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> and battery life was short In the mid-'90s and 2000s phone batteries lasted longer than they do today, assuming the regular usage of the day.

swores 3y ago
Pretty sure they're talking a few years earlier than mid-90s. Think brick-like phones, not phones that fit in your pockets.
- buran77 3y ago
  Maybe, it's not out of the question that some would do that but I've never had the feeling it was common or desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my guess. A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge. I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.
  - swores 3y ago
    Or, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before charging every day like you would a few years later once you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's the time period original commenter was talking about, and why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s. It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)

swores 3y ago

Pretty sure they're talking a few years earlier than mid-90s. Think brick-like phones, not phones that fit in your pockets.

buran77 3y ago
Maybe, it's not out of the question that some would do that but I've never had the feeling it was common or desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my guess. A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge. I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.
- swores 3y ago
  Or, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before charging every day like you would a few years later once you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's the time period original commenter was talking about, and why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s. It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)