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On my first Android smartphone, an LG Optimus One P500, I had no trouble to reach 4-5 days and the battery was far from humungous, only 1500 mAh. Most things we

by dwild 7y ago

On my first Android smartphone, an LG Optimus One P500, I had no trouble to reach 4-5 days and the battery was far from humungous, only 1500 mAh. Most things were not running but I was using it to text quite often during the day. I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. We see the battery on a picture, if it comes from Adafruit, that seems like the 2500mAh one they sell. There's no reasons that thing can't last at least a week, but I can understands it wasn't the goal at all to make it last, so almost no effort was invested in that.

jfim 7y ago
> I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. A lot of that wizardry is not really user-visible. Ensuring that chips spend more time in sleep mode, coalescing events so that wakeups happen together, ensuring that there are no components passively draining power, etc.
- dwild 7y ago
  For me, wizardry would be to go beyond what any other manufacturer would do. No one is considering Android phones to be optimizing specifically toward battery life and that phone was the cheapest of the cheapest, I paid 50$ for it, without any contract in 2012.
  - taneq 7y ago
    World's pretty big. A one-in-a-million engineer is pretty damn special compared to the rest of us, and there's 7000 of them out there. Cheap-per-unit hardware can have paradoxically high development budgets since volume is expected to be so high. We probably all have slightly unrealistic how hard it is to design even a "crap" piece of equipment. It's like how non-software people can't fathom that it costs $50k to build a relatively simple phone app when MS Office only costs a couple of hundred bucks.
  - jfim 7y ago
    The problem is that this wizardry is not usually user visible, and doesn't have much of a correlation with the device price or operating system. If anything, it's even possible that the cheapest phone has the most engineering done on it to optimize the battery life, due to the fact that reducing the battery size (and resulting cheaper BOM) on a cheap device that has millions of units sold is worth the additional engineering time to reduce power consumption.

by dwild 7y ago

jfim 7y ago

> I don't believe there was any wizardry on there. A lot of that wizardry is not really user-visible. Ensuring that chips spend more time in sleep mode, coalescing events so that wakeups happen together, ensuring that there are no components passively draining power, etc.

dwild 7y ago
For me, wizardry would be to go beyond what any other manufacturer would do. No one is considering Android phones to be optimizing specifically toward battery life and that phone was the cheapest of the cheapest, I paid 50$ for it, without any contract in 2012.
- taneq 7y ago
  World's pretty big. A one-in-a-million engineer is pretty damn special compared to the rest of us, and there's 7000 of them out there. Cheap-per-unit hardware can have paradoxically high development budgets since volume is expected to be so high. We probably all have slightly unrealistic how hard it is to design even a "crap" piece of equipment. It's like how non-software people can't fathom that it costs $50k to build a relatively simple phone app when MS Office only costs a couple of hundred bucks.
- jfim 7y ago
  The problem is that this wizardry is not usually user visible, and doesn't have much of a correlation with the device price or operating system. If anything, it's even possible that the cheapest phone has the most engineering done on it to optimize the battery life, due to the fact that reducing the battery size (and resulting cheaper BOM) on a cheap device that has millions of units sold is worth the additional engineering time to reduce power consumption.