I disagree. Joules are really hard to understand to laypeople. Watt-hours directly relate to the power of a device without conversion, and can even be really translated in terms of power bill.
3.6 megajoules? Eh, I guess that’s maybe a lot? Or not?
1000 watt-hours? Oh, like running a microwave for a whole hour? Dang that’s a LOT!
I guess it comes down to whether we want to primarily communicate battery size in terms of charge (Coulombs = Amps * Time) or energy (Joules = Watts * Time).
The first metric you multiply by your operating voltage to get the second metric, whereas the second metric you have to divide by your voltage to get the first. Depends on what comes easier to most people.
With the increasing abundance of electric vehicles people are getting used to (k)Wh as the unit for battery size. It would make sense to use the same unit for smaller electronics as well, IMO.
Yes. I really wish all batteries used watt-hours. All it’d take would be for someone to design a phone that runs at a different voltage and their battery numbers would stop being comparable.
A 4Ah battery at 5V would be a 20Wh battery, drop the kilo. Electronics draw power at idle, not energy. 2kWh is meaningless without an idle duration. What are you saying?
Wh may be better for determining total energy storage across differing cell chemistry. mAh is standard for electronics and makes more sense at the design level as the battery voltage is chemistry dependent and known to the designer.
i don’t think any manufacturer publishes the voltage their devices run at, could be anywhere from 3.3 to 5V. so i don’t know how an end-user is supposed to compare battery sizes between devices.
They would also have to give current draw which isn’t really possible since each end user has different apps and behavior. So you more often get standby time or video playback time which are based on an “ideal” (probably non-bloated) clean OS. That’s more useful to an end user but also subject to marketing fudging the figures.
You can often look up the battery chemistry or use an app to access sensors btw.
At the end of the day battery capacity is only one factor of many in battery/charge life and is generally just marketing in the context of phones.
Energy is just the product of power and time. And just like amperage, the power draw of a device varies.
And this should be obvious, but what makes more sense to an electronics engineer doesn’t matter one bit to the end user. And the end user doesn’t know anything about milli-amperes or volts (except maybe their wall outlet voltage).
Yes power is a rate. As you said energy is the time integral of power. So it’s meaningless to state an “energy draw” without a duration implied or explicit. E.g. what does drawing 2kWh at idle even mean?
I agree about end user sentiment. I was trying to suggest as well. The only way to know which battery/phone is going to have a better battery life is to identify reviews with similar usage to your own or cross-compare metrics across devices you’re familiar with. In general, phone A with a 4000mAh battery won’t necessarily outlast phone B with a 4500mAh batt.
Well you don’t say it draws 2 kWh at idle. You say it draws 2 kW at idle. While that is incredibly inefficient, it means that for every hour the device is idle, it draws 2 kWh of energy.
Oh yeah battery size isn’t sufficient to fully gauge battery life. You need to know power draw to calculate that. And it’s good to get battery life ratings from reviews. Great. It helps a lot.
But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get good, comparable physical specs.
Kinda like processors. Gigahertz and core counts are far from telling you everything, but it doesn’t mean it should be abstracted into some weird unit.
Yeah a metric would be nice but it would need a standard test. That’s why idle time and video playback time makes a good amount of sense. But it’s not entirely clear how that would translate into usage for example in back country (where cell network drains power harder) or travel. So it’s not perfect. But it is probably the best measure guven hardware and usage vatiation. In any case it’s subject to marketing dudging the numbers in various ways.
you can optimize your android device battery in ways iphones cant. For example you cant disable or remove any system app consuming your battery in iPhones, but that is instantly doable in Androids
Settings, apps, Google play services, disable. Very easy. Nobody is saying “you can disable any app you want on android and your phone will magically just keep running perfectly as though it’s not dependent on it” just that it is possible to do so. Yes, I understand disabling Google play services will cripple many features. It is however possible, and you’ll still have a functional phone afterwards. The same cannot be said about iPhones.
iphones cannot temporarily disable apps, cannot prevent specific apps from accessing network, cant spoof live location sharing, cannot even multi-window several apps at once. those are 4 simple examples which I personally find very helpful which all androids can do for more than 10 years already while iphone cant.
mAh is a stupid way to measure batteries. Wh is more relevant.
It also tells nothing about the efficiency of the device. You can add a 50kWh battery to a device but it doesn’t matter if it uses 2kWh at idle
I’d argue Wh is a complete waste. Just use J, which is the much more established unit.
I disagree. Joules are really hard to understand to laypeople. Watt-hours directly relate to the power of a device without conversion, and can even be really translated in terms of power bill.
3.6 megajoules? Eh, I guess that’s maybe a lot? Or not?
1000 watt-hours? Oh, like running a microwave for a whole hour? Dang that’s a LOT!
I guess it comes down to whether we want to primarily communicate battery size in terms of charge (Coulombs = Amps * Time) or energy (Joules = Watts * Time).
The first metric you multiply by your operating voltage to get the second metric, whereas the second metric you have to divide by your voltage to get the first. Depends on what comes easier to most people.
With the increasing abundance of electric vehicles people are getting used to (k)Wh as the unit for battery size. It would make sense to use the same unit for smaller electronics as well, IMO.
Yes. I really wish all batteries used watt-hours. All it’d take would be for someone to design a phone that runs at a different voltage and their battery numbers would stop being comparable.
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A 4Ah battery at 5V would be a 20Wh battery, drop the kilo. Electronics draw power at idle, not energy. 2kWh is meaningless without an idle duration. What are you saying?
Wh may be better for determining total energy storage across differing cell chemistry. mAh is standard for electronics and makes more sense at the design level as the battery voltage is chemistry dependent and known to the designer.
i don’t think any manufacturer publishes the voltage their devices run at, could be anywhere from 3.3 to 5V. so i don’t know how an end-user is supposed to compare battery sizes between devices.
They would also have to give current draw which isn’t really possible since each end user has different apps and behavior. So you more often get standby time or video playback time which are based on an “ideal” (probably non-bloated) clean OS. That’s more useful to an end user but also subject to marketing fudging the figures.
You can often look up the battery chemistry or use an app to access sensors btw.
At the end of the day battery capacity is only one factor of many in battery/charge life and is generally just marketing in the context of phones.
What? They draw power, not energy?
Energy is just the product of power and time. And just like amperage, the power draw of a device varies.
And this should be obvious, but what makes more sense to an electronics engineer doesn’t matter one bit to the end user. And the end user doesn’t know anything about milli-amperes or volts (except maybe their wall outlet voltage).
Yes power is a rate. As you said energy is the time integral of power. So it’s meaningless to state an “energy draw” without a duration implied or explicit. E.g. what does drawing 2kWh at idle even mean?
I agree about end user sentiment. I was trying to suggest as well. The only way to know which battery/phone is going to have a better battery life is to identify reviews with similar usage to your own or cross-compare metrics across devices you’re familiar with. In general, phone A with a 4000mAh battery won’t necessarily outlast phone B with a 4500mAh batt.
Well you don’t say it draws 2 kWh at idle. You say it draws 2 kW at idle. While that is incredibly inefficient, it means that for every hour the device is idle, it draws 2 kWh of energy.
Oh yeah battery size isn’t sufficient to fully gauge battery life. You need to know power draw to calculate that. And it’s good to get battery life ratings from reviews. Great. It helps a lot.
But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get good, comparable physical specs.
Kinda like processors. Gigahertz and core counts are far from telling you everything, but it doesn’t mean it should be abstracted into some weird unit.
Per the kW vs kWh, see top level reply.
Yeah a metric would be nice but it would need a standard test. That’s why idle time and video playback time makes a good amount of sense. But it’s not entirely clear how that would translate into usage for example in back country (where cell network drains power harder) or travel. So it’s not perfect. But it is probably the best measure guven hardware and usage vatiation. In any case it’s subject to marketing dudging the numbers in various ways.
you can optimize your android device battery in ways iphones cant. For example you cant disable or remove any system app consuming your battery in iPhones, but that is instantly doable in Androids
Try disabling google play services.
To be fair, you can do pretty much anything on a rooted Android.
But I wouldn’t say “instantly” since you’d have to root it first.
Settings, apps, Google play services, disable. Very easy. Nobody is saying “you can disable any app you want on android and your phone will magically just keep running perfectly as though it’s not dependent on it” just that it is possible to do so. Yes, I understand disabling Google play services will cripple many features. It is however possible, and you’ll still have a functional phone afterwards. The same cannot be said about iPhones.
You can take background permissions from system apps on iOS
iphones cannot temporarily disable apps, cannot prevent specific apps from accessing network, cant spoof live location sharing, cannot even multi-window several apps at once. those are 4 simple examples which I personally find very helpful which all androids can do for more than 10 years already while iphone cant.