Charging hassle a real barrier to 'normobs'

Actually charging hassle is a big problem to power users as well.

My E72's 1500mAh battery doesn't even last for 12 hours on a working day.
I'm on the phone for around 5 hours during those 12 hours. During the rest, Nokia Messaging is set to poll my email every 15 minutes, Mobbler runs for a maximum of half an hour on a WiFi connection, and the browser gets fired 3 or 4 times.

I haven't made the move to a touch-screen phone yet mainly because of this. I hope the E7-00 or whatever is the next E-Series touch-screen phone running Symbian^3 has a decent battery or I'll never make the move.

Seems in terms of battery technology we're still stuck in the dark ages. Why are we still using Lithium ion when this battery type just cant handle todays power hungry devices, you'd think a new battery technology would have been invented by now. Sticking in a 2000maH would help but maybe make the phone to chunky for most peoples liking. My X6 will barely make it through an average days use, often needing a lunchtime charge. My N79 is a great little phone though with decent battery life. The N8 worries me though, I think Nokia have made a huge mistake using a 1200 battery, unless im proved wrong I expect the N8 will have very poor battery life.

Here's a thought:

Nokia's have a light sensor, and a front-facing camera. One or the other can be used to detect when lights are out at bed time for example. How about an app to check the time of day, compare it with light levels, and battery levels, and make an intelligent guess that the user has gone to bed and forgotten to plug in their charger and needs to do so and then alert the user immediately - it shouldn't be rocket science should it?

I'm an app developer but don't have the time for this currently otherwise I'd make it myself 😊

@Davescot: >"The N8 worries me though, I think Nokia have made a huge mistake using a 1200 battery, unless im proved wrong I expect the N8 will have very poor battery life."

This is complete over exaggeration. Does anyone really think Nokia will make a "huge" mistake with the N8 and that it will have "very poor" battery life, given all the care and attention lavished on the N8 by Nokia, their awareness of the risks of a non-removable battery, and the risks to Nokia's slightly battered reputation if they screw up significantly on the N8? No. The N8 battery life will be fine for most people most of the time, you can be sure of that. Comparison with what 1200mAh is capable of in other devices is invalid as we're talking completely different hardware and OS here, that have been refined to the nth degree. I think people need to chill a bit on the N8 battery front.

It's a girl thing, Steve. They're just as bad at keeping their payg credit topped up or keeping track of when the car's MOT is due. There's nothing that any of us can do to stop them being like that.

ROFL. You could say that, but I couldn't possibly comment. I'd be lynched! 8-)

ajck, for what you want, there is already a app available - Nokia Bot from Nokia Betalabs. True its in experimental stage, and currently can only work on S60v5 phones that have the active homescreen (n97, C6, etc.), but it has started.

Steve, I agree with this charging hassle. 5 years I bought my 1st smartphone and till this point I was a user of "phones" and / or Nokia S40 phones. These phones when charged lasted atleast 4-5 days. My "1st" smartphone barely lasted 2 days. My initial shock was such that I went back to the vendor complaining that he has sold me a defective phone / battery. He had a hard time convincing me that battery span pf smartphones is shorter and I actually had to research on the web to convince myself. 😊

I wish the battery technology evolves so that we can have a good battery life for our devices.

This is what keeps me coming back to Nokia E72/N97 mini, I have a HTC Legend and its a brilliant phone but Im scared to leave WIFI, GPS, Bluetooth on incase it drains the battery so i'm toggling GPS off and on, WIFI off and on etc. With Nokia it only turns on these thing when you need to use them so when I get in the car I dont have to think have I turn bluetooth on and when I go to maps I dont have to come out of the app to turn GPS on. Little things but Nokia just do them so well.

Well, my N900 gets considerably better battery life than my friend's iPhone 3GS, despite doing more, so chalk another up for Nokia.

"The N8 worries me though, I think Nokia have made a huge mistake using a 1200 battery, unless im proved wrong I expect the N8 will have very poor battery life."

Actually, the N8 might very well end up having better battery life than the 5800 or similar, because it has a GPU and Symbian^3 uses the GPU for more operations instead of the CPU.

The thing is, general purpose CPUs tend to use a lot of power for even simple operations, GPUs are a lot more efficient.

So even though the N8 is much faster, it might actually also have better battery life.

But time will tell, of course.

The is the Most Important Part of Mobiles the Batterylife,we used to have batteries that could last about 2-3 days,but the Current Mobile phones only seem to last a day,Why no Law as been brought in on to the Mobile Produces about the Batterylife Annoys me,as the cost of mobiles as gone Way over the Top an then Running the mobile Cost More nowdays,thats why i always buy a spare battery an portable mobile charger just incase my battery on my mobile runs out,with the Current N8 on its way an we can not change the battery ourself,but if the battery only last a day,i will still be buying a spare battery,Please Bring a Law in making sure that batteries on mobiles last a least 2 days an help the public out

I entirely agree with the whole article, and also always carry a spare battery with me and a Power Monkey mobile charger, just in case, for my N97. However for �18 I purchased a 1900mAh battery for the phone (non-Nokia) which is exactly the same physical size as the standard battery and with moderate to heavy use will last a couple of days. With the cost of modern smart phones I really can't understand how all the manufacturers can justify putting 'cheaper' batteries in there handsets, the difference in cost compare to a cost of �400-�500 seems ridiculous !!!!!!!!!!!! Then again, as Nokia scrimped on nearly ALL the hardware on my phone, it should hardly be a surprise 😞

What @Unregistered said about the N8's GPU being a boon for power-efficiency is very true. The simple fact is that GPUs are designed specially to deal efficiently with ever so common operations involved in drawing to the screen. They do in one clock cycle what a CPU would do in many. Also, no-one cares to explain why the N8 would use more power than any previous Symbian device in the first place.

> Swapping out spare batteries isn't a typical mainstream solution

It used to be in the good old days when batteries also constituted a part of the phone outer shell, easily removed via a simple button or a latch. Nowadays, one has to take out a cover, pry or shake the battery loose, insert the spare, and replace the cover.

It seems that smartphones increasingly exhibit the same fundamental defect as laptops -- mobile devices that users are always rushing to tether to a source of the vital and so rapidly dissipated electric current. But even when relying upon a spare battery, I expect a phone, especially an expensive smartphone, to last three days of normal usage on a single charge.

They should offer official extended batteries like mugen batteries. I would easily sacrifice looks and size for extra power.

HTC did this with the diamond. Granted it only went from completely useless to barely acceptable.
I want a battery that takes my n900 from "barely acceptable" to "1 day guaranteed".

Charging every night is a complete non-issue for me.

brendand wrote:What @Unregistered said about the N8's GPU being a boon for power-efficiency is very true. The simple fact is that GPUs are designed specially to deal efficiently with ever so common operations involved in drawing to the screen. They do in one clock cycle what a CPU would do in many. Also, no-one cares to explain why the N8 would use more power than any previous Symbian device in the first place.

Also, it's worth noting in the discussion that the N8 battery is not easily removeable. The only on-the-go boost option will be external plug in battery packs.

As a (happy) Palm Pre Plus owner the Touchstone is an absolute neccessity for me. The battery life on the device is awful even if you don't use it at all due to the constant syncing with the cloud which cannot be (easily) switched off.

I think this is a large part of why phone battery life is so awful these days. Carriers market all these phones with data plans and facebook/twitter/etc built in. Users will utilize this functionality, thus ensuring the phone's cell radio is on full power for a fair amount of time each day (transferring data, photos etc) - this combined with the overhead of a multitasking OS (albeit a fairly small overhead in Symbian's case anyway) will mean the processor will be working at full pelt a lot of the time as well. None of it is good for battery.

I dread to think how bad the multicore ARM CPU battery life will be.

> The only on-the-go boost option will be external plug in battery packs.

Unless, of course, you have a small screwdriver with you of the correct size, and a spare standard Nokia 1200mAH battery, which is what many of us intend to have if we're serious about this issue. Of course someone in China no doubt will come out with a cheapo replacement end piece for the N8 that simply clips in and out rather than screws, which will be flogged for 99p + �1.99 postage on Ebay I expect 😉

It's all very well putting in (for example) a 4" high brightness screen and 1GHz processor

Urgh. I hate it when people think a 1 GHz CPU automatically means huge battery drain. These high-end SoCs are generally fabricated on more advanced, smaller processes (45nm on the latest Samsung Hummingbird or Qualcomm Snapdragon) which uses less power than their older 65nm or larger counterparts.

Newer and faster designs, such as the Cortex-A8, also have far more extensive power saving technologies (like clock gating), further reducing power consumption.

Finally, they don't always run at the max speed and power. Like modern laptop x86 CPUs, they only ramp up when needed.

In effect, these newer SoCs (that Nokia are seemingly ignoring on Symbian handsets) do MORE with less power.

And while we're talking about power, why doesn't Symbian have a push notification service? Apple was the first to introduce it but now Microsoft and RIM are adding it to their platforms as well.

Will81 wrote:

Newer and faster designs, such as the Cortex-A8, also have far more extensive power saving technologies (like clock gating), further reducing power consumption.

Finally, they don't always run at the max speed and power. Like modern laptop x86 CPUs, they only ramp up when needed.

This is true, but my experience of using these latest phones is that they are very good on battery drain as long as you don't use them to do anything. Very much like having a 5 litre V8 car that weighs 2 tons. They use very little fuel when they are parked up. The engines only ramp up when you want to go somewhere. On these phones there is almost visible battery drain when they are actively doing power hungry work such as google maps - which hammers GPS, 3G to constantly download new bitmap tiles, display and processing.

Will81 wrote:
And while we're talking about power, why doesn't Symbian have a push notification service? Apple was the first to introduce it but now Microsoft and RIM are adding it to their platforms as well.

If Symbian took an app that does a regular poll to its remote service in the background and said "this is a push service" then they would have one. All the push services are just simulated push, not real except the ones based on BES.

Hi Steve,
One topic that I and Im sure others would like to see an article written by you, on is how does the touch optimised symbian ( 5th edition and symbian^3) compare with symbian 3rd edition in terms of responsiveness and overall useability. I recently bought a Nexus One and I find it considerably slower to use than my old trusty N82 even though all the specs suggest otherwise. I got a feeling that a physical button is always going to be more responsive than a touchscreen regardless of how good the technology gets. Even though I use Android now, I keep an eye on symbian and Im waiting for a phone and/or Symbian OS that will make me return to symbian. I have a feeling though that the OS's are getting less usable as technology progresses because they try to do too many things, most of them useless in day to day usage. In my opinion the ideal OS would be something that has the stability and usability of symbian 3rd edition plus a lot more native applications. Am I asking too much? 😊
It would be great to take your thoughts on this topic.Thanks

In my use-case I've read some of my feeds for an hour before I leave home in the morning. I make a lot of calls, use gps and play music all day long. Emails, quickoffice and more feeds all get used a lot in a typical day. I seldom make it to lunchtime on a single charge. All of this means that I need to always have a car charger and a regular charger with me at all times. And it's been the same with every smartphone I've owned over the last 6 years. My argument is that these are MOBILE devices but if I'm having to carry so many periferal gadgets around then it's not really a mobile device. I might as well just keep my laptop with me for my web needs, buy a gps for getting around and an Ipod for music. So battery life negates the whole concept of convergence.

Unregistered wrote:If Symbian took an app that does a regular poll to its remote service in the background and said "this is a push service" then they would have one. All the push services are just simulated push, not real except the ones based on BES.

What Apple, RIM and presumably Microsoft are doing is consolidating all push services onto one server. This means that the phone only needs to maintain one connection to the Symbian or Nokia push server instead of having each app attempting to maintain its own connection.

This should reduce the amount of CPU cycles and radio access on the phone and help improve battery life. It also means that developers will not need to create their own push notification service which may not be as efficient as the push service built into the OS.

RIM's push technology is no better than anyone else's. They may be first to bring push-email to the masses but their NOC-based system which requires specific Blackberry carrier connections is archaic. Like tnkgrl said on the Engadget Mobile podcast, I wish RIM (or at least their stupid carrier connections) would just die.

I seldom make it to lunchtime on a single charge.

Sounds like you should get yourself one of those Mugen ultra-high capacity batteries which makes your phone twice as thick. That should get you through a day on one charge.

Will81 wrote:What Apple, RIM and presumably Microsoft are doing is consolidating all push services onto one server. This means that the phone only needs to maintain one connection to the Symbian or Nokia push server instead of having each app attempting to maintain its own connection.

.

Symbian/S60 support imap idle, natively and through apps like profimail. Apple and Google Android both license ActiveSync from Microsoft.

There's no real push because the server can never be consistently aware of how to locate the client, unless the client connects to the internet and advertises itself on each WifI/cell network it connects to every time it connects.

I agree with you, Steve!
I'm proudly possesing a white N86 and I really love it.
Especially the battery life is excellent at sometimes a whole week with modest use...
My prior N73 reached that, too, with only 1100mAh!!
And i really like the non-daily charging, which - like you said - is normally at android devices etc...

But with the upcoming N8 (as a symbian-lover a dream device 😊 *drool* ) there'll maybe arrive battery problems...

but what about the idea to use this "new" external battery packs with usb-cable like Nokia is already selling?

Can't say I've ever had a problem with battery life, or not anything that I've considered a problem anyway. 5230, I'd say it generally manages a week easily. I don't have any particular regime, just plug it in for the night when it's down to two or three bars. If the battery is low then I will stop using web and apps though. Probably use for an hour of internet browsing per day, plus a couple of text messages. Might play an hour or so of music in the evenings, which knocks the battery life down to a few days, still perfectly acceptable.

If I'm running the GPS constantly (OVI maps), then, yes, the battery only lasts a few hours (about 6 before warnings in my experience), but if I'm using the phone for navigation, I'm in the car anyway and it's still better than any satnav I've used for battery life. Only other point is that when using GPS, I frequently have the phone in "offline" mode to avoid roaming charges, which presumably helps the battery a bit. By this point I've already hit the car charger though, so the six hour figure above is for online, not offline.

I'm in a mixed 2G/3G environment if that makes any difference, only get a 3G signal at work, home is either very weak 3G (drops calls often) or moderate 2G. Between work and home there is no signal at all. Not sure how this impacts battery life, but I don't imagine it helps.