yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Nexus S General] ZeroCool84:
There are Android phones with great battery life, the Nexus S isn't one of the better ones though so if battery life is so important to you, there are other Android phones that fit the bill. That's one of the advantages of Android, choice.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Not the fairest comparison due to the SAMOLED display and white web pages but compared to the droids (which are battery sippers in the Android game) the iPhone clearly wins out by a lot and not just slightly more.
[Nexus S General] meetagrawal:
Battery life should be one of the top priorities of any company making a mobile device. There aren't many, if any, Android devices out there that advertise their battery life as a feature of their phone. My guess is because they know they can't compete with Apple. I'm not sure why they can't figure out how to do it.
[Nexus S General] symond:
yeah battrey is sooo crappy on nexus s even without sense ui or anyother bloatware

totally fail on battery nexus s
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Maybe it's the Linux kernel? On a Macbook Pro, battery life goes:

OSX > windows 7 > ubuntu

Could also be that the cpu takes a beaten in the absence of GPU acceleration.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
I get good battery life, much better than the EVO atleast. Just not iphone good.
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
The battery life of the phone as such is actually quite good. Just left alone on the 3G network (without 3rd party apps and data transmission but connected to the 3G network) it sips under 5% a day. I tested it myself. On 2G even less.

It is actually the silly apps which suck out the battery power. Iphone is much more restrictive here. For a reason.
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
They just have different priorities. Like for example Samsung, which decided that exaggerated thinness beyond being silly is more important than some 2000mAh battery (SGS2).

More hype than substance.
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
The NexusS linux kernel itself and system services are fairly optimized and burn almost no power. The main power hogs are screen and cellular data transmission.

That's why apple has such a restrictive background service policy in place. It saves tremendous amounts of battery power. At a cost of freedom.
[Nexus S General] tangcla:
Thinking I might sell the Nexus S in favour of the Galaxy S II. Will it be much better?
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
It will be significantly worse.
[Nexus S General] DirtyShroomz:
The benefits are that essentially any application an individual needs to stay running will, no limitations. Remember, not everyone uses a phone like you do. I constantly have news, pandora, facebook and other little things running in the background that I use constantly and would not like to reload every time I open it, but rather have it alert me.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Apple provides background APIs for actions that make sense. Anything that would require background processing (voice, music, messaging, etc) can be done. What Apple did early on, and what Google should have done at first too, is to emphasize push notifications for everything else. Android now established a direction where app developers prefer to periodically poll for updates (which is not only less power efficient but slower too). Outside of apps that require a data connection, having them them in the background does nothing, it just idles for the most part taking up RAM. Having apps like that in the background is just a waste of RAM and requires more aggressive memory management which probably ends up using more processing time anyway.

Apple's method is without a doubt a better solution for smart phones.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
The iPhone handles your use case faster and more efficiently.
[Nexus S General] DirtyShroomz:
That is highly debatable
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Well then debate. I don't see the upside.
[Nexus S General] meetagrawal:
All other information came via notifications that were pushed to the phone. It's just a better system that achieves the same thing but much more efficiently.
[Nexus S General] DirtyShroomz:
Got a little off track there. If we're speaking multitasking, android kills apple. If we're speaking notifications, push is by far better. Excuse my short answers, I'm at work and this is on my down time.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
What's the advantage? Your only filing RAM.
[Nexus S General] DirtyShroomz:
Really means nothing on android except that there are resources that are free that could be in use by somethimg else and is being wasted by not being put to use.
[Nexus S General] sinik420:
battery

my battery life is $#!T but it seems to be abnormal as most others have posted great stats. am on cm7 nightly with trinity14. thinking about getting the extended battery
[Nexus S General] ZeroCool84:
Because most Android phones don't get any advertisement at all. Of course they can compete with Apple which is why I said that if you want Android and good battery life, there are still many options for you. With Apple, you're stuck with no choices other than what they give you, with Android if you want great battery life you have the option, if you want LTE, you have the option, if you want a slideout keyboard, you have the option etc, etc.
[Nexus S General] tangcla:
What is the basis for this?
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
Just look at their section of the xda :)

Actually not difficult to explain: almost the same tiny battery, but much bigger hungrier display with ~30% more pixels to switch. Tons of samsung services like "social", gestures etc. More ram. Cpu is capable of burning through more power if asked (by some poorly written app for example). Still relatively rough firmware. Not clear how long will it take until to properly tune it.

The SGS2 is not aimed for a long battery life. It is aimed to be thin everything else be damned. If I was buying this phone I would buy it with an external battery case. Unfortunately it is just damn ugly.
[Nexus S General] icejagans:
Agreed gs2 is ugly in comparison to ns :)
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
While in theory it does look better, push notifications do require certain server side support. A part of the application (push agent) must run on the server side gathering the information to push. It needs to be hosted somewhere by someone. And paid for. While this would work nicely for big content providers who have their server farms anyway, it won't work for zillions of small apps from providers without their own infrastructure.

For example, someone writes a nice alternative multi-IM app which supports 34254 different IM protocols. In the apple world it is possible only if they have their own server where all the client apps will login to. And this service then will log into the IM networks on the client behalf. A significant undertaking with a lot of costs, possible only for the company with some business model.

In the Android model it just does it directly from the phone. A mere hobbyist (professional developer in his spare time) can accomplish it.

And then there is a question of security/trust. Would you trust your credentials to some middleman somewhere in the internet? What if they are hacked by someone, what are the security guarantees?

In case of the Android my credentials are always with me on my phone (barring malice on the app developer behalf).

This is not how Android works, nothing is idling in background doing nothing (cpu cycles wise). You can safely discount the RAM management as essentially free. I would even say, keeping something in background is energy wise cheaper than to start it again on push notification.

Of course. But it creates closed garden for a few privileged.

Actually I am sure google would LOVE such central notification server, it would let them aggregate even MORE information about their users :)
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
RAM is there to be filled. It does not mind :)
[Nexus S General] tangcla:
It's not just that straightforward. The screen technology is revised and does provide better efficiency, and the question is whether the ~10% increase in battery capacity overcomes the additional (or less), power draw from the larger but more efficient screen.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
1. I've put up a PSHB server on my own. If I needed more resources to scale, I'd just have to invest. If you have a potentially successful product that's what you do. But that doesn't happen on Android because well.. its not worth doing for Android marketplace users. You seem very willing to excuse poor apps because of potential costs to the developer, and that's just silly.

2. What credentials? If your talking third party (Google, FB, etc), they have very secure protocals for logging in without storing the true credentials on the server. That's a non issue.
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
This is not a question of poor or good apps, it is a question of general platform policy.

You either lock down your platform and introduce thorough application vetting in order to force all the applications to use your central push service (ios, wp7). Or you allow everyone to do whatever they feel like and let the market sort out good apps from poor apps (android, wm). There is nothing in-between.

So, if you are ready to exchange your freedom for some 20% more battery life then no problem, market offers you at least 2 other alternatives.

Of course it is an issue. If some remote middleware can log-in on your behalf (for example a pop3 mailbox collect service or IM client or something else), then someone can compromise it and steal you credentials. And many widely used protocols do not offer any other possibility, they require your user name and password.
[Nexus S General] Ok_Kaleidoscope5109:
You don't sacrifice openness by having a push server. If Google had their own push server properly setup and allowed devs to create apps to use certain APIs to invoke push easily, then we'd all be fine.

Push gives you the ability to have INSTANT notifications without consistently polling.

Very few Android apps offer this. Beejive and IM+ are great in this aspect, but Twitter? Why can't Twitter get push? Twitter is something that DEMANDS always-on capabilities.

BTW, push DOES save battery compared to always on. If you have to leave your IM client open versus Push, it will use a lot more power. There are cases where pull uses less power and I'm guessing if you set Twitter to poll every 30 min - 1 hr it will do better than push, but then you lose the ability for "always on." Why do you think Exchange mail is done via push using ActiveSync? Do you really want to poll every 5 minutes and kill your battery life?

Apple did Push Notifications right but did the notification system wrong. iOS5 is fixing this all. Google mentioned Push in its Froyo campaign at Google I/O last year, but didn't really implement anything new. Or did it? I didn't see anything change from 3rd party apps, and at the moment virtually nothing uses push. Look how long it took to get push onto the Facebook app....
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
1. This is one reason why the Android market place comes nowhere near the QUALITY of the iOS appstore. Not even close. I've spent maybe $15 in the marketplace and near $250 in the Appstore.

2. You seem to have never developed.
[Nexus S General] kegacide:
I just need to get through a whole day like you because i charge every night... ive never not made it... ok i lied, in the beginning the battery sucked, the first week and a half, but i was letting it drain real low, letting it charge fully, etc etc and it got better and after 2 weeks its been great, now i never have that issue...

im a pretty heavy user during the week, lots of calls, gps in the car, music, games, texts, twitter, some video watching, etc... my day lasts from 6am-about 10pm and at worst im at like 15% by the end of the day...

weekends i never have a problem getting through a day, but i dont use it as often as i do during the week with work...
[Nexus S General] Ok_Kaleidoscope5109:
that's fine if i charge everyday, but i shouldnt have to plan each day "worrying" about battery life and whether i can make it through. there are the long days where you go out with friends and a lot of down time at those bars is spent checking your phone. its far more draining than a day at work. therefore, i like to top off if i know that i'm going out, even if it's just a 1 hr charge during dinner.

but still sucks that i have to ration battery life so carefully :D
[Nexus S General] jonnythan:
Toss a $5 eBay spare battery in your back pocket and forget about "rationing."
[Nexus S General] thiagodark:
yep, i have a cheap battery in my car and i never used, but who knows... =oP
[Nexus S General] dreamsforgotten:
+1 android guides you the freedom to swap batteries, take advantage of it.
[Nexus S General] RogerPodacter:
lots of great info on push and notifications.

but i contend to you guys that its not related to any android apps. i propose someone factory reset an android nexus s, and not install a single app from the market. leave the google apps on there and just use the phone like normal. use web browser, gmail, or whatever, and the android will still perform significantly worse than the iphone 4.

what i cant figure out is why. what has apple done that has optimized the iphone 4 so much?
[Nexus S General] meetagrawal:
They design the hardware and software together. Their engineering is 2nd to none.
[Nexus S General] jonnythan:
Saving space by having a soldered-in battery with no removable cover and a 3.5" screen helps a bit.
[Nexus S General] A_Guy71:
When I first got the phone, I was only getting 8-9 hours of battery life. It's been a month now, and I can usually get about 19-20 hours of regular use. If I turn 3G off, I can easily last over a day. Without a doubt, 20 hours is more than enough battery for me. I don't need it to last longer than a day, I put it on the charger every night.
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
Developers would still need their custom code running on the server side, no matter what "APIs" google would provide them. The only realistic solution for google would be to provide hosting services. Which is not trivial if done properly.

Twitter and other big guys can provide pushing even without direct google support. They would still need to maintain their own open socket connection (instead of sharing one with other apps), but it is not dramatic (the same as an exchange connection configured to push). No idea why they aren't doing this.
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Google does have a push server. You just need a third party server to ping it, and as I said, I probably could easily have taken my PSHB server and pinged Google's Android push server to update a RSS reader app in real time. Its not that complicated, you just invest and scale.
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
Because you found something acceptable at little or no cost or because you just refrain from functionality?

If profit does not motivate developers to do proper job, then no amount of vetting will do. Mere presence of other poor apps does not make good apps any worse. So, by removing them you won't improve anything.

iOS was first there, it has that luxury charisma which attracts financially strong customers and as a consequence it is a primary target for develpers. This is main reason why apple market has more and cooler apps.

A bold statement this. Ok, let's take the previous example: explain how would you securely organize a pop3 mailbox push service without any user credentials available on the server side?
[Nexus S General] draugaz:
It is exactly what I said: the majority of the developers do not want to invest in their own server infrastructure. They would just choose not can their apps if forced to. That's why google does not seem to be overwhelmed with C2DM framework invitation requests.

Of course it does not mean, that big guys like twitter should not make use of that framework.
[Nexus S General] RogerPodacter:
but Android phones like the nexus one, desire, also have 3.7 inch screens which are near identical in size to the iphone's 3.5 inch screen. in fact with the high pixel resolution of the IP4, one could argue that it could be more power hungry with all those extra pixels over a n1 or desire 3.7 inch screen.

this is what i highly believe, that apple just put a hell of a lot of hardware and software optimizations into their single, high end device. only one device allows them to optimize the hell out of it in all sorts of ways.
[Nexus S General] rasaf123:
From what I found online, the iphone 4 only has a 1420mAh battery where the Nexus S hat 1500mAh. Interestingly a test from Cnet found that the iphone manages about 10 hours of video playback while the NxS runs out after 8 hours. What I found even more interesting was the comparison for audio playback time.

iphone: 40-67 hours!

NxS: 15 hours

I own a NxS myself and I can believe the 15 hours. MP3 playback is clearly affecting my battery life. Would be nice to know how apple gets such an advantage in audio playback when the amount of energy in the battery is about the same.

for a link to the Cnet test google for "Tested: iPhone 4 (iOS 4.2.1 vs. 4.3) and Android phones"
[Nexus S General] ZeroCool84:
It's pretty much common sense how they get good battery life, they control EVERY aspect of the device, they can optimize everything easily. You take that at the expense of a closed system so pick your poison.
[Nexus S General] tangcla:
There's a review somewhere which compared browser time and the Nexus S and Samsung Galaxy S II got 4-5 hours, whereas the iPhone got 8, on exactly the same pages/settings. Pretty much stands out from the crowd in that respect, if you ask me.

Me too. It's pretty appalling, listening to music on the train for an hour drains battery by almost 20%.
[Nexus S General] tangcla:
I don't know if it is so simple that it just boils down to that. MP3 decoding shouldn't require that much processing power. My 100Mhz Pentium laptop could do it well enough while multitasking back in 1997, so I should assume a high-end mobile processor (even if running at 100MHz) should do it like a walk in the park.
[Nexus S General] jonnythan:
Apple has spent a lot of time optimizing mobile devices for music playback.

This all started with an iPod, remember?
[Nexus S General] detusueno:
You act as if you need an entire server farm to host a simple notification/ping server for a Android app. There are cases where it might but there's a ton of cases where it doesn't. It's a lack of effort and quality from Android developers IMO.

As for the SMTP/POP question, I've never developed a mail client. Mostly deal with Python/Ruby/PHP when I do/did. My comment was meant for common popular third party services like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
[Nexus S General] barmanham:
8 hours of screen on time? If that is true wow android needs help badly I can usually get 3:30 hours tops if that is true which I doubt I dunno crazy
[Nexus S General] barmanham:
Btw if anyone can achieve more then 3 hours and 40 mins I'd like to know your setup thx
[Nexus S General] malikadnanm:
I get 4.5-5 hours running stock 2.3.4 rooted. No flashed kernels
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Nevermind. No need for another ios vs android battle.
[Nexus S General] vulcanrav3n:
yup, 4-5 hours streaming netflix video. nscollab 1.0.3.4, netarchy CFS 1.3.4, 1300 MHz smartass governor.
[Nexus S General] RogerPodacter:
yes this is what baffles me. i've done crazy testing on battery for the last 9 months, and my only conclusion is that apple just optimized their hardware to a much higher extent than any android manufacturer.

i've done side by side web browsing tests, clicking identical links on both phones for 30 minutes straight. the iphone 4 will lose 3% over 30 minutes, but the nexus one loses 10%. i just dont get it, both screens are near identical in size, or close enough to not make a huge difference. plus one is AMOLED.

i've found some crazy iphoen 4 battery info searching google for "iphone bootvoltage" and "iphone batterydetective", and seems like the iphone is very efficient.

for example, the iphone 4 with screen on, but doing nothing, can pull 70 mA. but my nexus one, at min brightness, showing full screen black color, pulls 110 mA. as hard as i've tried, i cannot get it lower than that. at max brightness and white screen, my n1 pulls 600 mA!!! pure insanity!

lcd pulls the same power regardless of color. apple just really put in effort to get each component down to minimum power consumption.
[Nexus S General] sergey.povzner:
For those wondering about cnet's video test and 8 hours of video playback read the description: their video tests are done in airplane mode.
[Nexus S General] sergey.povzner:
If those cnet tests are accurate, from practical standpoint the difference between the two is insignificant.

I picked just two models from their list: Apple iPhone 4 iOS 4.2.1 (Verizon) vs Samsung Nexus S:

Video battery life (hr): 10.3 vs 8.1

Audio battery life (hr): 67 vs 15

Boot time (sec): 39 vs 27

Web page load time (sec): 10 vs 7

Are those 2 hours extra hours of video playback accompanied by slower boot time and slower web loading make a big difference? The audio playback of 67 hours is impressive, but has no affect on the real life usage, because iPhone also has to be charged every night and 10 hours of music per day would satisfy most users.
[Nexus S General] jonnythan:
8.1 hours of video playback on a Nexus S?

What the hell kind of test are they doing?
[Nexus S General] Award Tour:
Huh, what? That makes no sense.

1. 2 hours is about 25% of the Nexus S' total battery life, of course it's significant.

2. Boot times are meaningless. I have to boot up my phone about once every 2-4 days. An extra 12 seconds over that time is as meaningless as it gets.

3. Of course the audio battery life affects real use. 3 hours of music listening on the Nexus S knocks out about 20% of the battery, on the iPhone it'd knock 4.4%. That's pretty significant, man.

4. Page load tests are the worse tests ever, they depend on way too many external and uncontrollable factors:

a. carrier signal type.

b. network load.

c. the server of the website.
[Nexus S General] meetagrawal:
Is this supposed to be a serious post?
[Nexus S General] Ya Boi D:
LoL I was just thinking the same thing ^^^^^
[Nexus S General] RogerPodacter:
Those video tests are not the kicker important part. To me the kicker is that the tests show that the iPhone 4 candidates do a legit 10 hours of actual web browsing, but the nexus struggles to do 4 hours of screen on browsing time. That is practical screen on usage which makes me insanely jealous.

I take my nexus one next to an iPhone 4 and do click by click tests side by side, after 60 minutes the iPhone 4 will drop 10% but my n1 will drop 25%. Ans both screens are near identical in size. If anything iPhone has more pixels, and the n1 has amoled supposedly going for it. I just don't get how apple did the power management.

I think amoled battery savings is a big marketing hype we've all been tricked into believing.
[Nexus S General] jgalan14:
Amoled does saved battery, but I get apple got better screen to saved battery life, I wish everyday my phone would last me a day but after 10 hours is done :(

Sent from my Nexus S 4G
[Nexus S General] tangcla:
what kills your battery when using the AMOLED screen is light/white pages. Dark pages don't need the pixels lit, apparently a full white page uses 3 times the power of a. Regular TFT LCD.
[Nexus S General] sergey.povzner:
25% difference in video playback is not a big difference imho, because it means that significantly larger 4" Amoled screen of NS is only 25% more power hungry than iPhone (assuming that video decoding drains battery approximately the same which probably is not the case).

I'll concede this one. 15 hours of audio playback on NS is very poor (assuming the screen is off).

But the bottom line is that both iPhone and Nexus S need to be charged every night. The only relevant test is: does your Nexus S last the whole day with your typical usage? If it doesn't, then you may consider an iPhone or an Android with a beefier battery or non-Amoled screen or spare battery or usb charger at work etc.
[Nexus S General] sergey.povzner:
As serious as an average post on this board.