I have never understood why some people find 24-hour charging cycles to be such a problem. Humans have a 24-hour charging cycle too, and while charging they are unable to use phones, so I don't see why it's such a trouble to charge the phone at the same time.
Battery use isn't linear. If 24-hour charging cycles are required for the average case what that means is that you're limiting use for a lot of normal cases. Use the phone a bit more than average or have a long period of poor reception, and then you've exhausted the battery. Which is precisely the case today, it's trivially easy for anyone to exhaust the battery on a modern smartphone in much less than a day.
In contrast, a phone that requires charging every week, for example, you'll tend to keep at a higher total charge and will survive periods of heavier usage better.
That's not dismissing the fact that most people are willing to accept the tradeoffs of modern smartphone battery life, but make no mistake the necessity of daily recharging for average use is a problem.
I'm probably on the opposite extreme (never have watched a movie or tv show on my iphone nor any youtube video longer than about 3 minutes), but I'd be shocked if long video watching was a common case.
Battery life on any iPhone sucks the big one. Hell, it sucks on any smartphone I've ever seen. Big, power-hungry touchscreen phones are simply not in a place where we can afford to use them all day.
I sit down and play Mirror's Edge for 10 minutes and out goes 10% of my battery. Holy crap.
But even taking gaming out of it, even moderate browser usage over 3G burns through that battery like kindling. I have to charge the iPhone at work if I plan on going out in the evening. Even with judicious limitations on usage (and isn't that defeating the point of a smartphone?), if I leave with a phone at 9am, go somewhere after work, there is a good chance I won't have enough juice to call for a cab at midnight.
I don't have a problem with a 24-hour charging cycle, my problem is that current smartphones - iPhones and all - have trouble lasting that full 24-hour period unless you severely handicap your own use of the device.
Not sure but I did it once because I had a lot of time to kill waiting for my girlfriend to finish up at work.
Another annoying scenario is when you lock the screen but keep a high CPU app running. Go back and resume a couple hours later and your battery is decimated.
I don't see why it's such a trouble to charge the phone every night
It isn't a problem ... mostly. But it's the edge cases that will get you.
e.g. Sometimes I stay the night at my SO's house. Or I go from work to drinks to a club. Any break in the routine and the phone's remaining charge is now an issue. These are also the times when you are more likely to need to send and receive texts, use maps or other helpful smartphone apps. What are you going to do, say "I can't; I have to go home and charge my phone"? These devices are supposed to liberate us from rigid schedules (and they did, if you remember that far back).
So I keep a charging cable in my desk at work, it solves a lot of things. Office-wide emails that go "does anyone have a charger for a..." happen regularly in any office.
It's a problem if you aren't a highly organized person like most hackers tend to be.
My gf - a sales/marketing pro - had a lot of trouble with this when she switched to iPhone; she was use to not paying much/any attention to her battery until the phone complained... She had to get use to charging every night.
It's easy to discount this but it was a pretty significant issue at least initially.
Whenever I go camping now I have to turn my Android G1 phone off for large periods of time so it will survive the weekend and be available if I need it. Never had this problem with my old mobile phones. They'd last a week or more a lot of the time.
I don't get the obsession with thin phones. I'd much rather have a thicker phone if it lasted 2-3 days instead of 1.
I haven't had a smart-phone yet, but I made a similar observation once about antennas - I would much rather have a stub antenna and better reliability than an internal antenna and have to worry about reception. I wonder if there is a market for a really reliable, long battery-life, etc, phone that was maybe the size of a small walkie-talkie?
I'm still using my G1 and when I first had it the battery life was terrible to point of me taking it back to the shop to demand another phone. The shop upgraded the software and it has been more reasonable since then. I had one of the first G1's in 2008, so there were still enormous battery issues on new phones even after the iP.
Yeah exactly - I have 2 USB extenders hooked to my charger next to my bed so I can read emails and play Shredder Chess when I wake up... plus the alarm clock.
But again, we are not normal folks though I bet this isn't that unusual the more I think about it.
They started making USB wall plugs after all (which is a great idea).
