Battery life - when did we settle for a day?

For the majority of us that own a smartphone, we have to charge it once a day. Why? When did we settle and think 'well we can live with this'? Gone are the days where we would plug in our phones once a week and not have to worry about them running out of juice at awkward moments. Some people might argue that the days where we only used our phones for calls and texting are over too, so it was a tradeoff in the end. I disagree.

Why?

The reason we have phones that last just one day with moderate use is because we want it all from our phones. We want them to look stylish, give us push notifications, have a glorious touchscreen and allow us to play games/update statuses and anything else you can think of. Now if we were prepared to let one of these slide, like the stylish factor, then maybe phone manufacturers could fit a larger capacity battery and our phones wouldn't have such a close relationship with the wall socket. Before the iPhone came about, we didn't care much for how phones looked, we cared a little but nowhere near as much as we do now. After their release, manufacturers had a wake up call that as good as their phones are, they need to look good too. Phones became as much a fashion accessory as they did a device for communication. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either. It's just how our tastes as consumers have changed.

How to fix it?

Android phone manufacturers have started to implement battery saving software to help the longevity of a single charge. Samsung started a while back with its power saving function, Sony and HTC both have it implemented in their phones now too. The three flagship Android phones on the market now, the S4, the Xperia Z and the HTC One, all have some form of this on their phones as standard. It means that manufacturers know consumers want longer battery life, but they cannot put a bulky battery on as it won't sell, regardless of how long it lasts for. This is their answer for the time being.

Unfortunately for us, there's no real fix either. You could get an extra battery, but you'd have to keep it topped up all the time and phone manufacturers are increasingly moving towards non-removable batteries. You could buy a battery pack to charge your phone on the go when the battery is low but they're bulky and realistically you can't use your phone while it's charging on the go. Apps like Juice Defender have been around for a while now, but they only increase your battery life at the cost of less connectivity. Most of these apps are very limited in how much battery they save, since the biggest drain of our battery is the screen, which is something you can't really disable. Either way you look at it, we're stuck.

Our only hope?

While advances in processing power and storage are extremely quick and exponential, advances in batteries in general are much much slower. It has been the case for years now. Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on integrated systems doubles abut every two years, which means that processing power doubles too. This has been the case for some time now and looking at the mobile phone market, it seems to follow this phenomenon too. While the advances of memory hasn't been as quick as this, it has still been much faster than battery capacity improvements. In a way this is also stifling advances in the mobile phone market since manufacturers can't put their fastest chips in their phones as batteries can't sustain them for long enough. This forces them to spend more money trying to make them energy efficient, essentially making the whole research and development process longer. We'll have to sit tight and hope that there is a breakthrough in this sector, otherwise we will be forever doomed to need to charge out phones once a day...

Mo

Clash of the Titans - S4 vs HTC One

We finally got what we all wanted, well most of us did. The S4 has been announced and we did actually see quite a few features which weren't leaked before the event. I watched the launch event and like a lot of launch events it was quite flashy and pretty fast paced. I wasn't a fan of everything they did and at times it was a bit dull and in between the gimmicky features, I saw quite a lot of things that Samsung are bringing out that I think are very useful additions to a phone.

Let's compare phone specs, as if they haven't been done already to death:















Design
The design of the two phones are very different with Samsung deciding to stick to its S3 design and HTC brining out a very sexy looking phone made of aluminium. HTC have always made good looking phones with amazing form factor and this is no exception, although the plastic of the Samsung might be more durable, I have to give this to the One as it does look fantastic.


Screen
The S4 has a Super AMOLED 5 inch touchscreen while the One has a Super LCD3 4.7 inch touch screen. Both have the same resolution, 1080 x 1920 pixels, often referred to as 'Full HD'. Since the S4 has a slightly bigger screen, the ppi (pixels per inch) pixel density is slightly lower as it covers a larger area so we get 441 ppi for the S4 and 469 ppi for the One. The winner really depends on how you look at it, but given the S4 has Cornering Gorilla Glass 3 instead of 2 to protect the screen, I am tempted to just give it to the S4 but let's call it a draw.

Storage
Quite an easy one here, the S4 comes in three different storage capacities, 16/32/64gb while the One has two, 32/64gb but the winner is the S4 by a mile as it has the ability to increase storage using a microSD card up to 64gb. I can't see it any other way, microSD slot is always a winner in my eyes.

Connectivity
Boring stuff here, but basically the two phones have more or the less the same type of connectivity here. They are both LTE capable, so 4G in areas which it is available, they both have v4.0 Bluetooth, NFC, infrared ports and microUSB v2.0. The only slight difference is that the S4 has USB on-the-go which means you can plug in extra storage if you ever need it, something which will probably be available for the One if you decide to go down the custom firmware route. We'll call it another draw.

Camera
The S4 has a 13 megapixel camera while the One has a 4 megapixel camera which they have marketed as the 4 Ultra Pixels camera. At first glance you might think that S4 wins but early camera comparisons have shown that the One does indeed appear to perform better. I think it's always important to bear in mind higher megapixels isn't always better and the One indeed seems to prove this. Have to give it the HTC One for the camera.

Processor and graphics
On paper there doesn't seem to be a competition here. The S4 has the Exynos 5 Octa 5410 which is an eight-core processor while the One has a Qualcomm APQ8064T Snapdragon 600 processor which is quad-core. So the S4 has four more cores than the One, but again until these are properly benchmarked then it's not easy to compare. In terms of the GPU (graphics processing unit), it's another difficult one with the S4 sporting a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 and the One with the Adreno 320. A lot of fancy words and numbers there but S4's GPU has three cores clocked at 533 MHz which is roughly between the performance of the iPhone 5 and the iPad 4. The Adreno 320 is a little bit older and has already been featured in the Nexus 4. Overall I think we'll have to give this to the S4 in theory and wait to see what happens in reality.

Sensors and features
The S4 will come fitted with the usual accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass, all of which the One has too but on top of this, the S4 will also include a barometer, temperature and humidity sensors. These are going to be used for various features that come with the S4. Talking about features, Samsung have introduced a lot of new things that the S4 will bring. Overall this round goes to the S4 as Samsung appear to have added in many little things, some gimmicky, that I can see being quite useful such as touch-less gestures, dual camera, drama shot, S-translate and so on.

Battery life
I don't know why HTC continue down this road but they've fitted the One with a non-removable 2300 mAh battery while the S4 has a 2600 mAh battery that is removable. It's a no brainer for me, the S4 wins in this category as I have the choice of buying an extra battery if I wanted to and overall it does have a higher capacity battery fitted.

Final remarks
Samsung - 6
HTC - 4

Obviously this is my view but I find the S4 more appealing that the One, maybe because of a slight brand loyalty to Samsung nowadays or it might just be that it is the better phone, either way I firmly believe that Samsung will sell many more units than HTC and this is most down to their incredible marketing budget! Having said that, my next phone is likely to be the S4.

Mo