As the English saying goes: Out of the frying pan and into the fire, meaning escaping one bad thing to succumb to something worse.
Another phrase more commonly used by Americans is: There’s no replacement for displacement, meaning the best car is always the one with the larger engine.
Both of these relate to my experience with this phone. The first due to having issues with a 2800mAh battery and trying to resolve the issue with a phone that has a 1821mAh battery. The second only applies loosely, as if we were comparing phones to cars the battery would probably be the fuel tank, but for the sake of this phrase it’s the engine. With all the optimisations in the world, and the most energy efficient components a bigger batter is always going to perform better than a smaller one.
Battery life is and always will be a function of a phone that I prefer to be as good as possible. I’ve got rid of multiple phones that didn’t hold what I would determine a satisfactory charge, and purchased phones solely because they advertised massive battery life. This and the previous phone was the point where I realised how much I valued this. In 2020 we were at home a lot, so I was never far from a charger but even so I use a mobile phone so it can be mobile. If I wanted a device that was permanently tethered I’d use a landline and a computer!
The strange thing about this phone was that technically it was very efficient. Left on standby overnight this phone would only lose 1-2% battery, and through mild usage it lasted very well. The problem was when you started ramping up the CPI usage. This phone had the flagship chipset the Apple A13 Bionic from the iPhone 11. It could decimate it’s tiny battery in around an hour if you were really pushing it. Apple device have always been very good at idling without using much power at all I will give them that.
At the time of owning this phone I had what I’d call a beater car. It cost me £500 and was a Citroen C4 1.6 Turbo Diesel, the one where the centre of the steering wheel stayed still while the outer rim turned. It ran OK but the radiator fan didn’t work. In the UK this was never really much of a problem, until it was. It was an extremely hot day and I was stuck in traffic as there’d been an accident somewhere down the road. Traffic was moving a car length every minute or so but just enough that I couldn’t switch off the engine. The temperature gauge started rising until it was in the red. Desperate I put all the windows down and turned the heater and fan on full. I was sweating but the coolant temperature came down, I was using my heater core as a makeshift radiator. What I didn’t think of was that my little iPhone SE was on a vent mount in direct fire of the main heater. I only realised when the phone, which was also being used for GPS did a thermal shutdown. I took it off and almost burnt my fingers it was that hot. When it eventually cooled down and powered back up I’d lost 10% battery health! It was quickly resold after that.
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