Battery Life: the Unexpected Extinction (OR how we lost it)

Since the very beginning of Android everyone has been talking about Battery Life... and how bad it is; but why that much hate?

Let's investigate:

For the following, i had only based the research on the devices i owned/used:

• Sony Ericsson Z530i
• Xperia X10mini (E10i)
• Motorola Moto G (XT1032/XT1039)
• Motorola Moto E (XT1022)

Impacting points But... What are the culprits??

Here are some, but i'm sure there are many more things that impact battery life.

Hardware:

• Device global power and Screen size/technology vs battery size
• Antenna quality and network coverage

Software:

• Firmware: Kernel, ROM... (implementation, and optimization regarding hardware)
• background services (viber, facebook, google services [location seeking, google fit, google wear, ...], ...)

User:

• User habits
• ...

There are lots of variables in the equation so we cannot "benchmark" them as we do for performances; the following won't give answers, but more questions that anybody should ask themselves when talking about battery life.
A good study would need known and fixed variables to investigate on one specific variable, with negative and positive controls, triplicates, and statistics to show significant differences. But we have none.

Hardware Power, Screen Size/tech, Battery Size...

We have 4 (5) devices from 3 generations:

• The "old phone"
• The early smartphone (The e10i was shipped with android 1.6 donut!) and
• The current gen entry/middle class smartphones (XT1022-XT1032-XT1039)

The oldest features a 128*160px screen for a 900mAh battery and could handle more than a week and a half without the need of a charge (up to 2 weeks with moderate usage)
The X10mini features a 240*320px screen for a 950mAh battery and could only stay on for about 24hrs-48hrs
The MotoG: 720*1280px for 2070mAh (24-48hrs)

The MotoE: 540*960px for 1980mAh (48-72hrs, and up to a week with fair usage)

Here is chart about battery capacity (mAh) and screen surface (px) coefficients between my first phone (Z530i) and the newer devices:

device	length	width	surface (px)	battery (mAh)
Z530i	160	128	20480	900	surface increase	battery increase
E10i	320	240	76800	950	3,75	1,06
XT1022	960	540	518400	1980	25,31	2,20
XT1032	1280	720	921600	2070	45,00	2,30

Z530i --> XT1032 : 2.3x battery capacity increase, but a 45x wider screen!!
Luckily, battery life had not been decrease by 20! (only by 7~14)

Screen technology also plays a role in power consumption: 
A standard TFT/IPS screen uses a whole backlight that is either ON or OFF (+ brightness levels) meaning similar power used regardless the displayed content.
On the opposite, AMOLED based screens don't have any: these screens features LEDs for each pixel that are completely OFF when a screen part is black meaning NO power used at all!
The previously named devices are all using TFT/IPS based screen though.

CPU and GPU are not much relevant (regarding clock since MHz/W has been increased a lot making newer devices a lot more efficient); this point would need a whole in depth article, so we won't study this much now.

Antenna quality has a lot to do with battery life, the better the antenna, the better the life: the device would need less power to get same signal, saving some more juice.

Network Coverage isn't directly linked to hardware (since it is not relateed to the device itself, --in fact yes if we consider the bands handled by the device and the ones provided by the MNO--)

Software Hardware isn't the only one

Implementation and optimization:
A well optimized software for a specific hardware can move mountains, as easily as a bad one will sink in the deep see...
That's easy to show for benchmarks (see my comparison between stock and CM11 on MotoG and impact on MFLOPS), but hard for battery life (too many other un-fixable variables).

All we can say here is that a process that needs more CPU cycles to perform an action will keep it awake longer, thus resulting in more power consumption and a shorter battery life.

Background services:
Google IS Evil, yes, their services are running in the background at any time and everywhere. Most of them won't be used by the end user, but f***k it, they are alive!
"- i'm looking at you location seeking, google fit, google wear, google search,..."

Facebook (app and messenger), Viber, ... All these apps use some services to keep refreshing for potential notification, calls, pokes...

What can we do?
Seek for wakelocks using Wakelock Detector,
Hibernate apps you don't use with Greenify,
Ask in the Forums for some advice

User habits 99% of bugs are between screen and chair

Who said the device was all culpable?

Look at yourself, what are you doing with your device right now? maybe reading this article from you phone/phablet? Playing all day long? Answering emails? Checking twitter/facebook/whatever? Browsing 9gag?

Didn't you changed your usage of the so called 'smart'-phone? are you doing the same as you were on your old 'not-that-dumb'-phone?

Wacom Intuos CTL-480 and Linux Mint 17.1

I recently purchased a Wacom Intuos Pen CTL-480, that i'm now using exclusively with Linux (mostly Linux Mint 17.1 x64 Cinnamon and Xfce edition)

This won't be an unboxing as there are many on the Internet. One observation though, i was pretty surprised that the wireless kit is 100% embedded in the tablet once plugged in it :

After the cover is placed back: everything is totally invisible. Well done Wacom! (when i purchased it i wasn't sure it would be that much stealth and feared it would make an hideous extension on the back)

Let's talk software: 

On Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon ==> Plug&Play (mostly)

Only thing missing : the four buttons on the tab are mapped by default, but cannot be reset using that utility. 

Playing with xev and xinput might be necessary.

MyPaint and GIMP perfectly handle the tab.

Major issue with battery status of the wireless kit:

Here is one of my very firsts paintings (using MyPaint and its marvelous brushes):

a few screenshots of steps to draw a baby dragon :

Quick Review: Hybrid Armor for Moto G : ageing

With time going on, things are ageing and a lot more when daily used. Here is the result of day to day use of a Cheap "Heavy Duty" case:

My first article about that case was written on June 17th 2014.

At that time it was brand new :

Wear and Tear Cosmmetic ageing

Time made its duty since then:

Coating is wearing a lot, not only in the angles, but also where some scratches were made:

Contrary to the "3 months later" post, the coating isn't simply getting scratches but even ripping off! 

Device protection Mechanical properties

Despite the bad cosmetic state after those 7 months of intensive usage, the mechanical properties of both rubber and hard plastic are still like on first day: providing an excellent protection to the device.

5$, 7 months (until now, but it may still last for quite a longer time) : for about 70 cents/month, it saved my device from a deadly crash a few times! It might not be pretty, but that's not what i asked it for.