Purism's Librem 5 "Dogwood" Seeing Improvements In Battery Life

[Shiba]

Makes you feel big; ...

Gonna ignore the big rant, I'm not interested sorry.

Pine64‘s News Blog

"July Update: biggest update in months!"

July 15, 2020; Lukasz Erecinski; 107 Comments

https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/15/ju...phone-version/

“... the PinePhone is now able to idle for ~100hrs...that’s not a typo, I wrote 100) using as little as 110mW in deep sleep. This is, of course, with the modem switched off. With the modem ON, you can expect the PinePhone to achieve an idle run-time of approximately 24hrs..”

That's some pretty interesting recent development, I remember a few month ago you couldn't expect more than 6h idle.

[cynical]

The secret to Android battery life is called KillApps.

When you kill 20 apps running for no reason in the background, it can drastically improve your battery life.
This is something that really pisses me off about Android, that you can't decide which apps you want to keep running in the background (some you really want to) and which apps you don't. Why are Amazon Kindle, Google Play Games or Google Keep running in the background while I haven't opened any of them since I last rebooted my phone? And what for, they don't bring me notifications of any kind... And no, the option to prevent them from running in the background does not prevent them from starting by themselves.

I would like to be able to close apps entirely.

And to delete the cache as a whole (not per app) as it was possible in Android 6, there's too much cache adding up and slowing the phone down (when it's supposed to do the opposite). Although it's unrelated to battery life. But you got me started.

That's because they started out really permissive, letting app developers basically do whatever they wanted. They've been trying to tighten restrictions over time and provide good system APIs to encourage developers not to abuse their users, but it's difficult to do. Canonical took the opposite approach and their mobile OS had excellent standby time, however apps were too limited. They would have opened up better APIs in the future, but we'll never see that now.

[skeevy420]

Maybe your current phone is supported by Halium (lots of phones are supported by Halium)? I have UBPorts running on a Poco F1 using Halium.

My current phone quit booting up yesterday...but it isn't supported (though it probably wouldn't have been that difficult to get it working provided the other LG phones from the same era work well enough).

[Vistaus]

Alexmitter I got a chance to try out Plasma Mobile a few years back. It was horrible. That was ok because it was somewhat expected and things can always improve at a later stage. The bad thing was the narrative that Plasma Mobile was a mature system with a bright future. In theory this could have been true because Qt is a better fit for mobile than desktop. In reality it just sucked and seemed more like a fast escape procrastination project because KDE had even bigger problems.

Fast forward to recent times and everybody nope’d on Plasma Mobile. I’m not surprised at all.

I think this is the first time you ever acknowledged that something from KDE land "can improve".

[Flaburgan]

Last night I almost pulled the trigger on a PinePhone but, after reading some reviews and seeing posts like yours, I was worried that basic features like calling wouldn't work all that well combined with the "sometime in August" shipping time. I dropped my phone, an LG V20, the day before and since then it started boot looping at random and will only get past the boot logo when on a charger. If I didn't actually need a phone ASAP the shipping time would have been moot to me, but a lack of confidence in the current product would be my primary negative issue with both the LIbrem 5 and PinePhone. For the curious, I ended up getting a brand new Moto G Power directly from Motorola with free one day shipping. If their page wasn't bullshitting me I'll have it sometime tomorrow.

But I think the negativity some people have comes from having a lack of confidence in the current product and not being able to see what it can be in the long run. If I were buying the PinePhone to use as a portable emulator, music player, or something along those lines then I'd have no reservations about getting one, but since I need it as a functional device for work and emergency purposes it isn't something I can consider just yet. People less reasonable than myself will see the glass half empty and then trash talk it because it doesn't have Apple's resources behind it to have 5 years of R&D before launch.

I'm hoping in another year or two that either the current model or a new model of the PinePhone or Librem will be in a state that I can confidently leave the Android ecosystem; until then, better the devil you know.

I would not compare PinePhone and Librem (hardware targeting mainline linux) to Android and iOS (software). I am using Ubuntu Touch for a year and a half on a Fairphone 2 as my primary device and it has been a pleasant journey. You can quit Android now. But you can't do that on a vanilla kernel.