As promised, PLINKA PLINKA

So on Saturday (really on Friday night), I switched SIM cards in my phones. The iPhone 6, freshly unlocked, took a turn on T-Mobile while my daily driver AT&T account ran through my first-gen Moto X. I only bothered for about a day, but it was terribly illuminating.

For starters, the AT&T Moto X didn’t have any appreciably better battery life than when it was on T-Mobile. I didn’t do any music playback from it, but it was fully charged at 9:30 AM and was down to below 15% battery by 7 PM. I didn’t think I was hitting it particularly hard, either, but with no music happening everything I was doing was hitting the screen, which is the biggest draw in any phone. Meanwhile, the T-Mobile-equipped iPhone 6 was pulling upward of 68 Mbps data download on LTE and seemingly offered plenty of signal anywhere other than on base at Moffett, which is a bad spot for signal for anyone. 

But more alarming was Sunday after I’d switched back. I did some audio playback but not that much – but in the span of maybe five hours off the plug and about three and a quarter hours total use, the iPhone 6 dropped to about 15% battery life. If I had to pin it down to one thing, I’d say it was Twitter, because that was the biggest battery killer while we were in Maui last week. Fortunately, the wife came through with the battery pack I’d loaner her for her day in San Francisco, or I would have had to call it a night and go home at 5:30 PM. But to only get four hours of actual screen time off a phone is kind of a problem.

The Hawaii test worked out reasonably well – I had the external battery case, which is a bulky plastic thing that holds about 3000 mAh and is good for charging the phone from 20% to 80% twice. As long as I can plug it in every night, I ought to be OK with that abroad – bearing in mind that I was never using it for Kindle and precious little audio (other than in flight). But Safari, Tweetbot, Instagram, even Mail – all burn 1% of battery every three minutes of use, seems like, and Reeder even slightly more. I think it’s reasonable to assume in London that in addition to social media and photography, we can expect to hit transit and mapping apps pretty hard (there wasn’t much call for it in Hawaii on account of either driving everywhere or laying out by the pool. Transit wasn’t a thing). More to the point: that bulky plastic case sucks. It’s huge in the pocket and impossible to get on and off the phone (unless you drop it, in which instance it flies apart in two pieces). On the other hand it basically means you only have to take the micro-USB charger. If I want to take an external battery, it’ll mean having a Lightning cable AND a micro-USB if I want to charge both at once.

And here’s the wild card: that iPhone 5se is still out there, notionally packing the same camera and chipset as the iPhone 6 I currently carry but in a 4-inch form factor that represents a display 37% smaller (and presumably less power-consuming) with a larger battery than the original iPhone 5S.  Depending on who you believe, more than half the people currently carrying an iPhone 5S are contract-eligible to upgrade, but haven’t – because nobody makes a 4-inch premium phone anymore.  The battery of the 5se, so-called, is allegedly 1642 mAh, which puts it almost halfway between the 5S and the 6S, but driving a 5S display and 6 chipset. Since the battery size went up 16% from the 5S to the 6, and the screen became 50% larger, the fact that advertised battery life went up slightly in the 6 is suggestive that the same chipset with a smaller display and larger battery than the 5S will yield legit battery life improvements over the 6 and 6S. And if nothing else, I’ll have two or three months to figure out whether this is true before travel time.

But the take-home message of the week and weekend is this: Android is no longer worth the squeeze. It’s nice to have a phone that feels smaller the way the X does, and I wish I had those kinds of features in an iPhone (2 GB RAM, 2200 mAh battery, and AMOLED display, for starters), but right now there’s no reason to rely on it in favor of the iPhone. I don’t know what changed aside from the new number and the unlock, but for whatever reason, I’m happy to just deal with the iPhone alone now.

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