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Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

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31–40 of 343 posts

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#31

At this point I would pay a premium to have replaceable batteries again.

My Sonim XP3+ has a hard shell replaceable battery and lasts a week and a half on a charge. It's not even a very expensive device, it's under $150! ;) But it is a flip phone running Android Go with no apps...

That said, I think the tradeoffs being made right now are probably the right ones. Apple's latest devices have gone to an electrically released sort of adhesive (versus the older pull-strip removeable adhesive, which is a big step up from the "glue it in" approach many vendors take), and for a given volume, you get more battery if you can rely on the phone to protect it from damage - which is why almost everything with an internal battery uses some variety of pouch cell. They're quite a bit more fragile than the hard-cased batteries, but you get a lot more battery in the volume than you do with the hard cased ones.

As long as it's not incredibly irritating to replace the battery, I'm fine optimizing the daily use thing (battery life in a given phone size) over the once-every-few-years thing (replacing the battery).

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#32
post #21
post #3

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before. From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?

That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta.

It's still pretty terrible though

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#33
The foldable phone thing later in the article is fun, because I actually do want a foldable phone. I'd love to have a smaller phone with a screen that gets bigger for things like watching movies while traveling.

But the thing is, before buying one I borrowed one from a friend and it was absolute shit! The software hardly worked, the hinges felt horrible to open and it was still too big even when folded up. I thought I was going to break it constantly while holding it.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#34

I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs

I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#35
post #18

> The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%)... Battery replacements are a thing. They're apparently not a common thing, unfortunately, because that might impact new phone sales... and even on devices where it's trivial, people don't seem to do it. A decade ago or so I was doing a lot of Nexus 5 battery swaps for people because one of the battery OEMs w…

> Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor

Everyone says this, but I wonder if the sales data says otherwise, because device manufacturers, especially Apple, REALLY love to advertise how thin their devices are.

Personally, I don't want a super thin device because I feel like the slightest bending force is going to snap it in half. It's absolutely wild to me that people will store their phones in their back pocket.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#36
post #20

what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"

I'd love it if CarPlay/Siri just could read out stuff it finds on the Internet. Currently, all I can get out of it is "Sorry, I cannot show this to you right now" for basically everything except trying to control multimedia.

At one point, I had ChatGPT working via voice in CarPlay mode (via Shortcuts I think?), but seems like Apple disabled that at one point, for some stupid reason probably.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#37
post #3

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before. From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#39

I've been trying the iOS Beta 18.2 and here's my impression of Apple Intelligence: It's not bad, it's really really bad. The image clean-up feature is utterly useless, and I think it's one of the areas where we can clearly see the difference between a company for whom Generative AI is an afterthought (Apple), and the competition. I paid $1500 for the new iPhone Pro Max and a great part of the deal was the Apple Intel…

Apple has always sucked in AI and they have never formed the culture necessary to enable and attract top ML talent. They developed Siri years ago and have stagnated since.

As far as the future of compute goes, Meta seems like it has a much more compelling argument with the Orion glasses and their investment in AI.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#40
These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline

> A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful,

So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful?

> 45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities

Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee?

>34% have privacy concerns.

66% have no privacy concerns?

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