Android 4.3 plus Snapdragon S4 has massive battery life improvements

Okay, I expected a battery life boost when I got my LG Nexus 4 (16GB), but what I got blew me away. When I finally got the phone last week as a replacement to my battery hogging Samsung S3 I didn’t really expect much in terms of battery life.

I immediately installed three apps that I use a lot and that draw some amount of standby power: corporate email, a second email account and Twitter.  Then I got a prompt to upgrade to Android v4.3 (thanks LG!) so I immediately installed the update. I fully expected to get 10 to 12 hours of use before the battery approached rock bottom. Well was I wrong…way wrong…because at the 32 hour mark (1 day 8 hours) I still had 42% battery left! See the screenshot at the bottom of the page. I’ve also seen other reports that 4.3, by itself, added an amazing boost to battery life.

Note, I did the exact same test on my S3 when it was brand new and it lasted almost 12 hours before it started throwing low power warnings. That’s pretty much been my general experience with the eight other various Androids that I’ve had since v1.5. The results from the Nexus 4 blew that out of the water. I understand this is a brand new phone with very few apps on it. And as I add other apps that eat power in stand-by I’ll fully expect to see a drop off in battery life, especially as the battery gets older and more discharge/recharge cycles on it.

I also wanted to explain my usage pattern for the phone. It is what I’ll refer to as light- to medium-duty. What I mean by that is I would check email, news and twitter every two to three hours. This would consist of browsing on the phone for roughly 7 – 10 minutes at a time in short bursts throughout the day. I very much use it as a business and Android dev phone.

My main suspicion is that the WXGA IPS screen combined with the Snapdragon processor and Android 4.3 is dramatically more power efficient than the Super AMOLED screen on the S3 running Android 4.1.2 with a Samsung Exynos 4 quadcore. I’ll also point out that the screens are roughly the same size, if you were thinking maybe the Nexus 4 had a smaller screen and that’s what saved on power then think again. In fact, the Nexus has a slightly higher pixel density:

Samsung Galaxy S3 – 720 x 1280, 4.8 inches (~306 ppi pixel)

Nexus 4 – 768 x 1280, 4.7 inches (~320 ppi)

My point is that when jumping between previous major Android versions in the past we never saw battery life improvements even close to this. And from a hardware perspective, my S3 and all of my other pre-4.2 Android’s had screens that were major gas hogs. The screens on those phones were always at the top of the list on the Android battery consumption monitor as the number one energy consumer.

Conclusion. Whoa! I’ve been harping on Android’s miserable battery life for a long time, and now the Android team along with their hardware manufacturing friends may have finally broken the trend. Time will tell as I continue to use the phone and load up on apps if 4.3’s battery life improvements continue to hold up under pressure.

Android battery at 32 hours

Debugging Web Apps on Android’s Mobile Browser – Part 2

In addition to the suggestions listed in Part 1, I forgot to mention one more tool. There is a lesser known browser that can be quite handy for debugging: Firefox mobile. This relatively unknown sibling of the full-blown desktop browser actually has a fairly nice, built in debugger. The one major caveat is that it doesn’t work as well as the native browser for HTML5, CSS3 and some JavaScript, but it may be just the tool you need for some quick debugging, on-the-fly. Besides it fits in your pocket along with your other mobile apps, and you don’t need Logcat.

Step 1 – place your finger in the middle of the screen and drag it to the left. Click the gears icon at the bottom right of the screen.

Step 2 – In the upper right hand corner of the next screen, click the bug icon

Step 3 – Scroll down the datagrid to view errors.

Debugging Web Apps on Android’s Mobile Browser

For some unknown reason, Google did not include a debugger in their native browser, at least for versions up to v2.3.x. I don’t have a phone that supports a version greater than that, yet, so I can’t speak about the latest releases. Unfortunately this can be a huge productivity killer. The good news is there is a solution – you can debug the native Android browser using what’s called the DDMS, or Dalvik Debug Monitor Server, and the ADB, or Android Debug Bridge. I can also tell you this works great.

Yes, it’s true that JavaScript development forces you to have an armada’s worth of tools, tricks, libraries, phones and browsers. This is just another hammer to place into your growing toolkit. Debugging via ADB was good news for me since I do native Android development and I already have the software installed when I installed the full Android SDK. If you don’t do native development then it’s a real pain.

But, if you want to do your best to deliver bug free apps, then your best bet is to install at least ADB. I believe, but I’m not 100% certain, that you can this without having to install Eclipse along with the entire Android SDK. Yes, I agree that installing the entire SDK would seem entirely ridiculous and complete overkill for mobile web development, especially if you are not using Eclipse as your primary IDE. I’m aware that in the past I’d seen a few stand-alone versions of this floating around for both Windows and Linux. I’m not even remotely certain about Mac’s. If you do know something about this, then I encourage you to please post a comment.

How to use ADB. My suggestion, once you’ve installed it, is to filter by the tag “console” if you are using Android v2.x and above.  Instructions on how to do filtering can be found in the ADB link below and scroll towards the very bottom of the page.

Caveat: You will have to install the Android USB device driver on your machine in order for ADB to work.  And, you will also have to have a USB cable that will connect your device to your dev machine. The drivers are different for every device. I’ve included a link to Google’s device drivers below. On a related note, for several of my Motorola Androids I had to go directly to the Motorola website to find a device driver that finally worked.

Another Possibility – Adobe Shadow! You should also be aware of a very cool development from Adobe called Shadow. As of today, I believe you can still download it for free from Adobe labs. I mention this last because, well…I haven’t tried it out. However, my good friend Kevin Hoyt, from Adobe, says it’s very, very promising. And, it’s supported on both Mac and Windows. As I write this I’m thinking that I really do need to download it and test drive it. If you have tried it, then post your thoughts…don’t by shy!

References:

Adobe Shadow + sneak peak video

Google’s ADB

Android Device Drivers

Google’s Guidelines for Web app developers