Sorry for using that old clickbait title, but in a way it’s true. You really won’t believe that I’m about to tell you something so obvious about batteries for cell phones.
Like this. I found that when I use less my phone, the battery lasts a lot of More than I expected. I know, shocking! I told you this would be hard to believe.
But before you get angry and start emailing me, I’m not saying this is some kind of revelation because, well, obviously not This. Instead, I want to highlight the revolution that has taken place deep within the latest smartphones as power efficiency has improved significantly. And we should recognize and applaud these efforts because they improve phone ownership. Provided you don’t use an iPhone.
Use the latest Android phones
What led me to this amazing discovery? I’ve been using a few Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Android phones over the last few months, and due to personal circumstances, the only real demands I’ve had on them have been calls, messages, email, and fairly basic app usage. According to the Digital Wellbeing screen, my daily screen time is usually around two hours a day, but no more than three, and my activities have never involved anything very intense, like gaming or streaming video over 5G.
The last three phones I used were Asus ROG 8 Pro phoneHe OnePlus 12 And Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultraeverything with a processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 3rd generation and with software Android 14 with corresponding user interfaces. It wasn’t unusual for me to end my day with a staggering 80% battery on the ROG Phone 8 Pro when used like this, and since switching to the Galaxy S24 Ultra it has reached an impressive 75%. I only had a few days with the OnePlus 12 as my primary phone, but it didn’t finish below 75%.
These were all new devices, and during the first few days I spent with them, the phone optimized itself, which usually resulted in more battery drain. Thus, it is quite realistic to assume that battery life may improve even in a few more weeks. Moreover, it’s not that I didn’t use phones at all, but that I used them very extensively, without any restrictions on graphics capabilities or keeping the screen active for hours at a time.
On the other hand, I found myself using cellular a lot more often, often with a poor signal, which would hopefully force the phone to use more power to maintain the connection. Not long ago this type of use was All that’s what we did with our phones, and a day or so of battery life was considered good performance. Today, with about two hours of screen time per day, I can realistically go three or four days without recharging the battery. This is incredible.
Internal improvements
When I test a cell phone, I drain the battery in a few different ways, and since I rarely spend much time on a phone that I don’t test in some way, how it performs in basic use rarely matters or anything that you actively evaluate. Various studies show that the average person spends about four hours a day using their phone, so we tested that way, but it was interesting to see how well phones performed under “light” use.
I’ve noticed an increase in battery life on Android phones in recent years, but especially in late 2023 and early 2024. What could be behind the gradual increase in efficiency? Qualcomm releases a new high-spec mobile processor every year, and it’s often difficult to keep track of the many numbers and percentages the company uses to promote these processors. But if you take a closer look, you start to understand where some of these energy efficiency improvements are coming from.
Efficiency has increased significantly in recent years.
For the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm claims that the move from the ARM Cortex X3 core to the ARM Cortex X4 core, as well as changes to the other seven cores, should result in a 20% improvement in power efficiency. own. The new Adreno GPU apparently offers a 25% improvement in efficiency. This is all compared to the previous generation processor, and when Qualcomm updated the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to 8+ Gen 1, it also claimed significant improvements in GPU and modem efficiency, several generations behind what we use today. When you put it all together, efficiency has increased significantly in recent years.
Android 14 is more efficient
The cumulative effect of these and other deeper changes in the processor is visible not only when we press hard on the phone, but also when we don’t do that. Since the effect was demonstrated on three different phones from different manufacturers using the same processor and software, it is also a stable and repeatable effectiveness. But all three devices on which I actually noticed very long battery life also used this software. Google Android 14So did that also play a role?
Yes, in this video produced by Google, Dave Burke, Google’s VP of Android Engineering, explains the work done to optimize Android 14’s background activity and cached processes, reduce code size, and the overall quality of the software itself. He says this all translates into improved performance and longer battery life. Otherwise, the latest version does a better job of managing resources and heat storage, and also contains special algorithms for handling power-hungry applications, all with the goal of improving performance and reducing power consumption.
In other words, Google has prioritized efficiency in Android 14 and, combined with Qualcomm’s advances on the Snapdragon platform, appears to have made visible changes in how the latest phones use battery power.
Apple is falling behind
While my primary SIM card is inside any Android phone I review, I also have iPhone 15 pro max and although I don’t make calls on it, it still has a SIM card connected to 5G and is used for apps, mobile payments, music and other tasks. While my Android phone has impressed me with its stability and performance in recent months, my iPhone has not.
While I use my iPhone differently than my Android phone, and I agree that this skews the comparison a bit, the amount of screen time between the two has been fairly similar over that time, stretching out to about two hours each day. But unlike an Android phone, I’m very used to seeing my iPhone’s battery drain to around 50% at the end of the day. Energy consumption also changes daily, even if usage remains relatively constant, and predicting how the iPhone’s battery will perform has been much more difficult.
Internally, the iPhone is very different from Android phones. It uses Apple’s A17 Pro processor and Apple’s own GPU, along with iOS 17 software. Using a new iPhone and a new Android phone simultaneously over the past 10 weeks has shown that Apple hasn’t improved efficiency at the same rate as Qualcomm and Google. . This is not a new problem for the iPhone, as battery life has been an issue for generations.
The title of this article is obviously sarcastic, and the reason I’ve gotten more battery life from the phones I’ve been using lately is not only because I’ve been using them less, but because real efficiency improvements have been made . .executed in hardware and software. This means that while I immediately noticed an increase in battery life when I used the phone less, you’ll likely experience the same if you use further your next phone too, but probably only if you choose an Android phone rather than an iPhone.
Published in DT in English by: Andy Boxall.
Source: Digital Trends
