Battery swapping is a workaround for flawed phones.
FWIW, though I'm not happy about the non-removable battery, I currently use a Nexus 4. It's gotten worse over time, but I used to be able to comfortably get about 2 days of runtime on a full charge. Now it's about a full day, though it sometimes needs a little help if I'm in an area where reception is weak.
Useful when out of charging range for an extended period, like when hiking or cycling.
The main attractive of a swappable battery, to me, is replacing it 2 after 2 years of use.
The rest of my phone is perfectly fine but I can either keep it tethered to the wall or scrap it. That said, it would be dead already because I did drop it in water and the waterproof case saved it :)
> This means that batteries of mobile phones, or other hand-held devices in daily use, are not expected to last longer than three years. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Battery_li...
Plugging a phone in on a daily basis is a workaround for flawed phones.
Kudos to LG for actually taking this step though. With luck this will whet the appetite for phones that are truly modular (and show manufacturers that there is a market for swappable parts).
I can wait 30 seconds while the phone is off.
- Proper camera handle and better DAC too, but not as mutually exclusive modules
What I want is:
- A robust and replaceable bumper that integrates with the design (i.e. isn't ugly). The phone should not be designed as if the user isn't going to slap an ugly case on it.
- A hole for a wrist strap so I don't worry I'm gonna drop my phone. All cameras have one, but now that phones are taking over, none have it.
- An unlocked bootloader that doesn't void your warranty. Or even better lets you set the signing key on first use (a sort of Trust On First Use that the user is the owner).
It really bugs me when consumers ask for more features regardless of their feasibility, here we have a great phone with changebale batteries and yet we ask for it to be still on while we swap the batteries! Hasn't it occurred to us that maybe it's technically difficult to add in a supercap. Just be thankful. This is like constentaly asking for phones with more RAM and processing power, I am really glad Moore's law has come to end, maybe now consumers will be faced with the harsh truth that it is not simple to keep on creating more powerful devices for them to watch cat videos on.
Longer battery life, swappable battery, greater durability, better camera, etc. I can absolutely handle the phone being a few millimetres thicker to get these things.
What's LG's track record like with releasing sources? Nexus devices don't count.
I'm not sure who "lg-devs" are, but they seem to have a full source tree for the G4 at https://github.com/lg-devs/android_device_lge_h811. No idea if it boots, though.
Global warming dictates that we as consumers not only our politicians are responsible for the future we create. If manufacturers can help make devices that last longer I´m going to choose such a device the next time I buy a phone.
I think its bold of LG to think differently and stick out of the crowd of similar phones. Like that you can upgrade the storage capacity via MicroSD cards.
Will be getting this phone as an upgrade. For me removable battery and SD Card in a flagship phone are a must. Then comes camera quality, then price.
Apparently, catastrophic bootloop failures of the G4 were such a widespread problem, that a petition has so far gained a couple thousand signatures [0] to get LG to officially recall the bricked phones. I personally experienced the bootloop of death on my G4 only a couple of months after getting it, and their customer service has been atrocious - even refusing to fix my phone after they've now admitted its due to a known hardware defect [1] because mine was the international, unlocked version. So, just a heads up to beware LG's "Caveat emptor" practices.
[0] - https://www.change.org/p/lg-mobile-launch-a-replacement-prog...
[1] - http://www.androidauthority.com/lg-admits-g4-bootloop-proble...
Funny enough I experienced a similar issue with my S4 a few years ago. One day it just died - no messages, no nothing. Completely out of the blue, no falls or anything.
I took it to Samsung repair, they sent it off and returned it to me in a few weeks. I looked on the forums and apparently it was a fairly common (ie thousands of people affected) issue. Same reason - a random hardware chip malfunction that manifests itself after 6-9 months of use.
I think this was the issue: http://forums.androidcentral.com/telus-samsung-galaxy-s4/380...
So basically I think any manufacturer can fall prey to this - a faulty component that takes months to manifest itself.
Incidentally, several years ago Chinese manufacturer Jiayu made an iPhone-looking phone also called the G5 and having a dedicated button to release the back cover:
http://amirexpress.ir/index.php?route=product/product&produc...
Sorry if you've been down this road already.
If you want a decent article by a respectable pub, check out the Ars version (linked below). It has all of the technical info that Engadget missed, minus the comments on how 'fantastic' the device feels.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/lg-g5-hands-on-lg-may...
http://www.androidcentral.com/lg-g5-keeps-sd-card-shuns-adop...
http://www.androidcentral.com/galaxy-s7-regains-microsd-card...
Adaptable storage would prevent me from doing this.
I, like probably most of you, flash a new image to the phone when the stock software starts showing its warts. I agree with this idea but I do understand where phone manufacturers are coming from. You can obviously avoid the problem of software-bricked phones by having the factory image as a secondary ROM that can be hardware flashed with a button sequence.
The real problem is, I recall a bad Android kernel floating around for the TyTN II (a long time ago) that would toast the CPU after extended use. That's permanent damage that would be covered by warranty and would cost LG money. Maybe what they could do is only lock down the kernel. Who knows, it's a difficult problem to solve.
To add one feature:
- A slide-out tactile keyboard[1].
The TyTN II is the greatest smartphone that I have ever owned for this reason. Touch keyboards just don't cut it. The answer isn't to have predictive text (i.e. SwiftKey) but instead to not botch up the text in the first-place.
My idea of a fair compromise between manufacturers and customers is:
- Let the customer run any OS will full hardware warranty. If a problem looks like it's caused by software, require the customer to flash back to official software, and provide warranty if the problem persists.
- Bolt down the hardware to restrict use out of specs (no overclocking, no software defined radio, ...)
- Provide an engineering pin. When removed, the phone is out of warranty and you can flash any firmware (you can have OC, SDN, custom SSD firmware, ...)
Google really could show a whole more love for tinkerers. A better OS isn't getting made because it's so difficult to flash on your own device, let alone flash it on thousands of user devices.
Regarding your point about keyboards, I personnaly don't like typing without all my fingers, so what you propose wouldn't suit me. But do you think an addon that bolts to the back would be okay for you?
A bumper-design (maybe a groove to hold a bumper) is a good idea too. One can argue that making phones easier to damage encourages people to replace it with new ones so manufacturers have hidden incentive to avoid such safety features, but ultimately if someone comes up with a better design like you state, people will flock to it.
People should be very thankful for these feats of technology, but their wants literally drive the innovation there. Until truly impossible desires start to become the criticisms, I honestly don't mind them.
I'm pretty sure most people realize that, and everyone I've ever heard complaining about battery life also added that they wouldn't mind a thicker phone.
Same deal with constantly wanting more RAM and CPU. Computers have been getting steadily more powerful at a nearly constant rate for maybe half a century now. Asking to keep that going is totally reasonable!
they both charged via a single USB port.
Yes, this made it bulky compared to most things on the market right now.
And frankly i would love to see less anorexic phones. Heck, my next one may well be the recently unveiled Cat model that has integrated FLIR. This time round it seems they didn't skimp on the internals while still retaining the rugged construction.
The horror!
Forgetting to plug it in overnight and having no power for the day is a pain.
The <1 minute it takes me to swap the battery, even with the pretty primitive mechanism in the S4, is a total breeze.
I don't even bother plugging my phone in at night anymore really - because I know in the morning I can swap batteries and be out the door with full power.
I've been less then thrilled with Apple punting every design problem into a dongle.
Are those modules hot-swapable? If the hardware and/or software does not support hot swap, there is a distinct possibility that they intentionally designed it this way: i.e. you have to power down before replacing modules. It would not be much more difficult to switch to "push-to-eject" battery mechanism which would make powering down optional when changing modules. Food for thought.
In my experience the distance between the pad and charger receiver made a big difference, thus putting on a thick case made charging difficult to proceed quickly.
My Nexus 7 also has wireless charging which has been great because the USB port is broken, so I have no other way of charging. The lack of moving parts in wireless charging does mean less chance of breaking.
Too bad about Palm...
That's what I was thinking, require their signature to change bits that could harm the phone. You could even market this feature: most phones only have change-able back-plates. I'd bet that people would jump at the chance were they to see how drastically Cyanogen or MIUI changes their phone - don't just give people the chance to install any ROM, but actually provide a few of the more popular ones ready to go.
> But do you think an addon that bolts to the back would be okay for you?
With the module system of the G5 this seems completely plausible. When you frame it that way you can really see how LG [are trying to] shine in the blandness that is the current cellphone market.
Sadly all the big sites head this way. Likely because their owners are breathing down the editors necks to be more "hip and social conscious".
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Pa...
Capacitors are usually cylindrical to increase the available surface area whilst keeping the horizontal size down ( http://www.camion.com.tw/images/en_basic_structure.gif ), but they don't have to be designed this way. Here's an example of a flat supercapacitor:
http://gpsworld.com/cap-xx-launches-0-6mm-thinline-supercapa...
if they're hotswappable and somewhat affordable, I think people will have no issue buying the packs and swapping during the day as needed.
This because the adoption process formats and encrypts the card, thus anything stored on it can only be accessed from within the device that adopted it.
My iPhone barely makes it through the day sometimes. I usually have no problem, but occasionally I find myself around 9PM and my battery is down to 5% and I have to plug it in somewhere. This leads me to plug it in more than I strictly need to, just to ward off these moments. This would all become a non-issue if the battery were twice the size. Then my phone might be 10mm thick instead of 7mm thick, and might weigh 300 grams instead of 200 grams. Not a big deal. But instead, thinness is maximized, and everything else is built to be just adequate based on that.
I'm not saying every single phone on the planet should be the kind I want....
Also, i could have sworn that Galaxy Note was a hit with with ladies as they put them in handbags rather than pockets...
Not that i know much about fashion, as my wardrobe is stuffed with cargo pants.
If i let it sit deeply in my palm, the outer joint of my fingers protrude over the edge of the device, and get in the way of using it.
But if i shift my grip so that the fingertips are resting on the side of the device, the only contact points are those tips, and the thumb area of the palm.
And holding it like that seems to always be on the verge of slipping.
Replacing the battery on a Nexus 4 is a trivial affair(I am not saying this to take away from your non removal battery point but letting you know its pretty easy).
Aside from that, I still get decent battery life out of it even in Android by carefully policing what runs on it. I have very few applications on my phone that run in the background, and I don't have the Google apps installed - I use microG instead, which is a FOSS implementation of (a subset of) Play Services.
I'm aware that the vast majority of users probably wouldn't like using their phone the way I do. That said, this should make it clear that battery life is very much affected by the software you run.
If phones had better battery life out of the box, it will help their current owner and the next owner.
If you do battery swaps as a nightly workflow so you can have a day battery and a night battery, then yeah pop-out replacement is the only option
"Warning first: Never try to move the battery unless it's broken and need to replace. Because there is very very strong adhesive sticker between battery and motherboard.And too much effort or careless operation will break the motherboard."
It's also difficult to maintain the waterproof seal when reassembling the phone. So while the Z3C has great battery life, you're essentially only going to have that for a couple of years.
All other things equal, I will always pick the slightly thicker phone with a removable battery over the one that might have me breaking out the spudger.
Original frames usually have it attached to the frame, aftermarket ones don't. Some tape or glue needed to close the original one after opening.
Now if only there were more variety in phones with small screens; now that iPhones are big, what are people with small hands supposed to buy?
