For a user who purchased a state of the art smartphone, a autonomy of a few days was far from being accomplished. Components were miniaturized and more space was needed for the battery. Unfortunately, the market demands thinner phones so the battery can’t exceed a specific physical limit.
Furthermore, processors are now faster and they have more cores, and autonomy was sacrificed in favor of bigger performance. Under moderate use, the owner of a top smartphone can see the battery running out at the end of the day, even if the phone was charged the night before.
Samsung decided that they are going to do something about this in 2012. The main ways to approach the problem is to increase the capacity of the battery and making the smartphone more energy efficient.
An example is the Motorola RAZR MAXX. This smartphone is different compared to the previous model by the fact that the 1,780 mAh battery was replaced with a 3,300 mAh battery. This move is welcomed, but we can’t ignore the fact that the thickness of the phone grew by 2 mm and the weight by 18 mm. Optimizing the radio modules sounds good, but who is willing to compromise when it comes to signal quality ?
And what is sad is the fact that a entry level smartphone does not come with good autonomy.You might expect a 1 GHZ smartphone to offer more autonomy than a 1.2 GHZ smartphone but things are not like this. There are only a handful of smartphones that provide a 2 days autonomy if used moderately. The solution ? We don’t know right now but we are waiting for news from Samsung.