this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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So let's keep making phones thinner and thinner while simultaneously growing the camera bump instead of making a flat profile with, say, 2 days of life!
So on one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, I think lightness is a thing people care about. I recently needed to get some photos backed up off an old phone of mine, and I didn’t realize how heavy my current one is until I picked up my old one. Thinness is irrelevant, but a 50% weight difference is not. Other than that, I don’t think most people get much utility out of more than a day of battery life, so 1.5 days new degrading down to 1 seems reasonable and in line with what most people want.
It is. Specifically it is something people do not want.
I have had a LG V30, Pixel 4a and 5, all of which are incredibly light. When I hand it to an iPhone user they tell me it "feels cheap". You can see this sentiment reflected in phone reviews also.
I agree for first impressions that heavier is perceived as more premium, but after months of actually using a device I can’t fathom that a reasonable person would actually prefer a heavier phone given an equivalent, lighter phone. Even Apple, king of making devices with mass appeal, decided last year that shedding weight was a priority when moving some iPhones from aluminum to titanium.
Okay well try convincing a consumer that they just need to try it for a few months before they'll like it.
I mean nobody had to convince me. I just picked up an old phone and was immediately “why am I carrying around this brick when clearly this exists”
Harder to drop a heavier thing to a concrete floor, if it's only held in your palm.
Well, cheap or not, but in terms of fitting into my pocket a fat rubber-covered dumbphone is better than a modern thin and light one. That plate is just inconvenient. It's too big. I don't care how thin it is. A newspaper is thin too.
Ask them about the lack of a headphone jack 😉.
Totally agree! I picked up an old iPhone 6s yesterday and I just couldn’t believe how much lighter and thinner it is than the latest models.
I have a Samsung A71. It permanently lives in its protective case which gives it good bumpers around the easily-breakable edge-to-edge screen. It's now 4 years old and has survived numerous tumbles and drops over the years.
Occasionally I have to swap the SD card in it and I am always astonished at how thin and light and fragile it is when not in the case.
I would quite happily have an actual similar size phone to what "I have now" if the battery size was bumped up another 50 percent.
You're blaming the wrong thing again. Newer phones have higher capacity batteries than the old bricks by far. The issue is the screen, SoC, and modem power consumption has gone up too.
In the phone world, the jump in capacity that modern phones have from my 4370mAh battery in my A71 is negligible. They haven't increased power density much because that way leads to fires and lawsuits when users bend or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile phones
My point was, if modern phones had the physical space that my phone + case has, they could have a bigger battery, and that bigger battery would then power all the hungry, hungry electronics.
Yeah, my Galaxy S3 is half as heavy as my current phone. It couldn't do less but had superior battery life. Smartphones and their OS all have grown bloated.
Exactly. I really liked my old phone, the Moto G Power, which:
I still have it for stuff around the house (gets like 3-4 days w/o the SIM), and I would totally still be using it as my main phone if it still got security updates. The screen is a little larger than I want, but it has been a solid phone for me.
I got a Pixel 8 mostly because of the longer software support and GrapheneOS support, and I honestly don't care about the camera, and the big bump is pretty annoying. I really wish I could just have my Moto G Power w/ a small screen and longer software support. In fact, I'd totally use a Pinephone if it had reliable calls and texts, better battery life, and better audio quality. I really don't need much, I just need a phone that will keep working for years and not need to be recharged throughout the day...
You're missing something though: phone cell or battery capacity has been getting bigger, not smaller. The issue isn't the batteries, it's the other hardware and software needing more and more energy. Modern phones are much faster, have better screens at higher resolution, brightness, even refresh rate. All of this uses energy, even with modern technology being as awesome as it is. Qualcomm, TSMC, ARM, and Apple put quite a bit of work into making these things as efficient as they can be, but we keep demanding more and more from these devices. For many they replaced laptops after all.
It's a bit like complaining that your new ultra high performance sports car is getting bad range, and complaining about the fuel tank or battery instead of the engine. The tank has only gotten bigger or at least stayed the same, but the engine has gotten hungrier and hungrier with each generation.
That's a contributing factor to battery life remaining stagnant. Manufacturers use those advances while continuing to slim phones rather than making an actually flat brick that uses those advances to drastically increase battery life. Regardless of the energy needs of the phone manufacturers can use the difference in height between the back of a phone and the camera bump to include more battery capacity and it will increase both the daily and usable life of the phone.