This weekend I didn't charge my iPhone 5 from the time I left work on Friday afternoon until Sunday night when I went to bed. And I still had 17% battery remaining. That is rather impressive.
Granted I did not use my phone very much as it was beautiful outside and I spent most of the weekend power washing and applying joint sand to my brick patio. This is not a scientific study, but in my experience the standby battery life of my iPhone is much better than what I have had on any Android device (and I've had a lot of them).
Background Sync
Again, we are talking about battery consumption during times of sparse usage here. I can only assume one of the reasons for the iPhone's strong standby battery life comes from the fact that very little is happening when the device is idle. Apple does not allow third party applications to spin up long-lived background services with a few exceptions like Android does.
There is a tradeoff here. When I receive an APN to let me know I have a new message in GMail I can even read a preview of the message in the notification. But then when I open the GMail app to read the rest of the message it's not there. I have to wait for the app to sync with the server. With Android, the new message would already be there. And not just for Google apps-- any app can take advantage of background sync using a Service.
For me the extra standby battery life is not worth the time I have to wait each time I open an app for it to fetch fresh data from the server. In this age of on-demand computing it should already be there.
What do you think?
Honestly the big limitation here is the current state of battery technology. The phone shouldn't need to go on standby at all. If batteries get better Apple might actually allow more to run in the background. Right now they are too focused on sucking every last drop out of current battery technology and making sure developers don't mess with their numbers on how long it will play music while on standby.
ReplyDeleteThe battery life on iPhone is even more astounding when you consider how much smaller the battery is when compared to most Android phones. The limitation here of couse is the form factor. A larger case can accomodate a larger battery.
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