Poor battery life - what can you do?

It’s not easy to be nostalgic about the age of the brick phone, but they did have one major advantage over their smartphone successors. Sure, your old Nokia couldn’t surf the web, stream video, or play anything more complicated than a ringtone, but if you charged it once every full moon, you could be reasonably certain the battery wouldn’t run out when you needed it most.

There’s a huge difference in battery life between today’s iPhone or Android devices, which seem to need charging every night, and the old set-and-forget brick phones with batteries that seemingly last for weeks, and it’s starting to be noticed by both the public, and smartphone manufacturers.

In this era of battery draining apps and location services, more and more people are citing poor battery performance as a major gripe with their phones. A study by phone manufacturer CAT identified ‘poor battery’ life as the major complaint of 37% of mobile users - and we think they have a point, after all, what use is a phone that can do everything, except seem to stay on for more than 12 hours?

Apple products always seems to receive the most criticism in this respect, and there’s nothing more frustrating that forgetting to charge your iPhone the night before work, and then being forced to wander the office hallways by lunchtime searching for a generous coworker with a charger.

The iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case

Apple has always been sensitive to the idea that it’s focus on design aesthetics, and attempt to manufacture slimmer and slimmer phones has led it to make compromises on battery size and capacity.

Whenever this charge gets levelled at the company, Apple rightly points out that third party apps and location services including GPS are the main drain on the iPhones battery, but the battery limitations still remain, which has resulted in the creation of an entire industry of external phone batteries, charge cases, and mini power cables as a consequence.

This week Apple announced an ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ approach to the battery debate by launching the iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case, which arrived in the Apple store yesterday, selling for $165 AUD.

The Smart Battery Case is available in white, charcoal or grey, and adding the battery case to your phone, allows users up to 25 hours of extra talk time, 20 hours of video playback or an extra 18 hours of internet usage.

There’s been one slight hitch to their plans though, in the form of a backlash to the physical appearance of the Smart Battery Case, which resembles a large plastic lump that protrudes out from the back any iPhone attached to it. The case was described as ‘an ugly mess,’ ‘humpy’ and ‘fugly’ on Twitter this week, with users criticising Apple for marring the clean design of the iPhone.

But you can’t have it both ways. A high-capacity phone battery will always take up space, and giving users the option of adding extra battery life to their phone is definitely a good thing. If you’re interested in learning more about the iPhone 6/6S Smart Battery Case, Silicon Beat examines it in more detail. You can also find a full product description of the case or purchase it directly from Apple.