One of the failure modes for lithium ion is overdischarge. a Recovering a battery that has been overdischarged is difficult and sometimes impossible. This seems super over conservative though
Android on Google devices is a joke. I have a new Nexus 7 that sometimes turns on and off correctly and sometimes does not. I see articles on how great the power management is going to be on Android N+1 but I think the people who write them run iOS because if they ran Android they'd be telling google to make the power button work right first.
It's an amazing piece of braindead UI that holding down the power button for ~5 seconds on an Android phone triggers a reboot, even on a locked screen. Apparently no one at Google carries items other than a phone in their pockets.
No, it's because the device requires a hard power cycle command that bypasses the running OS and is guaranteed to cycle the other controllers and hardware on the SoC. I'm certain the iPhone has something very similar.
On the devices I've worked with, that button handling is done by the power management silicon and not by software at all.
A hardware reboot is a must. Every phone without a removable battery simply has to have one; otherwise a reboot for non-responsive device would mean leaving it on until battery is drained and then recharging it back.
Except then you're screwed if your phone bricks while you're out somewhere without a paperclip or similar implement. Holding down the power button for X seconds seems a far simpler and more user friendly solution. (Although I'm obviously in the camp that has never had my power button held down by something in my pocket for 10 seconds. Tough to imagine that happening.)
I'm a Type 1 Diabetic, so I carry a tube of glucose tablets with me at all times, about an inch in diameter of hard plastic. If the buttons on the phone are facing the tube, and I squat down to look at something or whatever for 10 seconds, things shift around such that the power button gets held and my phone reboots. Awesome.
Same thing on my Nexus 7, plus the orientation doesn't always work (these things broke in updates, I believe). Of course now the two years of updates are gone. I could have bought a Nexus 9 when these problems cropped up, but if I had I would have had four months of official updates (Nexus 9 discontinued in June, official updates ended in October)
I think something happens to the orientation sensor after the tablet has been running for days or weeks. On mine, it doesn't work again until after a reboot.
Honestly, it's starting to feel like Android on a lot of devices is a joke, as far as the hardware experience. I've always been a passionate fan of the OS and anti-walled garden, but the daily frustrations of using my S6, a year old "flagship" phone, kind of makes me question what the advantages really are.
It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.
Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.
I share your frustration. Part of the problem seems to be with most devices they are quite nice "out of the box" but over 6 to 12 months the experience degrades; battery and storage performance drop dramatically. I'd like to be able to read reviews of devices after 1 year of substantial use, rather than reviews of brand new devices.
Note this is already a notorious problem with Windows 95 and NT derivatives.
Microsoft is aware of it and has made many changes to help. For instance there is an official interface to remove an unwanted program or to turn off a process that starts when you log in. Similarly there was a time when windows machines were not at all adequately patched and Microsoft has come out with a solution that (i) worked and (ii) improved the performance steadily since then.
This makes Apple's choice to aggressively control background processes seem prescient to me. Also aggressively pushing specific media codecs.
I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.
I'd still put up with Android if it was still anti-walled garden. But it isn't, and hasn't been for years, which is why I finally stopping carrying the things. It's worth suffering a little pain to be open source, but unfortunately, if you have Play Services, you essentially aren't running an open source OS anymore.
While most people run Android the same way people run Apple, you can run Android and get your apps from f-droid, and you can run CM (and, if your into these things, Xprivacy), so while Google may still be getting your private data, random apps won't.
As someone who spent a couple years trying to use open source apps and F-Droid and such, good enough, Android is not. And Google getting your private data is far worse than random apps getting your private data. Because while random apps may get an incomplete picture, Google is profiling you on an unprecedented scale.
I agree. I've had an Android device since the Nexus One and kind of accepted all this as The Way Things Are, until I received an iPhone SE as a work phone. Not only is the form factor better than any Android device out there (I prefer smaller phones) the software just works so, so much better. I swipe to the camera from the lockscreen and it appears immediately, rather than four seconds later. And it can multitask as well as Android can, for my purposes (wasn't the case when I switched to the N1, of course).
At this point, as much as I like Android, the UI, the open nature, etc. etc., I can't justify sticking with it for the next phone I buy.
I think a lot of this comes from people who've only ever used Android in a serious way just accepting that this is The Way Things Are.
Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again.
It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey.
As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.
My 2+ years old Note 4 is running fine. It needs a new battery, but the core OS experience has improved from the various updates over the years.
My iPad Air on the other hand has severly dimished usability from the various iOS updates. Orientation change no longer works reliably. The idiotic change from swipe to unlock via double tap of home tremedously increased the frustration in UX (Try a double tap while the tablet is barely upright via Apple's magnetic cover.)
I really want to get a Pixel, but I can't justify it because after replacing the battery on my Note 4 it works as well as the day I bought it. A friend of mine had a very different experience, his Note 4 slowed to a crawl and there was no sorting it out. He went back to Apple.
I have a N5 (ya...), and I've found that somedays I'll be getting ready to go home from the office (where I sit like 20ft from a WiFi AP), and find my phone down to ~20-30% battery life - and a quick look at battery stats will happily tell me that my WiFi somehow used up like 50% of my battery. I have no idea whats going on with that... sometimes I can notice while I'm using the phone doing some pretty low power stuff (playing some music...) that the back will just start getting hot. Andddd there I go turning off my WiFi. I have no idea how much this is helping, but I certainly feel dumb having to baby my smartphone like this.
I recently switched to an iPhone 6S from a first gen Moto G.
The Moto G was never a fast phone, but a new thing it started to do towards the end of its life was OOM kill the mp3 player if you backgrounded it. At first it was if you did something heavyweight, like start a game. Then it was browsing an ad-heavy site. Then it was if you opened the web browser at all. This, plus the usual Android lag, bad battery life, intrusive Google Botnet stuff.
The tipping point was this. I walk to the coffee shop with music playing. I order, sit down, start reading. There's an amusing line in the book, so I take out the phone to take a picture of it, which kills the music player. Then a Google Maps notification pops up asking me to add the photo to the coffee shop's Maps page.
I think, why the fuck am I still using Android? I know Google tracks me everywhere I go, but do they have to be so obvious about it?
As a 1st gen. Moto G owner, i feel similar. I feel annoyed to be forced to get a new phone every two years. It was a much better experience to use Chrome and Spotify together with this phone in 2014. Now Spotify alone is freezing from time to time, especially after the latest update. Chrome was fast and responsive. Now it's guaranteed that if I open a web page in Chrome, any other app i might have open are killed and will have to be reloaded if i want to go back to them quick. I really like the phone and wish to use it for a while longer, but my experience is getting a bit worse each day.
In 2014 you had Kitkat, which was the last "good" Android release. The L (and future) are just horrible with memory and they don't care, since most of the devices now are 2GB+.
My 1st gen Moto G is still going strong. Loading apps may be a little slow, but things rarely crash randomly. I'm pretty careful about exiting out of apps that I'm not actively using though, especially Google Maps.
I recently updated the OS to CyanogenMod though, mainly because the phone stopped receiving security updates. I wouldn't say the phone performs better running CM, but it's no worse than when I first bought the phone. I really hope CynogenMod can keep the ball rolling. I wouldn't want to run the stock image after it's fallen this far behind security updates.
> It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load.
Why spend $800 for this? Really? Really? Is there a point to spend $800 on a device that in a showroom or a friend's hand was not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day?
Decent camera (would have been called world-class 2 years ago), battery charged once every 3 days, stock Android, 2 SIM card sockets, 64GB SD card, 5.x sized screen.
But there are still things the camera phone can't do: Longer range/landscape photos. Interesting to see which manufacturer is able to put a quality detachable lens on a cameraphone, or when Nikon/Canon put SIM cards and telephony in their already Android-enabled equipment.
You're spending at least $800 on any "flagship" phone, it just might be through your carrier contract. I agree, I often wonder why the hell this is supposed to be worth the money. It was not marketed as "not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day," and as I recall it even ran great the first few months...Until the initial hardware warranties started running out, at which point my aux jack started disconnecting, the memory issues became apparent, etc...
I went from the iPhone to the HTC One and then the Nexus 5. I always had various power issues, but stuck it out until the iPhone came out with the larger size. Only when I went back to the iPhone did I realize how poor the Android experience had been. The iPhone is not perfect, and Android has good things about it, but overall the iPhone experience is better than either Android device I used.
The Nexus phones were a great value, but if the Pixel is going to be priced as a flagship phone then I see little reason to buy it over an iPhone.
I've got a nexus 5x on google fi and while it's fine compared with the cost of my iphone, I've been unimpressed with the UX. Feels a bit clunky and non intuitive in certain areas-- this morning I was trying to get a number from the calls log and ended up redialing inadvertently. I wanted to call from a land line so I hung up abruptly (unfortunately my callee had just picked up). Just little nuisances like that, that has me missing my iphone.
This isn't just on Pixels, I have a 6P that will turn off early as well, and I'd hazard a guess it has more to do with the latest Android versions than the specific hardware.
Same here. Originally, it would get to 5% then shut down, but it's gotten progressively worse. The highest I've had it shut down at now is ~20%. My first guess was that it's an issue of battery degradation not being properly accounted for, but the news about (new) Pixels suffering from the same problem makes it seem like that's unlikely. Hopefully this issue is resolved via an update, because I'd feel somewhat guilty recommending the Pixel to people weary of Samsung phones only to have major issues arise.
I've been running 6.0.1 on my 6P for a while now. I hear so many people complaining about battery life after updating. Battery life and reliably is the most important feature to me. I haven't had the 30% battery issue and my battery life is great.
I had this on a Moto X after just over 15 months of use. I think it was only a slightly degraded battery lifetime at that point. Likewise, I'm guessing this has something to do with battery measurement as much as anything else.
Same here. Moto X 2nd Gen. Likes to turn off around 25-30% at times. Sometimes it seems that if I keep it powered off and charge it over night then turn it on (I often will just plug it in once it turns off and then power it on while it charges) it seems to sometimes then get down closer to 5% before power down. I too suspect it has to do with battery measurement.
My Nexus 6 did this quite often, as does my wife's HTC One M8. It definitely could be an Android issue, but I think it would have to be a particularly egregious and obvious mistake.
If it is software, I'd strongly suspect something at kernel level, since quite a few times in my experience, the shutdown is too quick for a safe shutdown. Userspace seems to get a notification that battery is low because it usually gives the "shutting down" alert, but then just shuts off in a suspiciously short amount of time.
I'd be more likely to think it's probably something in the battery/power stack that's not managing or reporting the power well. Discharge/voltage curves are not at all linear, [1] [2], so it's logical that issues with immediately available voltage might start to affect the device around the 30% level. Additionally, as another commenter has mentioned, the discharge curve is dependent upon temperature [3], so a sudden drop in ambient temperature will eventually have a direct effect on the reported voltage.
I'm not exactly sure what kind of metrics are commonly used for reporting battery percentage, but I am about to read a few (okay, maybe half of one) Arxiv papers that came up in a search. [4] Presumably, it's strongly based on some voltage modeling and I can imagine that would have a hard time coping with external factors beyond its measurement capacity, like ambient temperature drops. I don't suppose a user would be happy to see their reported battery percentage drop like a rock immediately upon stepping outside.
I really don't know where I was going with all that, except I guess to say that my gut says Battery "percentage" is a bit more an art than a science. That is to say, there are psychological reasons not to report based on voltage directly (it may go up if you step into a warmer room; "Wat?"), and I can imagine any metric is going to have its strengths and weaknesses, because you really can't account as much for user behavior that changes important physical conditions of the battery.
I'm pretty sure my phone is affected, but according to that page:
To prepare your iPhone 6s for the battery replacement process, please follow the steps below:
Back up your data to iTunes or iCloud.
Turn off Find my iPhone
Erase data and settings in Settings > General > Reset > Erase all Content and Settings
Not anymore, at least the NYC stores don't. They take your phone in and give it back to you in a couple of hours(depending on how busy they are). That's how they did it when I had mine replaced last week. The 5th Ave store didn't have any batteries in stock so I had to either wait a few days or go to a different store that had them.
You should never send a phone with your personal data out in the wild. If an Apple Genius is going to take your phone to the back of the Apple store and out of your sight, back it up and restore it to factory settings.
Well, in all fairness with regards to cold, this is going to happen with batteries - it's just their nature. When it's -20ºC out, my old iPhone 4s can only be out for so long before the already depleted battery just dies off.
This can be "fixed" by resetting the battery data on the phone and then letting it completely discharge before charging. I've had it work myself several times (I own two of every model iOS device for app testing purposes).
Yep, my 6S had a goosed battery, walked into the Apple Store and 15min later I had a new phone with a predictable battery (and a headphone jack, happy times)
My Galaxy Note 4 did the same thing. But this was after about a year of use. And hey, after replacing the battery it works fine again!
And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable battery to avoid these problems.
More generally, this season's phones are also cheap-looking and cheap-feeling. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me, looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).
2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.
I'm still using my Note 4 and have been putting off upgrading for no real reason. I was about to buy the Note 7 until they started blowing up, but now I'm probably going to wait until the S8 or Note 8 or some other flagship coming this Spring.
I went from a Note 4 to a Note 5, and ended up dropping my Note 5 causing the screen/LCD to break and not turn on. It looks like it costs about $300-400 to replace everything after asking a couple of local places, because the parts for this are expensive/out of stock. You might want to see if it's the same thing for the Note 4.
At that price, I'd probably just want to buy a new one.. but as you said, there's not a lot of good smartphones out right now.
I'm using the Note 4 again for now, which is actually a refurb/replacement because the original one's screen died randomly one day (without dropping it this time.)
Yes, batteries definitely need replacing after a year or so, maybe 2 if the original battery was very good quality. Don't go with the cheapest eBay batteries either; Monoprice seems to be good if you buy directly from them. I've had my phone for a long time, partly because of the bad phone options with diminishing key features recently (SD card, removable battery). I've replaced the battery every year, and I can get down to 1% battery. When it runs down faster and can't make it that low, it's time to replace the battery.
Now, why this happens in a brand new phone like the Pixel is another matter...
I routinely replace my smartphone battery after 1 year of use, occasionally a few months later. The brand of smartphone doesn't matter: after one year of daily recharging a battery has seen it's best days. The hardest part is finding an original battery, especially on Amazon.
Same story with my Note 4 - it was shutting off at 30% too, but I bought some new Anker batteries a few weeks ago and battery life is back to being solid and reliable.
One thing that really bothers me about a lot of the new phones is the slippery glass backs. The Note 4 has a textured plastic back with quite a bit of grip to it. I tried a friend's Galaxy S6 and it nearly slid out of my hand!
I suppose a silicone case would fix that, but I like being able to use the Note 4 without a case and not have to worry that it will slip away.
I am one of the unfortunate owners of a Nexus 6P whose device was abrutely shutting down at random occasions. The phone would shut down when battery level usually was below 60% and I was out walking. At first I though it had something to do with it being cold outside (I live in Sweden) but later I proved that was not it. Phone itself has not been tampered with (running official Android, 7.1.1 OTA) and is in near mint condition with protective case used.
Anyways, I did what most people do not do and unlocked bootloader, installed TWRP and Pure Nexus Project 7.1.1 ROM and am happy to report that issue is now completely gone (I did stress-test it several times in below zero temperatures) !
When my Nexus 6 shuts down at 25%, I can turn it back on, and it still shows 23% after that. And it does seem to be temperature dependent. So I think it has to do with battery monitoring.
Quite likely. My understanding is that battery capacity is measured based on the voltage drops as the mah runs low. Thing is that temperature affects resistance and thus observed voltage (digital thermometer work on this principle, afaik). Could be that Google has set the cutoff a bit high, and momentary chills result in a too early shutdown (possibly to avoid data loss or some such).
More likely to avoid battery damage - undervoltage can cause permanent damage to both cathode and anode (from another thread here - http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm)
It's strange irony that I happened on this link after searching around for a replacement for my 5X, and heading back to HackerNews for a little break.
The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery, which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.
I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it. I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7 has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top bulletpoint.
What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries, keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the hardware vendors.
I didn't downvote your top comment, and miss phones with actual keyboards, but Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy aren't the only phone brands out there. 5" devices still exist. Devices with replaceable batteries still exist. Devices you easily can install custom ROMs on to not rely on the vendor for updates still exist. It's quite possible the combination you like isn't out there, but it's not total monoculture yet.
Samsung hardware + custom ROMs are a path I took in the past (with the S4 Active, which by the way was waterproof and had a replaceable battery, but somehow never achieved tremendous popularity).
But yeah, it's something worth thinking about. The major appeal of a phone like the Pixel is less the hardware than the vanilla aspect of the Android OS.
All another hardware vendor has to do is attempt to stay up to date, and minimize their own bloatware if that's a bottleneck in their time allocation allotment. I'm surprised no one sees that a lot of Android users clamor for a vanilla, up-to-date Android OS phone.
If you're brave it looks like you can replace it in only 5 steps. The caveat being that those 5 steps look very difficult, and in some cases require special tools.
I recently hit the LG G4 bootloop issue. Now that I am looking for a new phone (and looking at the pixel) I am finding defect problems pretty much in every phone out there.
I think I have come to the temporary conclusion that phones will always have problems even after several replacements. So all I can do is shrug, and ask why they cannot make phones like they used to.
> What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety.
We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).
But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.
The advantage of a swappable battery isn't having multiple charges worth of power on your person, it's not having to ditch the phone/potentially deal with warranty problems when your battery starts to go. It isn't about short term convenience, but removing a long-term point of failure. For people who aren't interested in shelling out for the latest device when they find their current one suits their needs (modulo hardware failures) this is (or, I guess, apparently only used to be) a selling point.
If you are looking for a hackable device with long support I would recommend Oneplus. I had 1+1 and loved it (but I smashed the screen). If you prefer smaller screen and are a bit adventurous you can try Nextbit Robin. Great design, looks like it has great support and is cheap (<$150 on Amazon).
BTW. I currently have 5X and have no problems with it.
> The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use.
I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.
Just a counter point - I was going to recommend for him to get a Nexus 6, as a budget / value focused person I bought one new-in-box in September of last year, it's been a great phone. The battery is fine but not changeable easily.
My nexus 6 hasn't shown any slow downs etc.. I'm on 6.0.1 and using T mobile. You can pick them up now $260 refurbished or $330 old-new-in-box stock.
It's a great phone when he lag isn't bad. It's particularly noticeable when using the camera. My wife had the same phone and same issues, but I also know two people with a 6 who do not have the issue.
Completely different experience here. N6 worked fine when I bought it about a 1.5y ago, then, when updating, turned on phone encryption (can't be turned off) and it's been a painfully slow ride ever since. Camera's glitchy and veeery slow. It's been getting to the point where I'm on the brink of throwing it against a sidewalk at times ;)
The Nexus 6 camera particularly in HDR mode is nearly unusable unless your battery is > 60% and battery optimization is turned off for the camera app. Otherwise forget it. My device easily takes 10-15 seconds per photo to do HDR rendering. And you may not take another photo until the render completes. And yet I can't make myself upgrade to a Pixel because it seems I'd just be trading one set of problems for another.
There might be something stealing resources on mine, or I just have a crappy battery. Either way it's been over a year.
What I've done so far is join the Android beta program (yesterday) so I get newer versions of the OS, just in case there's a known issue that's been fixed. I've nothing to loose but my pains.
Go to the "Battery" tab in the settings and see what you're spending it on. Most likely you've installed some app that's running services in the background which eats up your battery.
I've experienced the same thing on my 5x that I did on my Moto X. Immediately after an OS update, battery life would tank. As in, dropping 10% per hour while sitting on the table idling, or about that.
I found on the Moto X that a Google service was chewing up a lot of power/battery. Upon rebooting, that service would return to being a very minor component of battery use.
The first time my 5x started discharging in similar fashion, I had a look at battery use and found the same thing. Turning the phone fully off and back on, as with the Moto X, seemed to "fix" this.
I'm not saying this is your problem. Unless you never restarted your phone after such an update -- waiting and charging my Moto X overnight was not enough to make it go away. But even if not, maybe this comment will help out someone else.
I have to agree with this. I bought mine in October a few days after it was released and it has only improved. I used to get random reboots, crashes, poor performance after a few days uptime - the various over-the-air updates solved all of these within a few weeks and the Nougat release improved performance even more. The battery life is also much the same as when I bought it - nothing special, but it can see me from 7am to 1am quite happily.
I got mine around the same time and have the exact same experience as you. Just as fast, battery still good (about same as yours), just as when I first got it.
I also have a 5X. If I'm moving, the battery runs out at about 20% an hour. I normally charge mine in the evening, so it's at 100% at midnight, about 90% in the morning, about 70% after my commute, and around 40% by the evening. It'll be somewhere in the 10 to 20% range by the time I get back home, often with the battery saver active.
During the work day, I generally only use it to check headlines at lunch. I also use it to play back mp3s over bluetooth to my motorycle helmet. The screen is typically on during the day for less than an hour.
The 5X is slower than the Nexus 5 it replaced - 50% more cores but they run slower and most apps take longer to start up. It's a mediocre device and the battery life is not good at all.
Right now, the biggest drains, after screen at 12%, are Google Play services, Android System, Android OS and Mobile standby.
I have a theory that it's Google's appetite for data that kills battery life. They make it hard to use the phone with location services turned off or in battery saving mode except when you want a location in Maps. When you want your location, it gets turned on and stays on. There's no easy way to keep it on to a minimum. I think it's a strategic goal of Google to use customer data for everything from location popularity to traffic, and they're willing to sacrifice customer batteries with nudging defaults to get there.
That's my experience with the 6P. The first few months, I used it as a phablet and didn't put a SIM card in, and battery usage was fine. Then I moved to the US, activated Project Fi on it, and battery life is horrible -- I suspect the way Fi frequency-hops between cellular providers and known open WiFi hotspots means it taxes the location services even more than if you're on a standard carrier.
Except that when I first bought the device, in December 2015, it had GOOD battery life. I don't play games, I don't do anything but browse, use a couple of social media apps (as in, two) sometimes, try to keep the display below 40% brightness.
It rotted over time, like fruit left out on a hot day. The battery life became too gruesome to last the day.
It could very well be the massive data needing to be funneled about your commute, which Amazon product you glanced at, which jailed AMP news article you read, which restaurant you just walked out of, and all that other stuff that inspires modern dystopian fiction books and shows, that's draining the battery life.
Our dystopian information-centralized existence killed the battery life on my 5X. I'll take it.
I briefly used a 5X that I was given for free but quickly abandoned it in favor of my trusted Nexus 5 after experiencing similar issues. Despite being 3 years old (!!!) it's still rock-solid and super smooth running Nougat. I used to get a new phone yearly (if not biannualy) and the Nexus 5 is the first phone I've had where I don't have the urge to upgrade to the latest and shiniest device as soon as it hits the market.
Didn't the 5 have some recurring issue with the power button? ISTR looking at the 5 and being disappointed, but maybe I'm thinking of a different Nexus.
Listening to Spotify with a bluetooth headset is by far my biggest drain on the 5X (~40% per hour). I've come to use the jack cable more and more, and now it's okay[0]. Luckily, I'm not an iPhone 7 user.
[0] "okay" yes, but if people at Spotify would spend more time on battery and network issues than moving menus to weird places, I would be happier. Alternatives are worst, so it's just a matter of giving them money until they work on something you consider useful. As a consumer, this is infuriating.
Me too. I initially had some lag problems with it but turned off "Power button instantly locks" and it went away, and it's been smooth sailing since (about a year).
> The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint
As a tech professional who can afford to be a little fiscally irresponsible once in a while... the Pixel has been by far the best phone I've ever owned.
This is the first Android phone I feel has really challenged Apple's obsessively airtight design. I have never noticed a stutter, the camera is absurdly fast and shoots great photos, and the battery lasts nearly twice as long as my 5X.
Google has historically provided the cheaper, higher-barrier phones, but they're attempting to catch up while users are becoming lukewarm on Apple. I think they nailed it.
I'm no hardware expert, but they must have some more intelligent CPU throttling, or something— the Pixel is also using a much newer chip (Snapdragon 821). My 5X was on AOSP, no major modifications. Pixel is on stock. The 5X would only last until about the end of the work day, the Pixel lasts me several hours longer, even with the higher display resolution.
It's terrible and I don't get it. I'm guessing most people have never had a phone that lasts a full 24-36h so they don't know how nice it feels. I had a Huawei Mate 2 and it would easily last two days. Enough that I never worried if I forgot to plug it in. Anytime I went out, I knew it'd last.
Apple's obsession with thin has probably hurt us all here. Or is there another explanation why phones don't come with large batteries?
I work in a metal fabrication workshop, my pockets and desk get covered in tiny metal particles. Had the speaker in my iPhone 4S replaced a couple times before I broke the screen and the mic and speaker and battery all gave up.
So I bought a secondhand Galaxy J1 for AU$75. It's annoyingly slow for doing anything other than sms / email / HN, so I tend not to use it for much else. But the battery like is awesome. I can get through a whole 24hr period without charging it, get to work the next before I noticed it's down to 15%.
That's just the thing though, even I've come to accept that 30hr battery life is awesome.
The iPhone 7 is 7.1mm thick, the Pixel is 8.5mm.
Who cares? I wish some manufacturer would give us a 12mm thick phone with a battery that lasted 48hrs +
On the other hand, I don't see why so many people think that battery life is so important. I charge my phone all night and almost all day at the office. If you have a desk job, I can't imagine running into battery life issues very often.
> On the other hand, I don't see why so many people think that battery life is so important.
Pretty simple:
1) Not everyone wants to constantly [think about] having to recharge their mobile device, or having it constantly connected. If you go hiking for a few days, you still want to be able to call 911.
2) Applications become heavier and heavier (yay all the ads, embedded browser, 3D stuff, cloud, crypto, etc). If you're on a plane and say play a game because you're bored you may end up easily using for example 40% of your total battery power.
3) The more you need to charge the phone, the quicker the battery degrades (LiOn generally keep working for 1000 recharges). Over their lifetime (that's roughly 3 years of daily recharging) the battery will degrade to less juice within a full cycle [1].
4) Batteries are not user replaceable anymore, so require a third party to perform the swap, at premium price and without full control of the user.
5) There's enough waste as it is, and having to swap phone every 2 years or so creates even more.
6) It also is quite a task deciding which phone to buy, and if you made a mistake or don't have that much money to burn you may end up with a phone not so well supported.
7) Finally, one has to swap their settings and data to their new phone. Sure, you can use clouds. They're free at the cost of your privacy...
A powerbank mitigates some of the above problems, but only so much, and they also suffer from degrading performance by age.
[1] Anecdotal example: my MBP 2010's battery had 740 cycles and is at ~88% capacity when fully charged.
I have a huwai honor5x which lasts a full day easily.
I've had it for a few months now. It is annoyingly aggressive about shutting down apps (which makes my lastpass autofill not work, among other things).
But I paid ~$180 with no contract and though it definitely stutters at times, for my use it's been great.
I agree with this assessment. My Pixel XL is easily the best smartphone I've ever owned (2 BlackBerrys, iPhone 3G, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy 3, Note 3, Nexus 6P)
I just a pixel. My employer gave us all a free maxed-out pixel or iPhone 7.
It's good but I am surprised at the things it lacks. I had hoped it would support wireless charging because my last three Google phone (all nexuses) and my 2012 nexus tablet all had major problems with the power connector be oming loose after a year of use.
I also hoped it was at least minimally waterproof like most of the similarly-priced phone but, alas, it's not.
I'm very happy with the speed of the camera though.
Do you use Android's encryption feature? The 5X doesn't have a dedicated encryption chip, so all decryption/encryption is done with special (slower) ARM instructions. This really slows down IO.
What about the OnePlus? I'm happy with my iPhone 6S, but I would switch to that if the next iPhone isn't to my taste. A couple of my friends have it, and they seem to love the fast charge ability.
The OnePlus phones are amazingly good. I loved my OnePlus X, e.g. OLED display is stunning. I honestly think the hardware is better than Apple.
But I still switched back to my old iPhone 5. So make sure you don't find Android frustrating. (e.g. be prepared that security updates take far longer than on Nexus')
There is a bug in the update process that can cause the phone to slow and drain battery like crazy. Doing a reset might clear it up. Its a pain but I did the same thing a couple of times through the various updates and now its behaving as it should for about 6 months.
I was going to buy a Google Pixel C laptop, but there were reports of really bad wifi performance. Looks like I have yet another reason to pass :/. If the Phone is having basic problems like battery life, I don't have loads of confidence in the laptop.
I have seen the same symptom on Samsung devices with degraded batteries. With a new battery it will go all the way to 0% before shutting down. Then as the battery gradually degrades it will shut down with no warning at 5%, 10%, 20%, and so on. But when you get close to that limit the point where it actually shuts down depends heavily on power consumption at the time. It might have been able to keep running fine for a while but as soon as you launch a power intensive app such as the camera it will immediately die.
My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to the battery by shutting down.
Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
>Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
Assuming you have an extra removable battery charged and on your person at the time, and you still need to shutdown your device to do it.
And assuming you want to either juggle charging multiple batteries in the phone, or you get an external charger.
The batteries are small and easy to stick in a pocket. External chargers cost only a few dollars. It's really easy to deal with, much more convenient than carrying an external battery that you then have to plug into your phone's USB port to recharge the internal battery.
From only being able to provide power to a single device, handling a battery which is not meant to be handled that way (don't puncture or bend that, or have it touch anything which could cause a short), and charging it outside what it was designed to be charged in (i'd be extremely wary of using a few-dollar external battery charger...), carrying extra internal batteries is a much worse experience.
IMO modern fast-charging is significantly better (at least to me). Being able to charge up 50% in like 15 minutes is huge. And if that's not available, external battery packs are not only safer to carry, but can hold more juice, work on multiple devices (even at once), and are easier to recharge.
That being said, I think manufacturers could make it easier to change out batteries in phones even with non-removable batteries (in other words, make one-time replacements easier to do on your own). But I just don't see having to carry multiple batteries with you as a good solution.
The Samsung removable batteries are durable and safe to handle. They come with lightweight plastic cases. The external chargers are also made by Samsung and have the same charging circuitry as the matching phones. And the (small and light) chargers themselves also double as battery carrying cases.
Next time perhaps you should actually try out the alternatives before criticizing things you haven't used yourself and don't understand.
I've not only used them but was very nearly burned by carrying an internal battery in my pocket when I owned an LG G2x. It shorted on something in my pocket and not only got hot enough to burn me, but also swelled up to 2x its size.
And I also know that the OEM samsung external battery chargers are $40+ which is quite a long ways away from "a few dollars", and there are MANY fakes and dangerous counterfeits out there not only for the chargers but for the batteries themselves.
And even if they were safe and external chargers were as cheap as you say, i'd still prefer fast-charging and/or external battery packs over them.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? Of course it's not a good idea to carry batteries with exposed terminals, which is exactly why Samsung includes plastic cases for them. And if you're already spending ~$800 for a high-end smartphone then an extra $45 for an external charger and battery kit doesn't seem like much. In practice Samsung usually sends customers an accessories coupon code when they register a new smartphone purchase on the web site, so the actual battery kit price ends up being even cheaper.
The point I'm making is that when it comes to battery-life, I prefer fast-charging over removable batteries, and that if fast charging isn't available that moment or on that device, I still prefer an external battery charger over replaceable batteries.
It's cheaper, more versatile, safer, and more convenient to use for me.
I've had the same experience and I came up with the same hypothesis. It started happening just when Pokemon Go was popular, so I had a lot of opportunity to collect data. At first I knew I had to quit the app and turn off GPS when I saw the 25% alert. Then after some time it would shutdown before it showed the 25% alert. Eventually it started dying closer to 50%. Replacing the battery has helped a lot, and with the better capacity I'm getting down to 25% less frequently.
When a battery is as its discharged, its ESR rises, causing this behavior. A small amount of damage is caused during the cycling of a battery, permanently raising its ESR, so that is why older batteries shut down sooner.
Basically, you can think of it as a 5L bucket of water with a hole in the bottom. The first liter will have a much higher pressure than the last. Running energy intensive features (GPS, 3D, camera, cell modem, etc) increases the minimum needed pressure, causing the device to shutdown when lower power features would operate just fine. As you keep using the bucket, the mound of dirt its on gets washed away, reducing the maximum pressure you can get out of it.
Building a good battery gauge is non-trivial as you have to factor in how much people use high energy features when the battery is nearing end of charge. Better low power modes would help with this, but nobody has found a good way of indicating to the user the battery has X% power left at current use vs the battery has Y% of its fully charged capacity remaining.
It would be nice if smartphones would degrade more gracefully. The instant that the protection circuit detects that the battery is no longer unable to supply enough power I would think it could immediately shut down all extra peripherals and go into ultra power saving mode (grayscale screen, no sensors, no apps, only phone calls and SMS).
The ultra low power mode might not be able to do SMS or phone calls over cellular as it needs large bursts of power to TX, depending on connection quality and type (2g vs LTE, range to tower, etc).
A capacitor that can store enough charge to send/receive a SMS would allow this to work as the capacitor can be charged slowly, but it would take up valuable room inside the phone (a few mm^3). Some embedded cell/sat radios where size isn't very important already do this to reduce demands on the hosts electrical system (eg: solar powered parking meters that take credit cards).
The ultra power saving mode on Samsung phones does SMS and phone calls over cellular. That is an existing product feature, the problem is just that it doesn't automatically switch to that mode when the battery still has some charge but isn't capable of putting out enough power to sustain normal operations.
It seems to me like most of the problems of modern tech are related to quality yet everyone is rushing for new features and quantitative "improvements".
Had a similar issue on a galaxy s4 in cold weather (particularly when launching the camera app). The battery was ~3+ years old though.
After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.
My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself (there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.
I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon batteries.
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone-shu...
http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/12/02/sony-is-trying-to-pu...
On the devices I've worked with, that button handling is done by the power management silicon and not by software at all.
I don't know how much stuff you carry with you, but with my 5'5" phone doesn't reboot with my keys on my pocket.
I guess they are extending support for it.
It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.
Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.
Microsoft is aware of it and has made many changes to help. For instance there is an official interface to remove an unwanted program or to turn off a process that starts when you log in. Similarly there was a time when windows machines were not at all adequately patched and Microsoft has come out with a solution that (i) worked and (ii) improved the performance steadily since then.
I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.
While most people run Android the same way people run Apple, you can run Android and get your apps from f-droid, and you can run CM (and, if your into these things, Xprivacy), so while Google may still be getting your private data, random apps won't.
At this point, as much as I like Android, the UI, the open nature, etc. etc., I can't justify sticking with it for the next phone I buy.
Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again.
It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey.
As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.
My iPad Air on the other hand has severly dimished usability from the various iOS updates. Orientation change no longer works reliably. The idiotic change from swipe to unlock via double tap of home tremedously increased the frustration in UX (Try a double tap while the tablet is barely upright via Apple's magnetic cover.)
The Moto G was never a fast phone, but a new thing it started to do towards the end of its life was OOM kill the mp3 player if you backgrounded it. At first it was if you did something heavyweight, like start a game. Then it was browsing an ad-heavy site. Then it was if you opened the web browser at all. This, plus the usual Android lag, bad battery life, intrusive Google Botnet stuff.
The tipping point was this. I walk to the coffee shop with music playing. I order, sit down, start reading. There's an amusing line in the book, so I take out the phone to take a picture of it, which kills the music player. Then a Google Maps notification pops up asking me to add the photo to the coffee shop's Maps page.
I think, why the fuck am I still using Android? I know Google tracks me everywhere I go, but do they have to be so obvious about it?
I recently updated the OS to CyanogenMod though, mainly because the phone stopped receiving security updates. I wouldn't say the phone performs better running CM, but it's no worse than when I first bought the phone. I really hope CynogenMod can keep the ball rolling. I wouldn't want to run the stock image after it's fallen this far behind security updates.
Why spend $800 for this? Really? Really? Is there a point to spend $800 on a device that in a showroom or a friend's hand was not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day?
Decent camera (would have been called world-class 2 years ago), battery charged once every 3 days, stock Android, 2 SIM card sockets, 64GB SD card, 5.x sized screen.
But there are still things the camera phone can't do: Longer range/landscape photos. Interesting to see which manufacturer is able to put a quality detachable lens on a cameraphone, or when Nikon/Canon put SIM cards and telephony in their already Android-enabled equipment.
The Nexus phones were a great value, but if the Pixel is going to be priced as a flagship phone then I see little reason to buy it over an iPhone.
There are MANY options to choose from both paid and free that all prioritize different things.
Take a look around and see if any of them are nicer for you, and if it is you can set it as your default dialer in a second or 2.
One of the biggest benefits of android is being able to replace the built-in apps with 3rd part ones that act as default handlers.
Over at Facebook people had to be ordered to carry Android devices because their app was lagging behind the iOS version.
The Pixel line of devices seems like Google's attempt at dogfooding their own platforms.
If it is software, I'd strongly suspect something at kernel level, since quite a few times in my experience, the shutdown is too quick for a safe shutdown. Userspace seems to get a notification that battery is low because it usually gives the "shutting down" alert, but then just shuts off in a suspiciously short amount of time.
I'd be more likely to think it's probably something in the battery/power stack that's not managing or reporting the power well. Discharge/voltage curves are not at all linear, [1] [2], so it's logical that issues with immediately available voltage might start to affect the device around the 30% level. Additionally, as another commenter has mentioned, the discharge curve is dependent upon temperature [3], so a sudden drop in ambient temperature will eventually have a direct effect on the reported voltage.
I'm not exactly sure what kind of metrics are commonly used for reporting battery percentage, but I am about to read a few (okay, maybe half of one) Arxiv papers that came up in a search. [4] Presumably, it's strongly based on some voltage modeling and I can imagine that would have a hard time coping with external factors beyond its measurement capacity, like ambient temperature drops. I don't suppose a user would be happy to see their reported battery percentage drop like a rock immediately upon stepping outside.
I really don't know where I was going with all that, except I guess to say that my gut says Battery "percentage" is a bit more an art than a science. That is to say, there are psychological reasons not to report based on voltage directly (it may go up if you step into a warmer room; "Wat?"), and I can imagine any metric is going to have its strengths and weaknesses, because you really can't account as much for user behavior that changes important physical conditions of the battery.
[1] http://www.powerstream.com/AA-tests.htm
[2] http://www.ibt-power.com/Battery_packs/Li_Ion/Lithium_ion_te...
[3] http://www.ibt-power.com/Battery_packs/Li_Ion/Li_Ion_DiscTGp...
[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=battery%20percent%20site%3Aa...
Literally fluctuates between 40%, 1%, 31%, off and don't get me started on how it changes when it gets cold outside.
https://www.apple.com/uk/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown...
But this is just the nature of batteries.
And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable battery to avoid these problems.
More generally, this season's phones are also cheap-looking and cheap-feeling. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me, looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).
2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.
I went from a Note 4 to a Note 5, and ended up dropping my Note 5 causing the screen/LCD to break and not turn on. It looks like it costs about $300-400 to replace everything after asking a couple of local places, because the parts for this are expensive/out of stock. You might want to see if it's the same thing for the Note 4.
At that price, I'd probably just want to buy a new one.. but as you said, there's not a lot of good smartphones out right now.
I'm using the Note 4 again for now, which is actually a refurb/replacement because the original one's screen died randomly one day (without dropping it this time.)
Now, why this happens in a brand new phone like the Pixel is another matter...
One thing that really bothers me about a lot of the new phones is the slippery glass backs. The Note 4 has a textured plastic back with quite a bit of grip to it. I tried a friend's Galaxy S6 and it nearly slid out of my hand!
I suppose a silicone case would fix that, but I like being able to use the Note 4 without a case and not have to worry that it will slip away.
Anyways, I did what most people do not do and unlocked bootloader, installed TWRP and Pure Nexus Project 7.1.1 ROM and am happy to report that issue is now completely gone (I did stress-test it several times in below zero temperatures) !
So, no - it does not seem to be a hardware issue.
Seriously, looks like battery management isn't exactly the strength of today's device manufacturers -.-
The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery, which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.
I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it. I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7 has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top bulletpoint.
What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries, keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the hardware vendors.
I'm baffled.
Someone downvoted me, I guess the phone landscape really is a fantastic one and I was wrong.
But yeah, it's something worth thinking about. The major appeal of a phone like the Pixel is less the hardware than the vanilla aspect of the Android OS.
All another hardware vendor has to do is attempt to stay up to date, and minimize their own bloatware if that's a bottleneck in their time allocation allotment. I'm surprised no one sees that a lot of Android users clamor for a vanilla, up-to-date Android OS phone.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+6P+Teardown/51660
I think I have come to the temporary conclusion that phones will always have problems even after several replacements. So all I can do is shrug, and ask why they cannot make phones like they used to.
We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).
But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.
BTW. I currently have 5X and have no problems with it.
I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.
My nexus 6 hasn't shown any slow downs etc.. I'm on 6.0.1 and using T mobile. You can pick them up now $260 refurbished or $330 old-new-in-box stock.
What I've done so far is join the Android beta program (yesterday) so I get newer versions of the OS, just in case there's a known issue that's been fixed. I've nothing to loose but my pains.
I found on the Moto X that a Google service was chewing up a lot of power/battery. Upon rebooting, that service would return to being a very minor component of battery use.
The first time my 5x started discharging in similar fashion, I had a look at battery use and found the same thing. Turning the phone fully off and back on, as with the Moto X, seemed to "fix" this.
I'm not saying this is your problem. Unless you never restarted your phone after such an update -- waiting and charging my Moto X overnight was not enough to make it go away. But even if not, maybe this comment will help out someone else.
During the work day, I generally only use it to check headlines at lunch. I also use it to play back mp3s over bluetooth to my motorycle helmet. The screen is typically on during the day for less than an hour.
The 5X is slower than the Nexus 5 it replaced - 50% more cores but they run slower and most apps take longer to start up. It's a mediocre device and the battery life is not good at all.
Right now, the biggest drains, after screen at 12%, are Google Play services, Android System, Android OS and Mobile standby.
I have a theory that it's Google's appetite for data that kills battery life. They make it hard to use the phone with location services turned off or in battery saving mode except when you want a location in Maps. When you want your location, it gets turned on and stays on. There's no easy way to keep it on to a minimum. I think it's a strategic goal of Google to use customer data for everything from location popularity to traffic, and they're willing to sacrifice customer batteries with nudging defaults to get there.
Except that when I first bought the device, in December 2015, it had GOOD battery life. I don't play games, I don't do anything but browse, use a couple of social media apps (as in, two) sometimes, try to keep the display below 40% brightness.
It rotted over time, like fruit left out on a hot day. The battery life became too gruesome to last the day.
It could very well be the massive data needing to be funneled about your commute, which Amazon product you glanced at, which jailed AMP news article you read, which restaurant you just walked out of, and all that other stuff that inspires modern dystopian fiction books and shows, that's draining the battery life.
Our dystopian information-centralized existence killed the battery life on my 5X. I'll take it.
[0] "okay" yes, but if people at Spotify would spend more time on battery and network issues than moving menus to weird places, I would be happier. Alternatives are worst, so it's just a matter of giving them money until they work on something you consider useful. As a consumer, this is infuriating.
As a tech professional who can afford to be a little fiscally irresponsible once in a while... the Pixel has been by far the best phone I've ever owned.
This is the first Android phone I feel has really challenged Apple's obsessively airtight design. I have never noticed a stutter, the camera is absurdly fast and shoots great photos, and the battery lasts nearly twice as long as my 5X.
Google has historically provided the cheaper, higher-barrier phones, but they're attempting to catch up while users are becoming lukewarm on Apple. I think they nailed it.
And that's out of the box. Batteries degrade. This time next year expect to be recharging these flagship devices twice a day.
Apple's obsession with thin has probably hurt us all here. Or is there another explanation why phones don't come with large batteries?
So I bought a secondhand Galaxy J1 for AU$75. It's annoyingly slow for doing anything other than sms / email / HN, so I tend not to use it for much else. But the battery like is awesome. I can get through a whole 24hr period without charging it, get to work the next before I noticed it's down to 15%.
That's just the thing though, even I've come to accept that 30hr battery life is awesome.
The iPhone 7 is 7.1mm thick, the Pixel is 8.5mm.
Who cares? I wish some manufacturer would give us a 12mm thick phone with a battery that lasted 48hrs +
Pretty simple:
1) Not everyone wants to constantly [think about] having to recharge their mobile device, or having it constantly connected. If you go hiking for a few days, you still want to be able to call 911.
2) Applications become heavier and heavier (yay all the ads, embedded browser, 3D stuff, cloud, crypto, etc). If you're on a plane and say play a game because you're bored you may end up easily using for example 40% of your total battery power.
3) The more you need to charge the phone, the quicker the battery degrades (LiOn generally keep working for 1000 recharges). Over their lifetime (that's roughly 3 years of daily recharging) the battery will degrade to less juice within a full cycle [1].
4) Batteries are not user replaceable anymore, so require a third party to perform the swap, at premium price and without full control of the user.
5) There's enough waste as it is, and having to swap phone every 2 years or so creates even more.
6) It also is quite a task deciding which phone to buy, and if you made a mistake or don't have that much money to burn you may end up with a phone not so well supported.
7) Finally, one has to swap their settings and data to their new phone. Sure, you can use clouds. They're free at the cost of your privacy...
A powerbank mitigates some of the above problems, but only so much, and they also suffer from degrading performance by age.
[1] Anecdotal example: my MBP 2010's battery had 740 cycles and is at ~88% capacity when fully charged.
I've had it for a few months now. It is annoyingly aggressive about shutting down apps (which makes my lastpass autofill not work, among other things).
But I paid ~$180 with no contract and though it definitely stutters at times, for my use it's been great.
It's good but I am surprised at the things it lacks. I had hoped it would support wireless charging because my last three Google phone (all nexuses) and my 2012 nexus tablet all had major problems with the power connector be oming loose after a year of use.
I also hoped it was at least minimally waterproof like most of the similarly-priced phone but, alas, it's not.
I'm very happy with the speed of the camera though.
But I still switched back to my old iPhone 5. So make sure you don't find Android frustrating. (e.g. be prepared that security updates take far longer than on Nexus')
The price isn't even the biggest problem. Google ships the newest phone that gets Android security updates to only 5 countries: https://support.google.com/store/answer/2462844?hl=en
And no, it's not about lack of basic presence. (See Chromecast countries.)
And no, it's not about shipping batteries. (See Pixel C countries.)
My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to the battery by shutting down.
Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
Assuming you have an extra removable battery charged and on your person at the time, and you still need to shutdown your device to do it.
And assuming you want to either juggle charging multiple batteries in the phone, or you get an external charger.
From only being able to provide power to a single device, handling a battery which is not meant to be handled that way (don't puncture or bend that, or have it touch anything which could cause a short), and charging it outside what it was designed to be charged in (i'd be extremely wary of using a few-dollar external battery charger...), carrying extra internal batteries is a much worse experience.
IMO modern fast-charging is significantly better (at least to me). Being able to charge up 50% in like 15 minutes is huge. And if that's not available, external battery packs are not only safer to carry, but can hold more juice, work on multiple devices (even at once), and are easier to recharge.
That being said, I think manufacturers could make it easier to change out batteries in phones even with non-removable batteries (in other words, make one-time replacements easier to do on your own). But I just don't see having to carry multiple batteries with you as a good solution.
Next time perhaps you should actually try out the alternatives before criticizing things you haven't used yourself and don't understand.
And I also know that the OEM samsung external battery chargers are $40+ which is quite a long ways away from "a few dollars", and there are MANY fakes and dangerous counterfeits out there not only for the chargers but for the batteries themselves.
And even if they were safe and external chargers were as cheap as you say, i'd still prefer fast-charging and/or external battery packs over them.
It's cheaper, more versatile, safer, and more convenient to use for me.
Basically, you can think of it as a 5L bucket of water with a hole in the bottom. The first liter will have a much higher pressure than the last. Running energy intensive features (GPS, 3D, camera, cell modem, etc) increases the minimum needed pressure, causing the device to shutdown when lower power features would operate just fine. As you keep using the bucket, the mound of dirt its on gets washed away, reducing the maximum pressure you can get out of it.
Building a good battery gauge is non-trivial as you have to factor in how much people use high energy features when the battery is nearing end of charge. Better low power modes would help with this, but nobody has found a good way of indicating to the user the battery has X% power left at current use vs the battery has Y% of its fully charged capacity remaining.
A capacitor that can store enough charge to send/receive a SMS would allow this to work as the capacitor can be charged slowly, but it would take up valuable room inside the phone (a few mm^3). Some embedded cell/sat radios where size isn't very important already do this to reduce demands on the hosts electrical system (eg: solar powered parking meters that take credit cards).
After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.
My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself (there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.
I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon batteries.