Poll results: battery life far more important than performance
Last week, we asked you to tell us whether you consider battery life or performance more important when it comes to making a decision about which phone you buy. The results are decisive. You chose battery life by a huge margin. But is that because peformance on phones is levelling out, or because it simply isn't important?
There's no room for argument after this poll: over two-thirds of you said that battery life is more important than performance.
In the comments, many of you compared the choice to power and fuel-efficiency in cars. Smartphones, for most of us, are meant to be functional, not immensely powerful and luxurious machines. While some will opt for the fastest device on the market, most of us prefer something that is going to get us through the day in comfort.
With the performance gap between flagships and cheaper phones diminishing faster and faster, it seems that most devices provide enough performance for everyday use, so choosing one with good battery life is now the priority.
What are your thoughts on the results? Let us know in the comments.
I've been saying this for the past 5-6 years. But all these phone companies have been fighting over is who has the thinnest phone. I don't care how thin it is. I don't want t brick from the 1990s, but 7.5mm vs 7.2mm makes no difference to me.
Give me a phone that I only have to charge on weekends and I'll be happy.
Great performance need extra battery life piriot.
With out battery power every other option doesn't matter. What good are large screens and fast processors if you don't have the power to run them. I am happy with any quality screen over 5 inches. The phone also has to have the ability to take a beating or two and keep going.
1) Removable battery
2) Micro SD
3) Durability
4) Performance
5) Screen size
"With the performance gap between flagships and cheaper phones diminishing faster and faster"... And with cheaper phones often beating the flagship ones when speaking of battery... The fact is that, for too many years in a row, manufacturers have called flagship phones the ones that have the beat performance coupled with the nicer look, which in turn means small batteries and insane PPI. Cheaper phones are a bit bigger and provide a usually bigger battery coupled with less performing (but more power hungry) CPUs and screens with lower resolution. But the power consumption of CPUs is smaller than all the antennae and screen and thus, in short, cheaper phones usually have best battery life. Of course, in most of the articles you'll get comparisons between the flagships... But this is a bias of people that writes about tech (as AndroidPIT, for instance), that are not aware of all the cheaper alternatives out there.
Using Bob's ideas:
1 Screen
2 Storage + SD card
3 Processor and RAM (performance)
4 Robustness
5 Battery
As I commented in the original poll, you can tune a powerful phone to be battery efficient, but you can't make a phone more than the hardware limits you to. Reading between the lines of the original poll, it seems most users don't tweak their phones that strongly to get what they want. They just use them as they come.
My phone should run smoothly but it doesn't have to be able to play heavy games. I always look for the following things when I buy a phone
1 battery
2 screen size
3 Android version
4 quality of the screen
5 performance