How long SHOULD a smartphone battery last?

Completely agree steve, I've had to charge my N97 on a daily basis from new, and several times it's died mid-afternoon, so I bought a 1900mAh battery which gave me a bit more time and juice, but still have days where phone dies before six !! Today I received a 2800mAh battery and new phone back to accomodate it, Just charging it as I type, and to be frank it makes the phone look horrendous, however if it lets me use the phone for a day or two without carrying a spare battery or charger, I think I can live with the bulk and weight. I'm hoping it will give me two days of heavy use and if it doesn't, the only thing I can think of is a very very very long usb charger cable, which somewhat defeats the concept of a 'mobile' phone ?
Oh yes, and good, informative and interesting article as per usual 😊

I think it depends on how you use your phone to be honest.
I am a somewhat heavy user and I never got two days out of an N95 8GB, usually but not always got a whole day though.
I used to get two days out if the E71, but never managed a whole day with the n97.
I get a day out of the iPhone 3GS usually, but that's using wifi for data not 3G, it definitely uses more battery when using 3G.
The one thing I have noticed though is how much more I use my phone these days, for web, for email, for twitter etc etc, which brings me back to my first point, the more you use it the more battery you will use.

I entirely agree that usage consumes the battery much faster, logically, however I think ALL phone manufacturers should install a battery that will run its most power hungry apps for at least 10 to 12 hrs. What's the point having a mobile multi media computer that you can't use ? OK 12 hrs navigation or video viewing may be excessive, but more and more netbooks and net'pads' are giving 8hrs plus and surely their power consumption is proportionately higher than a mobile phone ?

You have to stop saying that the new and faster processors consume more power than the old ones. The iphone 3gs has the same battery as the older 3g model yet still has better battery life BECAUSE of the new and faster processor. They use less power because they are more efficient in getting things done and are able to go back to idle sooner.

The a4 chip is probably more efficient than the old one and the new iphone will have a better battery life than the old one. Apple doesn't lie about battery life.

You keep saying that symbian has better battery management than others like the iphone.
Well i've had several symbian phones(n95 8gb, n86, i8910) in the last 2 years and I had an iphone 3gs.

And by far the worst of them all was the i8910, a symbian phone with a 1500 mah battery. The iphone and the 2 others are roughly similar. Given the small screens they should performe similar to the iphone which they do. This tells me that the battery management efficiency of symbian is not really a big factor.

Tenkom wrote:And by far the worst of them all was the i8910, a symbian phone with a 1500 mah battery. The iphone and the 2 others are roughly similar. Given the small screens they should performe similar to the iphone which they do. This tells me that the battery management efficiency of symbian is not really a big factor.

It does seem a bit device dependent, as if the manufacturer can still mess things up in the firmware.... most i8910 HD firmwares were pretty bad at power management, I've observed. A new HX6 firmware is due that fixes this to some degree...

My main observation in terms of Symbian power efficiency is that I can quite happily have twenty, yes, twenty apps all running at the same time (in RAM) on the likes of my E90 - and the phone stills runs for two on one charge. But that's S60 3rd Edition. Maybe I should add a rider for these touchscreen, event-ified S60 5th Edition phones 8-)

Tenkom wrote:

The a4 chip is probably more efficient than the old one and the new iphone will have a better battery life than the old one. Apple doesn't lie about battery life.

.

Apple do lie about it, just like everything else. I have an iPhone 3GS and it has a really good long battery life just as long as I don't try to use it. Start running apps on it and it absolutely eats battery like a hungry horse. Leave it idling in a good signal area, with BT, WiFi, location and notification off and the battery will go 3 days. Pick it up and use a game and some browsing and I'll need a charge within a day. This is not the only one I have witnessed doing this with its stupid non replacleable battery pack.

Apple even have a page on their website advising people to turn things off to improve battery life because its so bad:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

Nokia Symbian phones definitely do more for the mah. So I hope the new iPhone 4 is an improvement because it needs to be. Sequences shortened, some steps removed etc.

On another note, by all accounts the XPeria X10 mini from SE with a hidden Android OS underneath an SE skin has a fabulous battery life from a tiny battery.

I'm very pleased with the battery life of my E52, and wouldn't go to a device with worse battery life after using it.

I fully agree with Steve on this. Why can't we as users expect our phones to last full day? If its not doing that then its huge fail as its basic feature of calls.
I have faced these issues with newer "touchy" phones which are so called high end, flagship.My battery goes down by afternoon and I cant make or receive calls any more.

Guys , Mobiles phones are for Phone Calls, other fancy things are not priority.

If your phone goes dead what's the use of all high end features.

I have happily bought E52-real star with power management and also does smartphone job for me, may not be fancy looking but I never cared about that 😊

Manufacturers need to invest more in R&D and come out with better solutions than asking users to not use features(like Apple does)

Yes, I agree that symbian has efficient multitasking. As long as the apps are well behaved(some 3rd party games can really kill the battery if left running) there is no problem leaving them in the background and there is no slowdown at all. The other multitasking oses(winmo and maemo 5) i've tried quickly start slowing down once you have a few apps in the background.

For me it's as simple as this :
People who spend 40 euros on a new Nokia for talk and text only can easily get a full day out of their handsets - how on earth can we recommend that they upgrade to a fun, new advanced handset when you have to be a semi geek to get it through one day ?

It's a smartPHONE manufacturers, and phones are core.

It can't be letting us down during our day - otherwise it'll feel like an unreliable acquaintance instead of your go-to mate.

What about, say, ring-fencing the last 10% of your battery for GSM calls and texts ?
That way we could enjoy the FUNctionality without being worried about missing that important call

I have to say I do miss the days of my Palm Pilot which ran for a month on two AAA's!

Andy.

ive been writting the same sort of stuff over at nokia users

whats the point in havinga mobile device thats got to be cahrged twice a day

it was going back to s60 v3 and the e72 that made me realise how good it was to have a long lasting battery

i had been using the n900 / nexus one / i8910 / 5800 / n97 / and they all suffered from poor battery specially the n900 when used alot it went down like a formula one cars fuel gauge when being red lined

i tryed the e72 and i used bluetooth streaming and gps for 2.5 hours and the battery hadnt lost a bar

i found the e72 such a good device and loved buttons so much i went and bought a n86 , the battery isnt as good as the e72 but the camera makes up for it and the battery still beats all touch screen devices ive mentioned and its only 1200mah

i can abuse the handset and i know it will make it home

i think t9 and s60v3 has alot going for it , size battery life due to smaller screens and smaller cpu and the o/s being so efficent

i think with s60 v5 we all forgot how good symbian could be

s60v3 is a dependable o/s with great features and alot of good hardware phones for example the n85 is what coming up 2 years old and the feature list on that is amazing infact i bet you can do allmost anything on the n85 that you can say the nexus one etc

battery life for me is important whats the point in having an amzing phone you cant use , after all the latest phones ive tested ive gone back to s60 v3 as it offers all the bells and whistles of a smartphone o/s and also manages to get through the day which many other smartphone o/s cant manage

i think nokia may have messed up with the 1200mah battery in the n8 it would have been so good to see the trusty 1500mah battery in the n8 and the more pics i see i just wander why they couldnt have squeezed it in there

the n8 has the same battery life as my n86 however it has more battery hungry features and when used like they are meant to be the battery is going to go down fast

it reminds me of the n95-1 and the n96 , when everyone found out the n96 had a 950mah battery we all knew it wouldnt be enough as it had more and the same battery

the n8 has less battery power then the n900 so the battery isnt going to be great in it 😞

shame really

i defently agree with your article mate and i dont think its to much to expect a battery that lasts the day on a mobile device ill either use a n86 , n85 , e72 untill newer phones can easily get through the day i think

Gone are the days when manufacturers used to offer spare batteries that offer extended talk time (5110, 6310 as such).

I completely agree that all smartphones at present have but one thing in common; power hungry features.

The more power to the processor, the more power needed to sustain it for a couple of hours/days.

I think that manufacturers should offer the option of using a bigger capacity for batteries, what use would a phone be if it cant even run through a whole day of texting, calling, emailing?

But I guess we are at the brink of technology when manufacturers would eventually solve this crisis.

Tacsiyapo!!!

if your tied to a desk all day have access to wifi by all means get the latest and greatest, but for those out on the road that must stay connected get a e series or a blackberry.

And another thing that winds me up and android owners will know this, in order to get a full day from your battery you should, disable, activesync, diable gmail sync, disable twitter, diabkle facebook, diable always on 3g, disable location in fact disable everything that that makes your phone smart. These are great gadgets but not for professional use.

gadget freak wrote:if your tied to a desk all day have access to wifi by all means get the latest and greatest, but for those out on the road that must stay connected get a e series or a blackberry.

If, by "on the road", you mean travelling by car then all that is required is a 12v car adapter.

However, I get your point. Battery life clearly is lagging the rest of the technology. I have a feeling that the N8 is going to do better for battery life than previous phones, despite the small cell size. The N900 is nothing to judge, I expect any linux based OS to be a bit hungry.

I'm pretty happy with N86 battery performance, it holds ~ 4 days :icon14:

Let's not forget of battery king of all times Nokia 6310, 7-10 days, that was really something, I was charging it once a week 😃

Cheers,
Miki

I loved the HTC Hero until I realised that the battery life wasn't much more than a day and a half - with LIGHT use - and less than a day with heavy use!
Now using E72 on GSM signal (no 3G here in China) and its giving me a solid four-five days - very impressed.
But how DID Nokia manage to squeeze so much out of the skinny battery in the E75? I'm getting three to four days on it with light use, which drops to two days if I'm writing long articles on the wonderful keyboard though.
One sure way to kill interest in a smartphone for geeks is to have rubbish battery life. It doesn't matter how cool or sexy the thing is.
Does the Android OS have the ability to be less power-hungry in the future, or will Symbian remain king of the hill? That's what I'd like to know! 😃

Agreed. I realise that I'm tying to compare apples with pears ie large touch screens with smaller non-touch, but as has been mentioned above, what is the point of all those wonderful features if the phone is going to be dead weight in your pocket within 24 hours? Give me small screen and keyboard with REAL autonomy any day!

Its not only the manufacturers that are fault, its mainly the marketing. Users now see smartphones as multi-tasking always-connected, location-aware, real-time updated computers now but when a device is used like that, the battery life suffers. Screen-on activities can draw 1000 times more power than an idle smartphone and as there's no such thing as idle on a smartphone due to wildly uncontrolled background apps (exception: Apple iOS does a good job of keeping this in order) then end user gets a shock.

It was expected and has been a problem for mobile computers (UMPCs) since day 1.

In the last 5 years battery life for a mobile computer has increased by an average 20% per year.

The same can be expected of smartphones.......

Unless someone kicks the lazy, money-grabbing li-ion industry up the bum and gets them to take on new technologies just like everyone else.

oh...one other thing.

I've been carrying two phones because of this battery life problem. For power users I recommend looking at something like the Dell Streak in the bag and a low-cost small-screen smartphone with a good cam in the pocket.
Steve

modern laptops use CPU scaling to increase their battery life. When you're just reading an email, or the screensaver is turned on, the CPU scales it's speed down to 0% (800MHz on my 1.8GHz laptop), scaling up the CPU when I start doing heavy things like a game, or compiling some software.

By forcing the CPU speed to the slowest option, I *double* the battery life of a dell latitude d630. These techniques can be used to gain battery life when we're not (actively) using them.

Those of us who have used various smartphones for years no the score and can fiddle to what suits us best, but smartphones are now marketed as mass market devices and most people haven't got a clue how to manage their ram, disable programmes etc, they just want to pick it up and it just works, all day every day.

Markdubya wrote:I loved the HTC Hero until I realised that the battery life wasn't much more than a day and a half - with LIGHT use - and less than a day with heavy use!
Now using E72 on GSM signal (no 3G here in China) and its giving me a solid four-five days - very impressed.
But how DID Nokia manage to squeeze so much out of the skinny battery in the E75? I'm getting three to four days on it with light use, which drops to two days if I'm writing long articles on the wonderful keyboard though.
One sure way to kill interest in a smartphone for geeks is to have rubbish battery life. It doesn't matter how cool or sexy the thing is.
Does the Android OS have the ability to be less power-hungry in the future, or will Symbian remain king of the hill? That's what I'd like to know! 😃

I don't believe that Symbian is less power hungry than Android. I'd have to see some scientific testing done to believe that. My personal experience wouldn't suggest that at all.

As for the E72 having a better battery life than the Hero, well, duh.. First of all the E72 has a higher capacity battery, but most importantly the Hero has a much bigger screen, with a higher resolution and it's touch sensitive. That's the biggest battery drainer right there - the screen! As for the E75, it also has a tiny, poor resolution non-touch screen.

Another factor is the usage pattern. People with Android phones and iPhones tend to use them more for useless things simply because they are generally more fun to use than Symbian phones.

I don't think the CPU clock has that much impact on the battery life either. I've overclocked my Milestone to 1.2 GHz (default is 550 MHz) and I generally haven't noticed much, if any, impact on the battery life with my usage pattern.

I've also owned a lot of Symbian phones (pre 5th Edition) and can easily say that - with roughly the same usage - none of those phones gave me a significantly better battery life than my current Android phone. Well, with the exception of the E61(i) I guess, but that one is pretty dated now. My E90 probably lasted a little longer at most things, but then again had poorer battery management at other things like multimedia (music playback etc.). My N95 GB definitely didn't have a decent battery life.

I do agree however that with the trend of bigger and bigger touch-sensitive screens with increasingly higher resolution, the battery technology has to play catch-up.

I agree that there is nothing empirical, but my tacit experience as the owner and user of several different phones from the BB, Symbian, Android, Apple, Microsoft stables, Nokia Symbian phones tend to do better pound for pound on battery than all phones except the BB. I think it's the way Nokia do hardware and implement power saving, which is all enabled by the nature of the OS.

Are you kidding?

Nokia n97 mini running on 434MHz (!) is painfully slow!. Every quick takes a while for execution! And I'm not talking about complicated apps/games. I'm talking BASICS! I have a shortcut on the homescreen for new message. Click that, and good 4-5 seconds pass before it displays. Now "Add recipient" and more seconds pass before the phonebook is displayed. This are BASICS that should happen INSTANTLY. Same thing with menus (go to apps and if you have 20-30 you have to wait 5-6 seconds before you can scroll) or playlists (music library takes even longer time to render). All that in 2010??? Seriously? I had E51 before, and 6822 before that, and 8210 and 5110 even before that, and NONE of them experienced a single hiccup when opening a text message! How is nokia happily making "backward progress", and how you guys praise them for it, I just don't get.

So, if you haven't heard that before, hear it now. N97 mini running on 434MHz CPU is SLOOOOOOW. There.

walmark wrote:Are you kidding?

Nokia n97 mini running on 434MHz (!) is painfully slow!. Every quick takes a while for execution! And I'm not talking about complicated apps/games. I'm talking BASICS! I have a shortcut on the homescreen for new message. Click that, and good 4-5 seconds pass before it displays. Now "Add recipient" and more seconds pass before the phonebook is displayed. This are BASICS that should happen INSTANTLY. Same thing with menus (go to apps and if you have 20-30 you have to wait 5-6 seconds before you can scroll) or playlists (music library takes even longer time to render). All that in 2010??? Seriously? I had E51 before, and 6822 before that, and 8210 and 5110 even before that, and NONE of them experienced a single hiccup when opening a text message! How is nokia happily making "backward progress", and how you guys praise them for it, I just don't get.

So, if you haven't heard that before, hear it now. N97 mini running on 434MHz CPU is SLOOOOOOW. There.

Did you not notice that this is a discussion about battery life?

Steve Litchfield wrote:The Nokia E63 and E71's processor runs at 370MHz, the best-selling 5800's at 434MHz, and I've never heard any of these phones described as 'slow'.

- N97 mini runs the same 434MHz. I couldn't stop myself from commenting on that line (I stopped reading the article after this nonsense). I guess I should have quoted for clarity.

Instead of talking about feelings, I would prefer if we talk about numbers and they are conveniently provided by a piece of software called

Nokia Energy Profiler

Actually even a superficial testing shows that the idea of a full day of active usage is unfortunately not very realistic even with 1500 mAh battery. The reason is that active wifi/3g connection consumes over 200 mA (I am referring to e90). This will depend on specification of your phone, but do not hope for miracles.

The same problem happens with gps or bluetooth. Both consume to much energy to keep them running the whole day.

@Steve, could you possibly publish numbers for some of your phones? For the sake of testing I think one can limit his attention to the phones which are supposedly energy efficient, like e52. I did not test it, but my guess is that it will not outperform e90 by a huge margin. Would be glad to know the numbers 😊