Librem 5: First Impressions

>>jstanl+(OP)
> The battery life seems short. I'm pretty sure that I charged it up to 99% when I plugged it in this afternoon. It's now 10pm and I just went to check something in Firefox and found that the battery has died already. And I haven't exactly been using it heavily. It's possible that I misunderstood how much I had charged it, but so far this is a bad sign.

Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on. I think Apple especially puts a ton of engineering effort and coordination into making iOS and their apps work efficiently with their hardware, reducing complexity, runtime cycles, and power consumption as much as possible, on top of already highly-efficient ARM hardware.

Over years of doing that (kaizen), the result is optimized hardware/software fusion with industry-leading battery life. But it seems like it takes a non-trivial amount of additional engineering time and effort to accomplish this, that will be difficult to match by smaller mobile tech startups.

I hope the open source community around Librem and Pine will be able to replicate that effort, but I'm not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers. And being maximally effective at it most certainly requires the parent company to coordinate the effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.

>>SkyMar+Me
Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc.

>>yeetsf+sf
Android phones have terrible battery efficiency compared to iPhones. The only reason you don't notice is because manufacturers cram in massive batteries to compensate.

Same with Linux/Windows versus Macs. It is only recently that Linux/Windows laptops have begun to approach Macs in terms of battery life, and their battery efficiency is still far behind, especially with Apple Silicon being a thing.

>>xvecto+Qf
Got some of that data?

>>tenuou+4j
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17004/apples-iphone-13-series...

  Platform Model                            Life  Size Efficiency
  
  iOS      Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max          21.7  4352       4.98
  iOS      Apple iPhone 13                  16.8  3227       5.21
  iOS      Apple iPhone 13 Pro              16.6  3095       5.37
  Android  ASUS ROG Phone 5                 16.6  6000       2.77
  Android  ASUS ROG Phone III               16.5  6000       2.75
  Android  ASUS ROG Phone II                16.2  6000       2.7 
  Android  Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (S888)  15.9  5000       3.18
  iOS      Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max          15.6  3969       3.93

(Efficiency is just Life / Size * 1000)

>>jcheng+ar
Never thought iPhone 13 has bigger battery than iPhone 13 Pro.

It's almost as if they deliberately added this seemingly bad option so people would choose the most expensive option iPhone 13 Pro Max. Because it would seem like the best deal out of three. I mean the Pro Max is just $100 more expensive than Pro, right?

But remove this decoy option, and most people would just buy the iPhone 13.

>>unobat+Ps
This makes no sense; virtually nobody is picking which phone to buy on the basis of 130mAh of battery capacity, and these are different devices to boot with different screens and cameras.

zlacker