Which Android Devices Sacrifice Battery-Life For Performance? 108
MojoKid writes: A couple of weeks ago, Futuremark began handing out copies of PCMark for Android to members of the press, in an effort to get its leaderboards filled while the finishing touches were being put on the app. That might give you pause in that the results, generated today, are not going to be entirely accurate when the final version comes out, but that's not the case. Futuremark has encouraged publication of results generated with the benchmark. What makes PCMark for Android useful benchmark is that it not only tests for performance, but also for battery-life and performance combined. As such, you can easily figure out which devices sacrifice battery-life for performance and which ones have a good blend of both. The HTC One M8 really stands out, thanks to its nearly balanced performance/battery-life ratio. A result like that might make you think that neither value could be that great, but that's not the case at all. In fact, the battery-life rating on that phone places far beyond some of the other models, only falling short to the OnePlus One. And speaking of that phone, it becomes obvious with PCMark why it's so hyped-up of late; it not only delivers solid performance, it boasts great battery-life as well.
all (Score:4, Funny)
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Any phone that can run a game is sacrificing battery for performance. If you set the cpu limit to 800mhz you still will be able to "work" from your phone and will gain 12-24 hours of battery time.
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I took this screenshot yesterday for an "Android friend" who refused to believe any smartphone would reach into a 2nd day on a charge: http://i.imgur.com/YxZjboT.jpg [imgur.com]
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The Note 2 and Note 3 are, based on my observation, good for a couple days without charging. Like the iphone 6+, this probably has more to do with the form factor than anything else.
I can get about a day and a half out of my S4, but I'm an atypical user since I don't use any messaging aside from E-mail (SMS is stupid and I hope it dies soon).
It's somewhat silly to try to define "using a smartphone as a smartphone" since that's really the ultimate movable goalpost. I use mine primarily to read things on the
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I owned every other iPhone from the 3G on. If I left it idle most of the time (take calls, check mail occasionally, get notifications), it could make it to the evening of the second day. I currently own an LG G3 as well, and under the same conditions it lasts almost the same length of time (last week I forgot to set it on the charger at night and when I went to bed the second night it was at 10%).
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Turn on Power Save mode and turn off Wifi? Check to see if you have any CPU-heavy applications, and force-quit them while not in-use?
Also, the amount of power used depends entirely on how powerful a signal you are getting. For example, my Galaxy S4 typically uses 30-35% battery per-day at normal home/work day, but this last weekend I went up to the middle of nowhere, PA. The house barely got 3G at one bar, and because of the shit signal my phone was down to 30% every night. If your place of work is insi
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I get between two and four days from a Nexus 5, depending on usage. My take on it is that it's a smartphone only when I need it to be. Most of the time I'll use it for no more than email, sms and calls which I agree could be handled by a feature phone (although not as easily for sms and emails - the larger screen and keyboard come into play there).
The difference for me is that it has all the features when I need them - better browsing capability, gps and a good screen for maps, half decent camera (within th
Re: all (Score:1)
I would expect that long with most of my phones with that little use.
Re: all (Score:2)
4-5 hours screen-on time isn't that great. That was the benchmark in 2013 before the LG G2 came out. It's normal to get 7 hours SoT with the G2, and more if you tweak things or use it as an ereader.
The number of days of standby time is irrelevant. My phone lasts 3+days if all I do is check the odd text message; it's amazing how long you can drag out 8 hrs of screen time if you don't actually turn the screen on.
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Standby time is irrelevent. Turn the screen off, put it in airplane mode, and it will last a month. Turn the phone off completely, it will last for years. Never take it out of the box, and it will last indefinitely.
How long the battery lasts when you don't use it isn't really a metric worth debating.
How long a battery lasts while you use the phone on a regular basis is what matters. And 4 or 5 hours of SoT isn't anything to brag about. Not when the LG G2, Droid Razr Maxx, and similar phones get 7+ hour
Re:all (Score:4, Interesting)
- What you leave running in the background
- Whether bluetooth / wifi / cell / GPS are on/off
- Whether you have a good cellular signal (more bars = less power needed to talk with tower)
- Quality of the WiFi signal / network congestion
- Screen brightness
With the HTC One (m8), I have to charge it every 2-4 days. Depends on how much I'm using it, what the weather is like outside, how many hours I spent on the phone that day, and where it spent most of the day.
I spent about 2.5 hours on conference/phone calls today and the phone has been off the charger for about 18hrs. Battery is at 66%. GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth are all turned on. That's not fabulous but not horrible either.
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Add:
- whether your stupid home button sticks out and turns on the screen in your pocket. Thanks for nothing Samsung.
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Who cares about performance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides gamers, who cares if it takes a few more milliseconds to launch a web browser or process an image?
Seeing as all these phones are pretty decent, from my point of view, I just want the greatest battery life.
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Besides old timers, who cares if it takes a couple more hours to deplete the battery?
Seeing as all these phones are pretty decent, from my point of view, I just want the greatest performance.
FTFY. In other words, it doesn't fit my use case ergo no one else can benefit from it.
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Most people who leave their mother's basement for more than the above-mentioned few hours!
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in general, people who want to calculate something that is fairly complex would also like to have a great processor because it reduces the time that is taken to do that calculation.
Use a computer?
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I'm curious what calculations you would be doing on a smartphone which would take a noticeable amount of time on a regular basis. GPS is pretty intensive, though that's done in dedicated HW. Video playback and scaling is intensive, but that's done in dedicated HW. The only things you see on a regular basis, outside of games, are UI animations and JIT code compilation. Maybe long trip calculations in a mapping programs - those do take several seconds for trips of hundreds of miles - but those calculations
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I was wondering the same thing too.
I have a decent 8-core xeon at work as my workstation. When I have intense computations to run, I do it on one of our clusters. The idea that someone would do intense calculations on a phone is pretty ridiculous. You've outlined a few good examples, but like you said, most of that is done with dedicated hardware, and seemingly instantly.
The only app that needs to be fast, and I mean really fast, is the app switcher and the Phone app. And they are pretty light on the comput
Re:I care about performance? (Score:2)
When I push a button and nothing happens, I wonder if my man hands confused the sensors. And I wonder if the signal has gone because certain kinds of wind interfere with both 3G and OTA TV. And I wonder if it was a "select" click instead of a"go" click.
I wonder all kinds of things in the time it takes for me to click on something and when it responds. And if it can be fast enough to do what I ask when I ask, then I care.
I realize that most of my complaints are based on shitty UI design. I can't control
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[rant]
I've always been irked when UI doesn't prioritize the user over other async events and work - for example, blocking an app while resolving DNS. What if the user wants to cancel? What if it was a mis-click? The buttons should always work.
This sometimes happens because the software is not well written in an async style, but other times the computation itself slows down the system too much to be useful any
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Dedicated hw core to keep controls processing. Not a dedicated thread or process. Run a partitioned off small RTOS core doing just user interface inputs and outputs, and controls.
Some embedded systems actually do something like that, and some consoles keep dedicated hw for system processing.
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How do I take any advantage of your comment? It is good advice in general, but if I am a consumer, how do I modify my purchasing?
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We had buttons that give feedback, but most people stopped buying such devices.
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Could the people selling devices which people buy also give feedback? It is not mutually exclusive.
Or another way, I will not buy a device that does not give feedback. If I have my current device for as long as I live, I will not be disappointed more than I am. If I have the opportunity to buy a better device, I will not hesitate. A trade-off is not acceptable.
Slashdot wants to take me to my own profile, because JS is disabled, so I don't know who "we" represents, if you have otherwise specified.
I am a n
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Besides gamers, who cares if it takes a few more milliseconds to launch a web browser or process an image?
I do... because that's a few less milliseconds my CPU isn't idle, which reduces battery life.
Seriously, does anyone understand this benchmark? I see pairs of performance and battery life numbers which seem to have no real-world meaning, so it's not at all clear to me why it makes sense to compare them. In addition, it's common that for a given set of tasks, a device with better performance will use less power because it spends more time in an idle state. The notion that devices trade off performance again
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Besides gamers, who cares if it takes a few more milliseconds to launch a web browser or process an image?
Based on the comments pre-project butter Android vs iOS articles ... everyone.
A fast responsive system is the number 1 thing that matters to most people. I can excuse graphical missmatches and occasional bugs, but if I click the little Phone icon and I have to wait for it to pop up there will be murder.
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On the tablet, I'm constantly having to wait on it to pull up email, or switch to the chat program, or open browser pages. I'm not sure if that is because it is one Android revision behind the HTC or if Asus did someth
Trade off and flame war. (Score:2)
Nothing like a difference in opinion of what trade offs some one chooses to cause a flame war.
Performance vs battery life. Some people want a responsive device while they charge their phone daily so it isn't an issue. Others want there phone to charge less option so they use it more.
The thing is people use their devices differently and have different habits so they accept different trade offs to best meet there needs.
But so many people feel that just because someone has their preference it is threationing
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It took two decades for the personal computer to reach a point where the average rig performance was "good enough" for everyone but gamers, it took 7 years for the same thing to happen to smartphones. Which is good for the users, not so much for the big companies.
The big companies are probably going to jump to the next bandwagon soon, what remains to be seen is what that will be. VR headsets, AR headsets, smartwatches or something completely different.
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You do realize the war on "retina" has gotten to the sil
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Yes, they are chasing the new and the better and trying to push that down the users throat just like they still do for desktop, yet people are not upgrading their desktops and laptops as often as they used to do, the same thing is beginning to happen in the smartphone/tablet market.
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Besides gamers, who cares if it takes a few more milliseconds to launch a web browser or process an image?
My Note 3 cat get _three days_ out of a single charge because I don't leave the internet connected and I don't have faceschmuk / viber / fartsapp pinging home every N seconds. I charge it every night anyway.
Don't make me wait to open the camera, give me the best performance and don't spare the battery just because _other users_ can't disconnect from the internet ever.
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Apps and Android OS both continue to get more bloated as time passes, so the better the performance, the longer the device will remain relevant and useful. It's a measure of lifetime. A weak phone might not be able to run the apps that will be released two years from now. A strong phone might still be able to run apps four or more years in the future.
If you upgrade your phone every two years like clockwork, then it doesn't matter to you. Those who prefer to delay upgrading until its necessary will appre
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Oh, they don't leave the house! That explains it!
Benchmarks are pointless. (Score:1)
I think they way you tune it can be bigger (Score:3)
I mean sure if you use heavy usage games lots then maybe this matters, but most of your use is standby and cell network stuff. I've got my Note 3 lasting 3-4 days on a charge. How?
1) Turning off background services that slurp up battery. Just took some looking at the battery monitor and then considering what I needed and didn't.
2) Turning off additional radios like Bluetooth and GPS when I don't need them. It doesn't take long to hit the button if I do, and even when they aren't doing things actively they can sip some juice.
3) Having it on WiFi whenever possible. In good implementations on modern phones it uses less power than the cell network. Work has WiFi and I have a nice AP at home so most of the time it is on WiFi.
4) Using WiFi calling. T-mobile lets you route voice calls through WiFi. When you do that, it shuts down the cellular radio entirely (except occasionally to check on things) and does all data, text, and voice via WiFi. Uses very little juice and an hours long call only takes a bit of battery.
The WiFi calling thing has been really amazing. When you shut down the cellular radios battery goes way up. Not just in idle, but in use. Prior to that (when I first got it T-Mobile was having trouble with the feature) standby life was good, though not as good as it is now, but talk seriously hit the battery. Two to three hours could do it in almost completely. Now? I can do that, no issue, and still have plenty left.
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Having it on WiFi whenever possible. In good implementations on modern phones it uses less power than the cell network.
Interesting note: that's not always the case. If you're on a network with a lot of broadcast traffic, WiFi will keep the phone from entering deep sleep, and your battery life will be terrible. It took me quite a while to figure out that my battery life's turn for the worse coincided with starting a new job, where the WiFi network is really big.
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This is only if the phone's broadcast/multicast filters are broken.
A proper wifi chip SHOULD filter out broadcast/multicast when the device is suspended.
Unfortunately, it's a common item for vendors to screw up. The Nexus 4's ARP offload was broken for example, leading to all sorts of issues. The original Galaxy S2 had a Broadcom chip that fully supported ARP offload and broadcast/multicast filtering - but Samsung disabled the filters, allowing everything through!!! (They do this on a regular basis on mu
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That's one issue that I hadn't heard of, but it makes sense: Of course the wifi chip, in an age of nearly-universally-smart NICs, should be able to filter broadcast traffic without waking up the rest of the system or even generating an interrupt...unless an application is actually using broadcast traffic.
The other issue is WMM, which is a function that requires support from the access point. It involves some packet scheduling, rather than shout-ASAP-into-the-collision-domain that Wifi was initially design
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Note 3 lasting 3-4 days on a charge. How?
Oh Oh let me guess! By having a phone the size of a tablet so the battery is huge?
you lose some smarts that way (Score:3)
The more things you turn off, the less "aware" your phone is of its environment.
For example, I have a friend who uses Tasker on his phone. He gets in the car and it pairs with the bluetooth ODB2 port and starts displaying engine info. He goes to the movie theater and it detects the wifi access point and switches to vibrate. He sets location-based reminders (next time I'm within 5 miles of store X, go pick up item Y).
I guess it's all about what's most useful to you...
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1. Can be taken further, in a manner not dissimilar to disabling the retarded pre-load-at-boot that such things as Open Office and Adobe Reader like to do on Windows:
Keeping seemingly-innocuous apps from doing non-productive things, triggered by system events that they have no business keeping track of, is something I've found to be very good for both performance and battery life.
As an example Pandora, the popular music streaming service, wakes up (runs) on all of the following universally-useless intents
Not my LG... (Score:3)
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My Google Nexus 4 (LG makes it) has never been that good with battery life. I've owned it for close to 2 years now and it's only gotten marginally worse than when it was new. I charge it each night fully, and get about 14-16 hours of life before it's in the red (warning comes on at 14%). That's with:
- Checking it regularly for slashdot, emails, messages, facebook, etc, for short bursts of 1-2 minutes.
- Probably put about 1-2 hours of internet browsing on it (mix of wifi and cellular) during lunch or before
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Do you have an adb trace or something to show how that hammering goes, or wireshark trace or something ? I actually got a feeling its the opposite, turning off location services significantly helps my battery survive, also on nexus 4
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- Leave off GPS to keep Big Brother from tracking my movements unless I need mapping.
FWIW that won't work, they can triangulate based on cell towers.
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"LG Android device"? Couldn't even find the model name?
Must be an old, low end phone. LG make the G3 and Nexus 5, both of which have excellent battery life.
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I'm not sure the G3 should be held up as a poster child for good battery life. I have one, and when it's running full out it can chew through a battery. It's the downside of the hires screen. It's not bad, but under normal conditions I'll be at 35-40% after a full day of use, and if I'm going to be on it continuously I can burn through the battery in 5-6 hours. OTOH, it's got a replaceable battery, so there's never any real battery anxiety. I think the G2 was pretty good with battery life, though.
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If at all possible, I would recommend rooting your phone and killing/removing apps. You could also try Cyanogenmod if it is supported on your device... which it likely is.
The HTC One M8 really stands out (Score:1)
The HTC One M8 really stands out, thanks to its nearly balanced performance/battery-life ratio
No it doesn't. Just because an arbitrary "performance" number equals another just as arbitrary "battery life" number doesn't mean the device is any balanced.
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I assume you do realize what it means when one completely arbitrary number equals another completely arbitrary number, right?
its called a 'coincidence' at the best.
Really, this is either a desperate attempt to shill for the M8, or a huge statistics fail that someone has decided to run with.
And, not only that.
If you look at, for example, the Oneplus One, it has basically the same performance but much more battery life.
In what way is that less good that the M8? Of course there is none - it is better.
NOTHING A
It's not the absolute values that matter (Score:2)
It's the placement relative to the other devices. In other words, the numbers are arbitrary, but the charts are useful.
So the HTC One M8 is middle-of-the-pack on performance, but second-best on battery. The OnePlus One is a few percent worse than the HTC on performance, but 15% better on battery life. They could have removed the numbers entirely and this would still hold true.
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Apples and Oranges (Score:2)
Yes, by itself those two indices might be useful, if you're looking for a phone to match your personal priorities, but talking about some "balance", just because the two indices are near each other is quite nonsensical.
one plus one (Score:1)
I want to know where i can get an invite.
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I have the Razr Maxx (Score:3)
Didn't really want it (I had a Samsung in mind) but it's what work gave me (it was that or an iphone). Gotta say, the battery life is impressive and it doesn't sacrifice much performance, only lagging occasionally. I actually intended to run the battery flat a couple of weekends ago but it was still going late Sunday from being taken off charge Friday AM.
I'd forgotten how nice having decent battery life is. I had an L7089 in a past life and that would go out to seven days. I would gladly sacrifice quite a few "niceties" for battery life. Where are the e-ink android phones? (I have a Motofone F3 somewhere but sadly it doesn't work on the frequencies here)
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They should seriously try a Taichi*-like phone with a pair of screens. IPS/OLED on one side and eInk on the other. A B/W interface would work fine for 90% of the time, and the color screen would be there for camera ops, video, and the like. Apple put glass on two sides of a phone and it made for a pretty damned durable device, imho.
*Asus' dual screen laptop/tablet hybrid, with a screen on both sides of the lid (though both were IPS).
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Maybe you shouldn't charge your Tesla with your phone. ;)
Power matters little, Battery life matters less (Score:2)
Power on a cell phone? Maybe to the rarified gamer on /. but to little Andrea or her grandmother all they want is a phone that doesn't stutter and plays music and videos. And they make up 90% of the market segment for smartphones. That's not to say having a fast phone isn't nice, especially since the UI designers seem to be determined to max the bling, requiring lots of processing for that stutter free experience.
And if you are worried about your phones power, then battery life matters even less when you ca
Irrelevant. Comes down to users. (Score:2)
Which Android Devices Sacrifice Battery-Life For Performance?
The ones owned by people who dont know about background processing?
The majority of users have no clue why/how the battery drains, each device and its user will get different "real world" results.
At the end of the day, those users probably couldn't care less because they can magically charge it with electricity!
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This.
I've had so many devices that people claimed had shitty battery life, when I had no issues whatsoever. Like the Nexus 4.
(The N4 DID have some issues on initial release with the GPU frequency governor and broken wifi ARP offloading, but once these were fixed the device was great.)
Same with the Nexus 5. Google had some nasty power management bugs that killed battery on some wifi networks, but they had commits on AOSP within days that fixed the issue on the next OTA.
Some strange kind of slashvertising? (Score:1)
Am I reading too much into this? Being overly cynical?