Battery life of smartphones getting worse
PHONE makers promise “allday battery life.”
If you recently bought a new flagship phone, chances are its battery life is actually worse than an older model.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year’s top models underperformed last year’s. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year’s iPhone X. Google’s Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2.
“Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about five per cent per year,” says Nadim Maluf, the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm called Qnovo that helps optimise batteries. “But phone power consumption is growing up faster than five per cent.”
Blame it on the demands of high-resolution screens, more complicated apps and, most of all, our seeming inability to put the phone down. Lithium-ion batteries, for all their rechargeable wonder, also have some physical limitations, including capacity that declines over time - and the risk of explosion if they’re damaged or improperly disposed.
My test has limitations. Your experience will depend on how you use your phone, and there are steps you can take to make your phone life stretch.
We’re not without hope. Two phones that performed well in my tests, Samsung’s Note9 and Apple’s iPhone XR, offer ideas about how to design phones to last longer - at least until a totally new battery tech comes along.
My results made me do a double take, so I called up a squad of other tech journalists also obsessed with testing at CNET, Tom’s Guide and Consumer Reports. “Our overall average battery life is coming down,” says Mark Spoonauer, the editor in chief of Tom’s Guide, who also found the iPhone XS battery died sooner than the iPhone X. Many of the phones with the longest battery life, he adds, are a year old.
I use a light meter to set all the phones at the same brightness and then force their web browsers to reload and scroll through a series of sites I serve through a local WiFi network. I rerun the tests as many times as possible, and then average the results.
CNET, which like me found conspicuous dips in battery life between the iPhone 8 and iPhone X (and Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S9), tests screens at 50 per cent brightness playing a looping video with Airplane Mode turned on.
What we both discovered: Phones with fancy screens that are especially high-resolution or use tech such as OLED perform worse.
Tom’s Guide throws another factor into the mix: The cellular connection. It makes phones run through a series of websites streamed over LTE.
Unlike me, it also saw a big battery life hit to the Pixel 3 XL versus the Pixel 2 XL.
Another lesson: If you want the battery to last longer, use WiFi when possible - or even Airplane Mode when you don’t need to be reachable.
Consumer Reports is likely better testing the phone’s processor, an area where a number of companies - but particularly Apple - have made efficiency gains.
So overall, are battery lives decreasing or increasing? “You can’t make a straight trend,” says Consumer Reports director of electronics testing Maria Rerecich.
So what about the two 2018 phones that did better in my tests?
Samsung’s Note9 succeeds by stuffing in more battery.
It contains a battery capacity of 4,000 mAh, up from the alreadyhuge 3,300 mAh in the Note8. (The iPhone XS battery is only 2,659 mAh, and actually slightly downgraded from the X.)
Lots of phones have followed the bigger battery trend. iFixit, a repair community that performs teardown analysis of phone components, says battery capacities have almost doubled in the last five years.
How much further can the size game go? Huawei just introduced a phone called Mate 20 Pro, not sold in the US, with a 4,200 mAh battery.
Larger, denser batteries can be more dangerous (remember Samsung’s exploding Note7?), not to mention heavier. The Note9, which also has a giant screen and a stylus, weighs 7.1 oz - more than twice a deck of cards.
Apple’s iPhone XR, the new phone I recommend to most people, has a different approach. It scales back on the screen tech - lower resolution, less bright and lower-quality colour - in ways that benefit battery life tremendously: The XR lasted three hours longer than the top iPhone XS, even though the its screen is larger.
“Consumers have to start getting ready for compromise,” says Maluf, the CEO of the battery optimisation company. — Washington Post.
Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about five per cent per year. But phone power consumption is growing up faster than five per cent. — Nadim Maluf, CEO of Qnovo, which helps optimise batteries