Raj Singh’s Mobile Life

Piquing my curiosity, I’ve been looking at the mAh values for numerous batteries of phones I have previously used.

[table id=2 /]

As you can see from the table above, talk times have generally been increasing over the years. Is that because the battery technology is getting better, probably not and more likely because the software managing the radios have gotten more efficient.

Graphing the ratio between talk time and mAh:

The ratio validates that battery consumption for voice has improved. Note, I used the word consumption rather than life since it is software driving this improvement. Also note, that since 2003, 3G radios are standard although for many years and on some devices, voice is still done over the 2G radio which is less power hungry (or at least my understanding).

Maybe a reader will see a more interesting correlation but my analysis draws me to the book Moneyball. If you haven’t read Moneyball, the thesis is that the statistics used in the past to measure the effectiveness of something (ie baseball players in the case of Moneyball) need to adapt over time – meaning that a stat used to measure something 10 years ago may not be relevant today.

Phones are still measured on talk time but this is the fallacy in that voice minute consumption for the first time, is starting to decline in the US. People don’t talk anymore but rather browse the internet or send SMS or use apps. This may even be a double-whammy since it’s not clear whether the platform and OEMs are optimizing for this stat rather than real-life usage patterns?

What do you think should be the new statistic to measuring the battery efficiency of a mobile device? Megabytes downloaded? SMS sent? App usage time? Or maybe based on averages based on personas? Obviously, the challenge with all of this is determining a fair test across different devices and networks.