacturer.

              They use the highest density most expensive option. A few years ago this cost quite a bit more and fewer companies used them.

              However, as a consumer, i'd rather a design concept like the motorola razr maxx, prepared to have a bit more thickness if it means the phone will last a weekend without charging.

              I understand. I own the MacBook Pro Retina which made huge sacrifices for thin and light. People really like thin and light when they see it, when they try it. But just like the move from desktops to laptops, thin and light likely means 30% less device for 30% more money.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by tehcyder ( 746570 )

            Apple from a profit standpoint would much rather have a big cheap battery than the incredibly expensive light thin batteries they have. Heck they would rather sell the phone hooked up to a car battery and give you 1000 hrs talk time. Light and thin is costing them money, this isn't about penny pinching.

            That serves them right for twatting on about how fucking thin and light their products are, when it actually makes zero practical difference to most people if their phone is a few millimetres thicker and a few grammes heavier.

            • The weight I'm not too fussed about, but any reduction in thickness is awesome for anyone that keeps their phone in their pants pocket. :)

    • That, my friend, is the iPhone 12 - as was revealed exclusively to me in a morphine-and-"don't worry"-drug-coctail following my (very successful) brain surgery 3 1/2 years ago, a little over a month after the iPhone3G was released.

      At this point, sitting stunned in a hospital bathroom, I was pleasantly surprised:

      You see, the Interplanetary Patent Office had commited a major temporal blunder, and I held in my hands the fabled iPhone 12.
      I'd been looking forward to this, I came to realize, because of the wonder

    • This is because the original iPhone used EDGE. If you force future version off the 3G network, talk time beats the first generation iPhone easily.

      Yes, but the battery capacity bump between the OG iphone and iphone 5 should also be put into consideration. My point is smartphone manufacturers in general believe that their customers will tolerate shorter operation time in return of bigger screens, slimmer body and faster data rate

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by otuz ( 85014 )

      TFA compares with the 3GS, which had 300 hours standby.

  • More power for the same battery life is Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:40PM (#41330347)

    And as competitive as smartphones are today that's close to as good as we'll get for a bit. There IS a type of Lithium-ion battery that can store twice the charge of today's batteries at the same volume, but that's apparently coming to electric cars first; which obviously spend a lot more on batteries per unit and are in far more need of it.

    But expect these batteries in phones at some point. In the further future the most promising technology is lithium-air batteries, which offer up to 10x the current charge per volume as today. But there are still numerous problems with them, and so an ETA there would be indefinite but quite possibly less than a decade. Still, imagine a phone that would need charging less than once a week!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by neonmonk ( 467567 )

      But that's NOT as good as we can get. Apple sacrificed possible battery life for aesthetic thinness, as is their wont. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that's the best that could be done.

    • Apple's claim of 8hours LTE useage i think is very optimistic.

      • Re:More power for the same battery life is Good (Score:5, Informative)

        by hazydave ( 96747 ) on Friday September 14, 2012 @08:13AM (#41333239)

        Probably not. In some situations, LTE can actually use less power than 3G. Mine, for example. I got all-day-plus performance on my Galaxy Nexus (with the 2100mAhr battery) at my old office. That was in Philadelphia, in a very old stone building... very good 4G signal, in fact, much better in-building than 3G ever was (most of the cells in the city are going to use 1900MHz on Verizon, for the increased bandwidth, which gets more attenuation through old stone walls than the 700MHz used for LTE).

        These days, I'm in an office in Downingtown, PA, in a pretty fringy 3G area. Same phone won't last a work day on standby without sitting on a charger when not in use.

        Going forward, LTE will eventually save power over any form of 3G. Right now, not necessarily -- the digital protocols still take more power than either sort of 3G, but that's going to vanish as chips shrink. What you can't shrink is the need for the power amplifier (PA). Most phones want to be able to put out a signal of at least 1/2W (27dBm). The typical OFDM modulation schemes used in 3G, however, basically sum a large number of independent carriers (subcarriers) to deliver the full signal. When things line up unfortunately, you have too many signals summing high, creating a temporary power "crest".. this is known as the crest factor of a modulation scheme. For 3G as a class, this is a 6-10dB crest factor (also sometimes expressed as a PAPR -- Peak to Average Power Ratio). This means that the PA actually has to be able to support no just 27dB signals, but 37dB signals... a peak of 5W. Now, certainly, your phone isn't constantly transmitting 5W. But the PA has to be able to transmit at 5W without crushing the signal. That means the PA is going to be much less efficient than it could be at 1/2W.

        Now to LTE.. the new SC-FDMA uplink modulation, presents only a single carrier on transmission, greatly reducing the PAPR/crest factor. Basically, it's a conventional OFDM modulation fed into a fourier transform, which has the effect of averaging out the high peaks. This can deliver 64QAM with a crest factor under 5dB. So you'd need an amplifier peaking at about 1.5W, rather than 5W, for the same uplink in 4G LTE vs. 3G HSPA. That's a huge win for the handset.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 )

      ETA there would be indefinite but quite possibly less than a decade. Still, imagine a phone that would need charging less than once a week!

      Like my 5 year old Motorola C168i?

    • Still, imagine a phone that would need charging less than once a week!

      You can still get phones with battery life of two weeks or more. What you can't get is a pocket-sized internet-connected computer that does the same.

  • Oh, the milliamp-hours! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:44PM (#41330369)

    "As explained around the web, milliamps hours (mAh) are something like a gas tank, and voltage (V) is the amount of fuel the device is drawing."

    I don't know who wrote this bullshit, but they need to be shot.

    (Yes, I attempted to read the article; so sue me.)

    • Re:Oh, the milliamp-hours! (Score:5, Informative)

      by dido ( 9125 ) <dido&imperium,ph> on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:30PM (#41330729)

      Actually, simple hydraulics and electronics have natural analogies [gsu.edu], in that similar equations can be used for both. Milliamp-hours is a unit of charge, 1 mAh == 3.6 coloumbs, or about the charge in 3.73e-05 moles worth of electrons, so yes, it would be accurate to say that mAh can be analogised to the volume of a tank of petrol, as charge would be the equivalent of fluid volume in hydraulics. However, voltage, being in units of energy per unit charge (a volt is 1 joule per coloumb), is more like fluid pressure in hydraulics (joules per cubic metre or pascals), or at how much pressure the fuel is being sent out the gas tank, so the article is completely wrong on that score. The "amount of fuel the device is drawing" is more like current, which is measured in amperes (coloumbs per second), which would be the equivalent of flow rate in hydraulics (cubic metres per second). Thus, if you had a battery rated at 1500 mAh used on a device that drew 100 mA of current from it on use, you'd be able to use it for about 15 hours before you needed to recharge the batteries. In a similar way, if you had a tank with a volume of 1500 cubic metres and were pumping liquid out at 100 cubic metres per hour, you'd need to refill it after 15 hours.

  • Better in all the ways that matter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:45PM (#41330381)

    Did the original iPhone have 225 hours standby?

    And the fact that you still get 8 hours browsing, even over LTE, is really impressive. It might be slightly shorter than browsing time on an original iPhone but how much browsing could you have got done on Edge? You could probably read 10x the content on the iPhone 5, so how is it not far ahead?

    It comes back to the problem of looking at a raw number on a list, without thinking what that number MEANS to a user on the device.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mkraft ( 200694 )

      It remains to be seen if the iPhone 5 can really pull off 8 hours of LTE browsing as that would be impressive (blow through your data cap on a single charge), but historically Apple's battery estimates are on the high side.

      • Apple pretty accurate on battery estimates (Score:5, Informative)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:13PM (#41330617)

        It remains to be seen if the iPhone 5 can really pull off 8 hours of LTE browsing

        Yes, but remember that in every device Apple has shipped (from laptops to iPhones to iPads) the battery life estimates have been pretty much spot on.

        as that would be impressive (blow through your data cap on a single charge)

        Browsing is not watching media only. Browsing is loading pages, reading them, moving on and reading more. It's not about constant data streaming, so it's not overall something that will destroy your bandwidth - you can only read so much in eight hours!

        Yes you could blow through bandwidth fast if you sat watching extremely high quality video for hours on end. But that is why mobile app developers are not giving you those really beefy data streams, instead over even LTE you'll get reduced quality video from most things unless you force the issue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arekin ( 2605525 )

      You could probably read 10x the content on the iPhone 5, so how is it not far ahead?

      Probably not actually, as speeds increase so does the average page size (even on a mobile browser). Honestly what 4g has bought us is a marginal amount of more information and a dramatic increase in ad usage. We are paying more for the privilage to see what people have to sell.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      Nokia posted their research into GSM/EDGE vs 3G battery usage around the time Apple started making excuses for the lack of 3G on the original iPhone. For standby, there is no difference, except in low signal areas if both 2G and 3G are enabled, due to continuous searching for stronger signals on both 3G and 2G networks instead of just one. Talk time is reduced on 3G, because it uses a 64kbps channel for high quality voice vs GSM's 13kbps. For data, GPRS/EDGE looks better in per minute figures for the same

  • Crap compaired to .... (Score:4, Funny)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:48PM (#41330395)
    The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.

    • Ssh. We're supposed to buy the iPhone 5 now, because the 4s is crap compared to the 5. We're not supposed to think about the iPhone 6 until May.

      Didn't you get the memo?

    • Funny but informative (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:32PM (#41330749)

      The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.

      Humorous.

      And yet in that comment lies a revelation of why Apple's supposedly boring updates are not a problem.

      Because from the 4 to the 4s, it was not that much of a leap. Or so it seemed at the time.

      But now from the 4 to the 5, that is actually a pretty big jump. So even though we might see something like a 5s next year, you can be pretty sure that waiting for that will not be an amazing leap over the 5 - so there's little point to wait. And yet when the 6 does come out a year or two from now, it will probably be a really impressive gain over the iPhone 5.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N1AK ( 864906 )
        You've made this point a couple of times on this story and I'll be honest, I really don't see the justification. Unless you need, and are in a location with LTE, then the iPhone 5 really isn't a vast improvement on the 4. Sure it is better, and if you've got an upgrade coming up and have already decided that you want to get an iPhone then why not. An extra row of icons and a screen that has gone from pitifully small to small in an odd shape for a phone.

    • Of course. And don't forget to mention that the chocolate rations will be increased by then as well.

  • HUGE DECLINE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fferreres ( 525414 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:52PM (#41330443)

    iPhone 2G, lasts me 12 hours full use or 4 days stand by (2 days average) - still use it btw with new battery
    iPhone 4 lasted me (now my wife) about 8 to 9 hours and a day and a half of light use
    iPhone 4S with most battery hungry functions (eg. GPS, notifications) lasts me 6 hours of constant use, or 22 to 26 hours of light use

    Now the 4S is in the brink of being unacceptable. It's still convenient and the extra speed is very appreciated. But I always need a power outlet nearby when traveling, and I cannot count on it lasting a full day. It just can't if used for browsing and apps for a couple of hours.

    Now, I love the iPad 2 battery life. Puts it in the Awesome Stuff list. I am guaranteed it'll last a day. If they could have kept the 2G life and not up CPU I'd have been more interested in the iPhone 5.

    • > iPhone 2G, lasts me 12 hours full use or 4 days stand by (2 days average) - still use it btw with new battery

      Seriously? I thought we weren't supposed to replace the battery.

    • Re:HUGE DECLINE (Score:5, Insightful)

      by theJML ( 911853 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:35PM (#41330759) Homepage

      My 4S is definitely better than my 3G was, but then it was 3 years old when I traded up. I still get a days worth on either. The catch is that the 4S is so much faster and generally more useful that I end up doing more battery sucking things with it just because. It's smooth and does great transferring real time maps with GPS while streaming Pandora in the background, even over AT&T "4G".

      If I leave both on the table and mostly ignore them for the day, the 4S gives me more battery life than the 3G ever did.
      If I actually use them as I usually would have, the 4S loses... but I find I actually use it A LOT MORE. When I first got it I found myself thinking "Man, the battery life sucks on this" but then I realized I was bascially using it non-stop. Once I got over the "OMG NEW-SHINY" period, it's on par with what the 3G was.

      In short, I think the batteries Have improved, but we now expect our phones to do more, and have found more and more ways to use them more on a more regular basis. We cram more powerful AND power hungry chips in the same package and then get annoied and act surprised when it doesn't last as long as the older ones did.

      The same thing has happened to laptops... and because this is slashdot, cars. I mean, I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG. Why don't we have that now? because the civic is huge in comparison, weighs almost twice as much (the old 90 DX was literally 1 ton), has A/C, power everything, huge beams and airbags for safety, etc. And everyone thinks we should have more MPG by now. Yeah. We should, except you wanted all this other crap in there too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by puto ( 533470 )
        The ATT Iphone 4s is not a 4g phone... Never was and never will be... No matter how hard you wish upon an apple star.

      • I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG.

        The only Civic that's ever got that kind of mileage was the pre-civic CVCC. The CRX HF got that kind of mileage, but it is a horrible deathtrap. We have a hatchback that gets 55+ MPG with all the accessories today, it is called the Golf TDI.

    • Re:HUGE DECLINE (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:37PM (#41330773)

      iPhone 4 lasted me (now my wife)

      You married your iPhone 4? That's being too much an iFanBoi.

    • Re:HUGE DECLINE (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bill_the_Engineer ( 772575 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:41PM (#41330795)

      The iPhone 2G only uses the edge network. 3G is more power hungry than 2G (LTE even more so). This is the point everyone is making. The article is flawed because it doesn't take this into consideration. People upgraded their phone to take advantage of the more advance features, so increased power usage should be taken into account.

      My android phone battery has a much shorter battery life when I travel to some locations. I believe its a function on how much power is required to maintain contact with the nearest tower (using "4G" doesn't help). Right now I'm on the road and I'm lucky to get 24 hours of "standby" time on a single charge (standby being in quotes due to email client running in background so data is being transmitted on occasion).

      My iPad2 seems to last a very long time (charge once a week range), but it's WiFi only and therefore doesn't need to use power to maintain contact with a tower miles away. Also the iPad2 models that have a wireless modem built in (CDMA or GSM) has the luxury of being able to put that modem to sleep to increase battery life since it doesn't have to accept incoming phone calls (especially when a WiFi connection is available). Also the iPad2 is able to have a physically larger battery.

      My point being that "Your milage may vary" due to factors like usage pattern, location in respect to cellphone towers, and the data protocol being used.

    • I always need a power outlet nearby when traveling, and I cannot count on it lasting a full day

      Last year my iPhone 3G broke (somehow I lost all phone reception), but money was really tight at that point in time. So I bought a cheap Samsung android phone which basically is specced the same as a 3GS. However the battery is replaceable... I bought three extra batteries and when travelling, I always have a bunch of fully-charged batteries. This is such a useful thing when you're travelling, that I'm really doubting whether to go back to an iPhone again. (I do have an iPad).

  • depends on use (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:53PM (#41330451)

    ever since i got rid of my work email account off my ipad the battery time doubled or tripled

    take 10 people off the street and you will have 10 different use patterns

  • Oversimplification (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mosb1000 ( 710161 ) <mosb1000@mac.com> on Thursday September 13, 2012 @08:56PM (#41330487)

    It's an oversimplification to assume that a company would, or should work to increase battery life. The different features have to be weighed against each other. Performance comes at the expense of battery life. A larger battery would mean a heavier, bulkier phone. Lithium ion batters today have about the same capacity of the batteries which existed when the first iPhone was released, while power efficiency of electronics has increased significantly. They could have used these advances to increase battery life, but have instead chosen to use them to increase performance.

    • most companies will release one with features, one with battery life, one for people who browse, one for people who use it as a _phone_, one for media and games, and one for the fat-fingered.

      apple only releases 1 of anything, and dangles the update like a carrot through their ridiculous press managed "leaks" and rumours.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by marcello_dl ( 667940 )

      Battery life is a rather powerful tool for implementing planned obsolescence, too.

  • Why compare to the first (Score:3)

    by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:05PM (#41330573) Journal
    When Apple made the first iPhone they probably had very little real world usage info.
    By now they have a good idea how people use their iPhones and what they should target.

    • Article focuses on real-world tests more than on the numbers Apple gives. As always when it comes to battery time, the numbers a manufacturer gives are ideal-situation, best case scenario results.

  • Marketing genius! (Score:3)

    by GoodNewsJimDotCom ( 2244874 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @09:50PM (#41330839)
    If I was to make a product and I just wanted money, but didn't care about improving society, I'd do a gimmick:

    Every release, I'd have some things better and some things worse. Then I could tout,"Improved THIS AND THAT!"

    Next release, I could make the worse things better and the better things worse, and tout,"We improved this now!"

    The trick is that it can't be things the user easily can see in action like screen resolution.

  • As a telephone (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FranTaylor ( 164577 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @10:07PM (#41330937)

    The $20 phones from the convenience store have more battery life and equal call quality. If you are looking for a telephone they can't be beat.

    If you want to talk about carrying a computer in your pocket, that's a different story, but for pure telephone use, the cheap ones are the way to go.

  • War lost long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PineGreen ( 446635 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @10:11PM (#41330953) Homepage

    There is absolutely nothing new here. My Nokia in 1999 had a 10 day battery life and today I recharge my HTC One S every day. It is just a fact of life that we use phones todays for so much more that the batteries just last less. No phone has a 10 day lifespan these days.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by adolf ( 21054 )

      Slap a modern lithium battery into an old Nokia, and I'll wager that battery life will be much longer than 10 days. (Of course, you can't -- at least not in the US, since it won't have GPS as required by law. But in theory....)

      That said, I get a week or so out of an old OG Droid that has no cell phone service. I used to have to recharge that exact same Droid every day when I used it as a cell phone, whether or not I actively used it it at all.

      I remain puzzled as to how a phone that is just a dumb phone g

      • Constant data and intelligence gathering.

        Hey: it could happen [youtube.com].

      • Slap a modern lithium battery into an old Nokia, and I'll wager that battery life will be much longer than 10 days. (Of course, you can't -- at least not in the US, since it won't have GPS as required by law. But in theory....)

        OK, who the fuck told you that? They are a lying dipshit. E911 does not require that all phones have a GPS. It only requires that the provider be able to provide positioning information. Literally all GSM providers in the USA do this with DToA, not with GPS. CDMA providers may also use DToA, but my understanding is that originally, the US CDMA providers did decide to go with GPS instead, so there's a lot of verizon and sprint phones with secret GPS receivers the user is not allowed to access. You will not f

  • A car analogy that works! (Score:4, Funny)

    by sqrt(2) ( 786011 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @10:12PM (#41330957) Journal

    There is a very good car analogy here.

    Over the years cars have become much more efficient, through various refinements and improvements in the design of the internal combustion engine. We are able to produce more horsepower with less fuel. So, did cars stay the same size and increase in fuel economy over the years? Some have, but especially in the USA, designers instead chose to increase the size and power while keeping fuel efficiency relatively constant. So the engine has become more efficient, yet those gains weren't used to produce a more fuel efficient engine, they were used to make bigger, more powerful, cars that had the same fuel economy.

    With the iPhone, the battery definitely has become better of the years. So did Apple choose to increase battery life? Nope. As with the cars, they increased the CPU power, screen resolution, GPU power, memory, radios, etc. They packed more powerful components, more efficient components, into the same size with ever increasing battery technology. So battery tech has to keep improving all the time, just to keep up with the increase in power usage from the rest of the system, and it doesn't even always keep up. It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.

    I've not developed this very far and I know there are counter-examples, many came to mind while writing this, yet the analogy is apt especially when we confine our comparison to specific segments of the US car market. I'm pleased that, in recent years, this trend seems to finally be reversing, and the US is becoming more--if only slightly--like Europe with their focus on smaller, more efficient cars.

    • Re:A car analogy that works! (Score:4)

      by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Thursday September 13, 2012 @11:03PM (#41331189) Journal

      They packed more powerful components, more efficient components, into the same size with ever increasing battery technology.

      The iPhone 5 is 1.778 mm thinner than the previous iPhone.
      That's almost the difference between the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Maxx.

      You know what the Razr Maxx did with that extra thickness?
      They almost doubled the battery capacity and now have a phone that outlasts everything else.

      But people are used to plugging in their smart phones to charge every night, so Apple doesn't lose anything by adding thinness instead of battery life.

      • I'd prefer to pick the size of my battery than have it dictated by the design of the phone. Back in the day, I had three batteries for my old Nokia. The stock battery that I never used but kept charged as a spare, a very thin/light battery for day-to-day use that I charged each night, and a gigantic brick of a battery that could go for a week between charges which I used when travelling. That was normal back in the analog days and I wish manufacturers would bring it back.

  • My proposal (Score:3)

    by iampiti ( 1059688 ) on Friday September 14, 2012 @02:16AM (#41331993)
    To smartphone making companies: Stop using the advancements in manufacturing to make the phones slimmer, they're slim enough (I'd say too much), instead use it to put larger batteries. They really need them.
    I know some companies have gone that route (some Motorolas have large batteries) but we need more of these.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sd4f ( 1891894 )
      Yep, I agree, it appears that they make the phone as small as possible, then get a custom battery to fit in the gaps. Some phone company should grow a pair of balls and design a phone around targets for what the battery should be able to do. So far it has only been the motorla razr maxx, and i would have bought it if not for my awful experience with android fragmentation and bugginess.

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