Will these findings result in a softer, more comforting way of saying your phone's battery is low?
Perhaps an anthropomorphic icon that looks like its getting sleepier and sleepier, or something Tomagotchi-like.
Maybe battery-low messages that are less blunt and more friendly, like "We know you're busy, but your device is working hard and needs a recharge as soon as possible. Thanks for connecting me to a power source as soon as you can manage."
I think it'd just increase stress. Instead of seeing some kind of counter going down (percentage) we'd have a vague statement that at any point in time the phone can shutdown.
I wouldn't call it profound, but a low battery is definitely a source of anxiety. Battery packs do solve the issue, but then you have to carry it around all day. And not forget it, or to charge it, in the first place.
Seeing my phone battery below 50% makes me faintly anxious because it seems like it always discharges faster from 30% to 0% than from 100% to 70%. It's the unpredictability of discharge rate rather than merely having a low battery.
That is what's happening - I'm not an electronics person but my vague understanding is modern li-ion batteries output e.g. 3.5v but actually hold between 2.x and 4.x volts, and regulate power up or down. When it's full it's easier to push current through, when it's nearly empty it has to work a lot harder to supply power and consequently drains faster.
> We show that energy gauges on portable technology (e.g. battery icons in phones) are
a key to energy hysteresis. Through “hermeneutic reflection” on the battery charge in
portable technology and information about accessibility of infrastructure outlets in the city,
consumers adapt practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 99) in order to ‘re-embed’ or ‘pin down’
infrastructure, technology and social relations (Giddens 2013:79). The aim of these practices
is to attain ‘psychological comfort’ in vulnerable circumstances (Giddens 2013: 155).
However, rather than a return to equilibrium as in Phipps and Ozanne’s (2017), single domain
context we see energy consumption through portable technology as leading to a system of
contingency planning that anticipates disequilibrium (see figure 1).
That paragraph doesn't seem like jargon to me (though I admit I used to work in a field where "hermeneutic" was an ordinary term). But part from that perhaps uncommon term, it all seems pretty straightforward and in fact doesn't appear to use any domain-specific terms.
Just because you don’t understand a specific scientific term doesn’t make it “jargon”. Plenty of perfectly valid technical docs would be considered invalid jargon if you held them to the same standard.
Just because you understand a specific scientific term doesn't make it cromulent. Plenty of pop-sci articles are perfectly approachable and eschew gratuitous jargon.
Data point of one, but I cannot relate to this in the slightest. My Android phone is two years old and I never even check the battery. I don't even charge it at work -- but if that became a problem, I would. Seems like an easy problem to solve.
And who in the world measures their commute in batteries? Ten miles will stay ten miles; half a battery could mean very different things from one day to the next.
(The phone is a Huawei Y7 that I bought in Bogotá in Dec 2017. It wasn't available in the US at that time, and I never really found the specs online -- only for models that seemed likely to be similar.)
I always have a wallet, keys (in a coinpurse which sometimes has coins too) and a phone, and very rarely anything else. Sometimes I pack light, sometimes heavy -- enough so that I've been made fun of for both.
I carry a backpack around a lot, full mostly of a laptop, umbrella and jacket. Bogotá rains a lot.
Yeah, something about the way they use "people" as if it describes absolutely everyone is off, as practically everyone I know (1) considers their phone a necessity and (2) keeps it charged because 1. There's always weird situations like when your kid unplugged your charger etc. etc. but thinking of life entirely in terms of battery anxiety is not something I can relate to.
I never carry a charger for my phone or laptop unless I plan to spend more than a day out (I had to with my old laptop, though). I actually feel a little frustrated when my phone's battery lasts less than 48 hours, because it means I'm using my smartphone much more than necessary. I don't try to limit my phone use, but I do take some measures that probably help to save battery: screen rotation and bluetooth are always off and I use an app that automatically adjusts screen brightness much more efficiently than the stock android setting does.
It's called Lux Auto Brightness (I've no relation whatsoever with the developer). I prefer it to other options because with it the brightness is always very comfortable to me. Just checked the battery usage by apps, and it doesn't even appear in the list.
Recent revisions means that Bluetooth isn't as thirsty as it used to be. I have a smartwatch and spend ~90min a day on bluetooth headphones and there's no real difference than when I'm not using them.
Of course maybe the fact that I have smartwatch means I'm not playing with my phone quite so much whenever a new notification comes through... hmm.
> I never carry a charger for my phone or laptop unless I plan to spend more than a day out
Me neither, but a different reason: my laptop battery lasts 6 hours or so, and for my phone I just carry a tiny USB cable to charge my phone from my laptop. I'm already carrying around this 97Whr battery in my laptop, might as well use it to charge my phone.
Power-saving mode. I know Acer used this in their notebooks. (I had one.) You could manually switch to a reduced power mode. Because it used less battery power it was advertised as eco-friendly since I guess the marketing assumed conservation always means the same thing.
Nowadays every CPU and peripheral does automatic power throttling all the time and no one pretends it has anything to do with being environmentally conscious.
> People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their battery away," said the study's lead author, Dr. Thomas Robinson.
Are people really like this? If so, I think we need to pump the brakes on phone usage for children because this is out of control. People are literally slaves to their phone.
Imagine the absurdity of a 1960s equivalent:
> People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their book away," said the study's lead author
I don't think the book analogy says anything interesting, it's a different sort of thing.
Maybe we just need some combination of bigger batteries, more efficient devices and easier charging.
Like, what does it say about me that I bought a car charger for my phone before a recent long drive? Am I hopelessly addicted to my battery meter or am I just vaguely prudent?
> Like, what does it say about me that I bought a car charger for my phone before a recent long drive? Am I hopelessly addicted to my battery meter or am I just vaguely prudent?
I would argue: unless you have a paper map and know how to use it, buying a car charger for your phone would be a symptom of you not knowing how to get there and/or expecting to call to ask for directions.
I do the same kind of resource management with books when I travel. It's no fun to go on a trip with a mostly depleted fiction paperback and end up lugging around dead weight for 5 days out of 7.
Same for me growing up. The weird thing has been my time in NYC with mass transit. In my earlier days, driving 30 minutes to go to a specific restaurant in another town felt like such a lift.
Now? 30 minutes on the Subway, even standing room only seems normal, even though I've only gone a handful of miles, not 30 miles.
I wonder if someone has done a study about the differences between mental state or health when you're driving 30 min vs. on the subway for 30 min. In my experience, it's a different kind of interruption somehow. I wouldn't avoid the 30 minutes on the train as much as the 30 min driving, but I'm not sure why.
(In steady state, of course, I expect someone's first 30 minutes on the NYC subway to be a shock if they haven't experienced it already.)
Driving 30 minutes on 101 in the bay area at 5pm is much different than driving 30 minutes on a random journey in rural Iowa. You could easily encounter not a single other car on the latter trip which is a far different experience.
I find driving to be a relaxing almost meditative experience while not in traffic. My parents are just short of terrified of driving in normal-for-cities traffic.
Standing room only public transit is still like my own personal hell. Standing in a box that jerks me one way or another jammed between people going to a place where there will be no space which is "mine" and no escape nor self determination besides through a repeat reverse journey many hours later. Honestly I think I would prefer being locked in prison 14 hours a day than have to go back to commuting by public transit to a city center.
I think there's some truth to this. Back when I was just about to replace my phone, the battery on the previous one would survive about 2 hours of screen usage, so I would start to measure aspects of my day to make sure I don't run out of battery and therefore lose all of the functionality that comes with having a working phone.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that I would start using my battery as a unit of distance or time, but I definitely memorized the battery consumption of my evening commute more precisely than the distance.
"We found that people who let their phones batteries run out are viewed by others as out of touch with the social norm of being connected and therefore unable to be competent members of society.
Phones have become such a nexus for everything that we are that an inability to effectively manage battery life becomes symbolic of an inability to manage life."
Scary.
I just have a Caterpillar Tractor phone with 3 days of battery life, and don't worry about it much.
They're just your typical Android phones. Nothing special. medium resolution touch screen, a little bit of extra heavy plastic on the case. The usual OEM crapware is permanently installed on the device, and sending analytics back to the mothership.
I know the hardware specs are nothing special. I don't need them to be. I'm asking about the Cat-specific features. Ruggedness, waterproofing, extra-long battery life, IR camera--do they work as advertised? Does the extra bulk affect usability?
The OEM crapware is an issue, but from a quick google it seems like Cat phones are rootable, yes? So it should be possible to fix that manually.
If you buy it directly from Catphones, you just get the usual Google crapware, which can be disabled. Plus an "app store", which you don't have to use. I installed F-Droid and removed all the Google apps, and use only F-Droid open source apps.
The "social norm of being connected"? Hmm. I seriously doubt the bandwidth of emojis and oneliners, so to me that's like looking down on someone for not having 10 watches drawn with marker on each arm, because they obviously don't care about punctuality or even space time itself.
I suspect they asked mostly mobile users, maybe even a subset of that, because from my experience either this study isn't relevant to my neck of the woods, or people are so taken aback and scared by this person from the wilderness reading a book, that they instantly become fantastic at acting as if they don't care at all.
> "We found that people who let their phones batteries run out are viewed by others as out of touch with the social norm of being connected and therefore unable to be competent members of society," Dr. Robinson said.
First, the headline feels almost-misleading -- it's not about battery "icon shapes" as the graphic also seems to imply, just about battery levels affecting your activities and anxiety.
But second, the best trick is just to turn your phone to airplane mode whenever you're on transportation. My iPhone goes from 100% to about 80% if I spend the whole day at home. It goes from 100% to 20% by mid-afternoon if I take a few subway rides. Your phone constantly searching for a new signal drains the battery more than anything.
It makes me wish there were a setting to reduce the aggressiveness of connectivity -- if the accelerometer has figured out I'm in motion, and I'm not using my phone at the moment, then only bother searching for a signal only once every, say, 5 minutes. I don't care about getting calls immediately when on the move, but still want text messages to come through every so often. (Obviously not true for everyone, so doesn't need to be a default -- just a setting.)
52 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI wonder how much priming they had to do to get that response. Sounds like we can cure the world's anxiety with a $20 battery backup.
Perhaps an anthropomorphic icon that looks like its getting sleepier and sleepier, or something Tomagotchi-like.
Maybe battery-low messages that are less blunt and more friendly, like "We know you're busy, but your device is working hard and needs a recharge as soon as possible. Thanks for connecting me to a power source as soon as you can manage."
> We show that energy gauges on portable technology (e.g. battery icons in phones) are a key to energy hysteresis. Through “hermeneutic reflection” on the battery charge in portable technology and information about accessibility of infrastructure outlets in the city, consumers adapt practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 99) in order to ‘re-embed’ or ‘pin down’ infrastructure, technology and social relations (Giddens 2013:79). The aim of these practices is to attain ‘psychological comfort’ in vulnerable circumstances (Giddens 2013: 155). However, rather than a return to equilibrium as in Phipps and Ozanne’s (2017), single domain context we see energy consumption through portable technology as leading to a system of contingency planning that anticipates disequilibrium (see figure 1).
And who in the world measures their commute in batteries? Ten miles will stay ten miles; half a battery could mean very different things from one day to the next.
(The phone is a Huawei Y7 that I bought in Bogotá in Dec 2017. It wasn't available in the US at that time, and I never really found the specs online -- only for models that seemed likely to be similar.)
I always have a wallet, keys (in a coinpurse which sometimes has coins too) and a phone, and very rarely anything else. Sometimes I pack light, sometimes heavy -- enough so that I've been made fun of for both.
I carry a backpack around a lot, full mostly of a laptop, umbrella and jacket. Bogotá rains a lot.
Of course maybe the fact that I have smartwatch means I'm not playing with my phone quite so much whenever a new notification comes through... hmm.
Me neither, but a different reason: my laptop battery lasts 6 hours or so, and for my phone I just carry a tiny USB cable to charge my phone from my laptop. I'm already carrying around this 97Whr battery in my laptop, might as well use it to charge my phone.
Nowadays every CPU and peripheral does automatic power throttling all the time and no one pretends it has anything to do with being environmentally conscious.
Are people really like this? If so, I think we need to pump the brakes on phone usage for children because this is out of control. People are literally slaves to their phone.
Imagine the absurdity of a 1960s equivalent:
> People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their book away," said the study's lead author
Maybe we just need some combination of bigger batteries, more efficient devices and easier charging.
Like, what does it say about me that I bought a car charger for my phone before a recent long drive? Am I hopelessly addicted to my battery meter or am I just vaguely prudent?
I would argue: unless you have a paper map and know how to use it, buying a car charger for your phone would be a symptom of you not knowing how to get there and/or expecting to call to ask for directions.
Everywhere I would want to go would be 5,15,30,45,60 and further increments of 30 minutes after that.
Now? 30 minutes on the Subway, even standing room only seems normal, even though I've only gone a handful of miles, not 30 miles.
(In steady state, of course, I expect someone's first 30 minutes on the NYC subway to be a shock if they haven't experienced it already.)
I find driving to be a relaxing almost meditative experience while not in traffic. My parents are just short of terrified of driving in normal-for-cities traffic.
Standing room only public transit is still like my own personal hell. Standing in a box that jerks me one way or another jammed between people going to a place where there will be no space which is "mine" and no escape nor self determination besides through a repeat reverse journey many hours later. Honestly I think I would prefer being locked in prison 14 hours a day than have to go back to commuting by public transit to a city center.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that I would start using my battery as a unit of distance or time, but I definitely memorized the battery consumption of my evening commute more precisely than the distance.
Scary.
I just have a Caterpillar Tractor phone with 3 days of battery life, and don't worry about it much.
The OEM crapware is an issue, but from a quick google it seems like Cat phones are rootable, yes? So it should be possible to fix that manually.
I suspect they asked mostly mobile users, maybe even a subset of that, because from my experience either this study isn't relevant to my neck of the woods, or people are so taken aback and scared by this person from the wilderness reading a book, that they instantly become fantastic at acting as if they don't care at all.
But second, the best trick is just to turn your phone to airplane mode whenever you're on transportation. My iPhone goes from 100% to about 80% if I spend the whole day at home. It goes from 100% to 20% by mid-afternoon if I take a few subway rides. Your phone constantly searching for a new signal drains the battery more than anything.
It makes me wish there were a setting to reduce the aggressiveness of connectivity -- if the accelerometer has figured out I'm in motion, and I'm not using my phone at the moment, then only bother searching for a signal only once every, say, 5 minutes. I don't care about getting calls immediately when on the move, but still want text messages to come through every so often. (Obviously not true for everyone, so doesn't need to be a default -- just a setting.)