The Truth About Why Your Smartphone Battery Sucks

Whether you’ve got a battery rated at 1500mAH, 1300mAH or are one of the unlucky with something even smaller – you’re probably complaining about your device not lasting long enough. Well I put it to you, that Linus never planned on his love-child to be run on portable, embedded or mobile devices. Yet here we are, the Mars Rover runs Embedded Linux, Linux on Wal-Mart P.O.S and handheld price scanners…and just about everybody who has purchased a smartphone in the past few years has a device that is loosely based on Unix, Linux or some other POSIX-compliant platform. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the operating system but the Linux kernel isn’t exactly disk and battery efficient without configurations; coupled with a journaling filesystem, 4 (if not more) extremely power-hungry transmission radios and a large screen – you might find yourself curbing your usage. I blame manufacturers and their developers for shipping devices with software that doesn’t maximize usage of the constrained hardware.

Android forced mobile phones to reach the holy gigaherz grail – everybody went with it and nowadays you can’t launch a new device without mind-numbing questions from self-proclaimed pseudo-pundits who pass themselves off as bloggers/geeks/journalists about what speed it’s running at, and if it has a Snapdragon or not. Hey. Shut up. Back in the day (yes, I said it) we used to use every spare cycle for something useful. We’d re-compile programs from source in order to optimize it for 0.08s faster disk IO. We donated our cycles to projects like SETI@Home or distributed.net – not so much anymore. Even Google is blaming developers for how they’re writing applications. Apple left out multitasking because they claimed it killed battery life. That’s software, sir.

Do you notice a trend with the types of devices that absolutely drain down power? Apart from having huge screens? Here’s a hint; the platform. Android – Linux based. iOS – Unix based. Maemo – Linux based. WebOS – Linux based. Now how about what the other ones? Have you *ever* heard a Blackberry user complain about bad battery life? How about early Symbian ones? No. Why? They’re not an after-thought to a device. Blackberry OS and Psion/Symbian were written based on hardware and written to compliment a device. Nowadays, your phone is being mass-manufactured and a pre-cooked OS is being slapped on. Nobody knows what platform your hardware is running before it gets it. HTC can and will swap it randomly during testing. Point is – it’s not optimized for the device. That’s not your fault. Blame Google for not stress-testing (they can’t, they have no hardware requirements). Blame Apple for not letting users change kernel settings (most people are too dumb anyhow). Blame Maemo for giving anybody and everybody root access (with great power, comes great responsibility). Blame WebOS for using interpreted languages that requires separate rendering engines.

So when your battery sucks and you can’t make it through the day <SARCASM ALERT> – don’t blame Nokia for shipping a 1320mAH battery. Don’t blame Apple for making their devices with a non-user-replaceable power source and please don’t blame HTC for designing a device so thin that the battery has 4 cells in it. Here’s who you can blame. Developers, developers, developers. The same people who are coding your precious 250,000 apps are the same ones who don’t give a flying frappuccino about power management. The ones who are letting services run idle in the background, the ones who don’t follow specs for protocols, and the ones who aren’t allowing you to dictate when and where you want things to happen.

Oh, and blame yourself for cranking up a 100mW WiFi radio, routing packets through your 3G connection that juices about 2W, powering up a GPU to process over a MILLION instructions and driving a 300mW-sucking 4” screen just so you can watch an YouTube video of a dancing baby.

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Simon has written 8 articles for The Mobile Fanatics.

Hey, I'm on the internet! Email: simon@themobilefanatics.com. Twitter: @SimonLR.

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Saenzm626

Really interesting, until the reference to “a dancing baby”…so tired an unoriginal. Who the hell is looks at dancing babies, get out of the 90s. It’s all about Antoine Dodson!!!!!
pieter13

Oops, I don’t know how to change Kernel settings…..
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http://www.themobilefanatics.com Mike Macias

Damnit Simon, you always make me feel like a re-tard when I read your articles. I never realized app developers had such a big part of phone’s battery life. I know some apps drain the battery – FAST – but I figure the ginormous screens and 3g were the main culprits.

So if a developer were to make an application more battery efficient how much would that impact a normal day’s usage? Would the normal user really notice a few hours difference or are we talking minutes.
http://twitter.com/creip Chris

This was a good read! -b
Anonymous

yeah, that pretty much covers it. i want my symbian back…. always had good battery life on my n95 and n97.
Victoria_pvn

пожалуйста скажите что делать, не держит батарея на новом телефоне Е71!! проблема в батарее или же в самом аппарате?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Hisyam-Halim/100000545855759 Hisyam Halim

This is a truth that not many in the tech press know/write about. The limitation here is battery not the processor or how bright your screen can get. A smartphone that ran out of battery right after lunch is not even a phone anymore. Since now Symbian is forced to be more touch friendly and have bigger & brighter screens, it’ll be interesting to see whether Symbian ^3 will fare better than Android & iOS in battery consumption.

In the end, what matter is, when you’re holding a dead 4″ screen devices, your BB & S60 3rd ed friends will be laughing at you when you have to borrow their phones to make a call.
http://thenokiablog.com Mark Guim

he makes me feel stupid when I read his tweets
Allen

You make a lot of sense
http://www.mozzarellashop.it MasviL

Very interesting article!

So 3G connection drain power more than Wi-Fi? I read a lot of articles they say to avoid Wi-Fi connection because it consumes more than 3G. Please clarify.
http://www.themobilefanatics.com Mike Macias

Hi MasviL,

I’m sure that @SimonLR has a better answer than me. I’ve heard both sides of the Wi-Fi vs 3g power consumption argument. I think if you’re constantly scanning for Wi-Fi then you’ll get more drain then just leaving 3g on and Wi-Fi scanning off. But if you are using a constant connection like streaming movies then I would think Wi-Fi will be easier on the battery. But I might be wrong!
http://www.knownokia.ca Simon

As I understand it…under heavy transmission, WiFi is much less battery intensive than using a 3G connection with the same load.

Without using Power Saving Mode (PSM) on a WiFi device, the radio in many smartphones top out at Tx/Rx 120mW and can be scaled down to 10mW by the user. Compare that to anywhere up to 2W for GSM/UMTS/HSPA, that’s an immediate difference.

If you’re using a certified WiFi device and use PSM, your packets get buffered by the access point and your radio enters a sleep mode and cycles power to check for waiting packets. This can reduce the power draw by well over ten-fold. Huge numbers. Huge difference if you enable it.

I say, WiFi is less power hungry than 3G.
http://www.mozzarellashop.it MasviL

OK, thanks for make me understand.

So I guess using SmartConnect or similar APN switcher (something like “if there is Wi-Fi use it, else use 3G”) is a good idea, right?
http://www.mozzarellashop.it MasviL

OK, thanks for make me understand.

So I guess using SmartConnect or similar APN switcher (something like “if there is Wi-Fi use it, else use 3G”) is a good idea, right?
EPx

Who cares? iPhone taught everyone to keep a charging cable within reach, and people got used to it. At last resort, you can buy a DealExtreme “external battery” with USB 5V output. This is the price for carrying a computer+GPS+camera+compass+gamepad in your pocket, that happens to double as a cell phone.

If you want just a cell phone, buy a Nokia 1208 (which is excellent anyway, but I prefer to carry just one gadget).
Anonymous

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