It’s not your imagination: Phone battery life is getting worse

Phone makers tout all sorts of tricks to boost battery life, but they just can’t keep up

Phone makers promise “all-day battery life.” Sure, and you haven’t stolen any of the kids’ Halloween candy.

If you recently bought a new flagship phone, chances are its battery life is actually worse than an older model.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year’s top models underperformed last year’s. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year’s iPhone X. Google’s Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2.

Phone makers tout all sorts of tricks to boost battery life, including more-efficient processors, low-power modes and artificial intelligence to manage app drain. Yet my results, and tests by other reviewers I spoke with, reveal an open secret in the industry: The lithium-ion batteries in smartphones are hitting an inflection point where they simply can’t keep up.

“Batteries improve at a very slow pace, about 5 per cent per year,” says Nadim Maluf, the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm called Qnovo that helps optimize batteries. “But phone power consumption is growing up faster than 5 per cent.”

Blame it on the demands of high-resolution screens, more complicated apps and, most of all, our seeming inability to put the darn phone down.

Lithium-ion batteries, for all their rechargeable wonder, also have some physical limitations, including capacity that declines over time — and the risk of explosion if they’re damaged or im- properly disposed.

And the phone power situation is likely about to get worse. New ultrafast wireless technology called 5G, coming to the

U.S. neighbourhoods soon, will make even greater demands on our beleaguered batteries.

My test has limitations. Your experience will depend on how you use your phone, and there are steps you can take to make your phone life stretch.

We’re not without hope. Two phones that performed well in my tests, Samsung’s Note 9 and Apple’s iPhone XR, offer ideas about how to design phones to last longer — at least until a totally new battery tech comes along.

My results made me do a double take, so I called up a squad of other tech journalists also obsessed with testing at CNET, Tom’s Guide and Consumer Reports. “Our overall average battery life is coming down,” says Mark Spoonauer, the editor in chief of Tom’s Guide, who also found the iPhone XS battery died sooner than the iPhone X. Many of the phones with the longest battery life, he adds, are a year old.

But not all other reviewers have noticed the same declines — and the differences in our results help shed some light on what’s going on.

Larger phones often last longer, but it’s not as simple as the size of the battery inside. Remember the BlackBerry? Those had much smaller batteries than today’s smartphones, but could go days without being charged.

Perhaps the market will fragment further, making phones more like buying cars. That market was eventually upended by fuel-economy models; instead of the gas-guzzling Cadillac, you could choose the Honda. Apple’s iPhone XR is the Civic of smartphones.

Our near-future choices are likely either: Get an economy phone — or plug in more often. Faster and more convenient charging is the strategy for some makers. .

And then there’s the plug itself. Apple, which has shipped the same 5 watt charging brick for years, could take a lesson from Google, which sells its Pixel phones with an 18 watt charger and claims you can get 7 hours of use from just 15 minutes of charging. The one thing that’s almost as bad as running out of juice is being tethered to an outlet.