This week work wise has been amazingly busy. Between spending 2 days in continental Europe (including 3 countries in one day!) and then two days at a trade show here in London, I’ve been going non-stop. But the week has also been an enlightening one on the Windows Phone front for many reasons and it reminded me once again why I love my Lumia 1320 Windows Phone battery life.
There were two things that made me appreciate the battery life of my Lumia 1320 this week: Tuesday’s 3 country jaunt and two days at a trade show. Tuesday was, in a word, hell. I traveled to Lille, France Monday night only to find that my meetings had been cancelled. A few phone calls later it is decided that I will travel to Liege, Belgium on Tuesday morning to go to another meeting. So up I am at 5:00 AM on Tuesday, unplug the Windows Phone from charging overnight and off I go. In all I spent multiple hours on trains (missed a train and had another massively delayed), ate a huge amount of data checking and sending emails, updating files and the like on my 1320 and when my feet finally brought me home at 23:29 on Tuesday night, I still had 8% battery left. Compare that to my iPhone 5s which was in my bag with me. It was never connected to data (I turned off roaming) and I didn’t use it throughout the day on Tuesday. When I got home it had switched off because it had run the battery flat.
Okay, I get it. The battery in the 1320 is nearly double that of the iPhone 5s. But seriously, literally not a touch on the iPhone all day and it still goes flat just sat in my bag? That’s not a feature peeps, I don’t care the size of the battery. And for comparison, I also had my Lumia 520 with me and it wasn’t touched all day either. It still had 92% battery life left.
I think part of this , in addition to the massive battery in the 1320, comes down to the battery saving features in Windows Phone when compared to other platforms out there. It simply does a better job of managing tasks and apps to maximise the battery life of the device while you are on-the-go. For me, it was the most dramatic example yet of how much better battery life performance is on Windows Phone.
My second battery observation came on Wednesday and Thursday of this week here in London. I was at a trade show, IP Expo Europe both days. Like my trip to the continent, I took my Lumia 1320 with me for both days. For me to get to the event it was a 1.5 hour train and Tube journey then a 9:00 through 18:00 each day at the show followed by another 1.5 hour journey home. So it was a long day both days and as I write this on Friday morning, my feet are still letting me know!
For my colleagues who were at the show with me, there was a mix of iPhone users and Android users. Every one of them using an iPhone at some point throughout the day – sometimes multiple times – went diving for a power port. In fact one of my colleagues yesterday simply walked around all day with his iPhone connected to a small, 2200 mAh external battery. For those who were using Android, they pretty much all made it through the day with no problem.
But it was an eye opening thing for me, a current (albeit far less than before) and long time iPhone user. They are simply horrible on battery life. Even the one colleague who had the new iPhone 6, while it was better, was still searching for a power port by the end of the day. For me and my 1320? I had about 20% battery left by the time I arrived home each day. Again, you could make the argument that I, effectively, am carrying around an external battery given the massive 3400 mAh battery built into it. But the point is I didn’t have to carry an external battery nor go find a power port. All day. In fact, by yesterday I wasn’t even thinking about battery life and I certainly wasn’t conserving any use of my phone. Because I didn’t have to worry about it.
I also appreciate that everyone’s mileage will vary when it comes to battery life. There are a huge number of factors that lengthen or shorting your battery life throughout any given day. But I would contend that no matter how you slice this pie, Windows Phone is superior when it comes to battery management. Even if you dismiss my 1320, the fact that my iPhone 5s and my Lumia 520 sat in the same bag next to each other all day without being touched and one was dead while the other had virtually all of its battery left, speaks volumes because the iPhone’s battery is bigger than that of the 520.
This week, perhaps more than any since coming back to Windows Phone in August, has proven to me that this platform is the right choice for those of us on-the-go. The simple fact of not having to worry about charging a battery throughout the day is the ultimate freedom and it simply frees you to do what you need to do on your device without having to worry about killing it when you need it for something important later.
That is real digital freedom.
