I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that if they made the phone a little bit thicker to make if flush, we could get some crazy battery life (and a headphone jack).
This race to thin phones with unusable battery life reminds me to the race to more and more mega pixels in digital cameras with unusable low exposition quality some years ago. It's just about the buzz, it just hinders the technology in order to be able to tell a more catchy number to consumers.
I would happily go with a 33% thicker iPhone with great battery life and a headphone jack and I doubt that most of the people would notice the difference in size.
Right, I feel like we're back in the days before iPhone when so many different companies were coming out with lame gimmicks to sell their flip phones and sliders that were all virtually identical. Maybe we're stuck here until wearable tech becomes more of a reality?
This option is already available to you: buy an aftermarket case/battery combo. I see these around all the time. The beauty of Apple selling millions of iPhone is there is a viable market for whatever accessory you may want.
People put up with all kinds of crap when it's the best option available. They're OK with it until something better comes along. In this case, a smartphone with a day of battery life trumps a flip phone with a week of battery life just because it can do so much more. You know what trumps a smartphone with X battery life? One with X+1 battery life, as long as it still fits comfortably in a trouser pocket. With the behemoth-screened phablets that are common these days, I think it's reasonable to make them a little thicker and a little more useful.
My phone's about 3 years old now. Even when it was new, I couldn't use it indiscriminately and expect a full day of charge. If I want to have it available for critical purposes like emergency calls, it's literally not usable in the way that I'd like to use it. I don't think that it's even remotely unreasonable to advocate for better battery life, and I think it's only a slight exaggeration to call current phone battery life "unusable".
Considering that only Apple phones run iOS, and there's only one Apple phone per physical device size bracket a generation, people don't really have a choice.
At least in the iPhone ecosystem it's not so much best option available, it's the only option available.
There's no immediate danger of people not buying iPhones because they want better battery life, so Apple doesn't even have to try harder than an average show of effort.
It doesn't negate the argument (even if it was hyperbole). I took an iPhone 5S out on a car trip yesterday across L.A., and forgot the car charger but hey it was fully charged. Used it for navigation for about 20 minutes total, and maybe 10 minutes total of phone calls. Checked email maybe 5 times. By about 8PM, the battery was at 2%, and I still needed to drive home. So the phone was unusable to me if I wanted to have ability to make an emergency call. And if the battery had gone down another 2%, the phone would have been entirely unusable.
My iPhone 2G had better battery life than this given similar usage patterns. Sure you can cite LTE vs. 2G and processor ability etc, but battery life made the modern(-ish) phone less useful to me under what I consider are not that strenuous of conditions. This is a real problem, and battery life will definitely be a major consideration to the next phone I buy.
> All these gimmicks and breakthroughs don't mean shit, make a phone that lasts 3 days and that will be a game changer.
Oh, I completely agree with that. It's more that I have an iPhone 5S that I replaced the battery in and it lasts for about 24 hours with my usage patterns -- would I love more? Heck yes I would! A phone not making it through from morning to evening though implies that it's likely a dying battery, as the iPhone 5S should last longer than that.
How many of these people have to consciously adapt their usage to make sure their phones still have juice at the end of the day? Yes, I can work with a phone where I look at the battery level and think "ok, better not do X now", but it would be better if I could always use it when I want to.
True but I'm not actually sure the smaller SE size is so bad--I'm not sure I actually need all this real estate. In fact, as I look to switch to an android phone because of this headphone nonsense, I'm actually finding my new problem is not being able to find a phone small enough!
Maybe I'll regret it but my next phone (and last iPhone) might be an SE.
FWIW, I switched from an iPhone 4 to a Z3 Compact because it was the only decent "small" phone available. But a 4.6 inch screen is not actually "compact", as far as I'm concerned. I switched back to iPhones for the SE, which isn't that much physically smaller, but is a lot more usable nonetheless.
It turns out the important dimensions are the overall width (for being able to hold it one handed) and the screen height (to reach everywhere with your thumb), and the iPhone SE's top and bottom bezels don't screw up either of those.
With the Z3C you can hold it one handed, but you can't use it effectively unless you have gigantic hands. Making a phone fit in one hand isn't enough; if the entire face is covered with screen then it still takes two hands to operate it.
Yep, the Sony Z3 compact did this a couple of years ago and was amazing. Top notch waterproof, superb battery, headphone jack, magnetic charger, SD card. Just one of those phones that really managed to hit the spot.
Oddly enough, the main complaint I had about it was that because it was so flush and shiny, it slid around too much on a table. Had to put a protective film on which was a bit more grippy.
And after marketing it as an underwater camera, they later backpedaled and said "waterproofing was tested in a standby state under laboratory conditions, do not attempt to use the phone underwater"?
> You mean those stupid plastic flaps with the gaskets that came unglued and prevented the flaps from even closing properly?
This. Girlfriend had that phone. The device and their after-sales service was completely garbage. Sony failed to repair the unplugging flaps, even after multiple service attempts. And every single time, they did complete factory reset on the phone to replace the flaps (!!!).
Then they didn't go and make the mistake of trying to slim too much for the next gen in the Z4 compact. The thing has incremental improvements on all the features you mentioned and battery life is just as good as it was before.
This race to thin phones with unusable battery life reminds me to the race to more and more mega pixels in digital cameras with unusable low exposition quality some years ago. It's just about the buzz, it just hinders the technology in order to be able to tell a more catchy number to consumers.
I would happily go with a 33% thicker iPhone with great battery life and a headphone jack and I doubt that most of the people would notice the difference in size.