Phone battery life

I take track and listen to podcast with S23.  Maybe 40% of the battery for 10 hours.

Yours might last 8 days.  Probably need a usb powerbank.  A 10,000 mAh?  Maybe a 5,000 mAh?

I just used my iPhone 16e on a 7 day trip as a camera and a GPS in airplane mode and it burned about 15% per day.

Really hard to say with all the variables. You can try it home. Fully charge it, don’t put in airplane, leave it alone for 8 hours except to take the occasional pic and video to meet your criteria.Double whatever figure you get for battery drain, that might put in the ballpark on per day usage with a margin. Would also take a at least a 10k power bank (~2 full phone charges)on trip. It’s worth an extra couple oz in case you accidentally pop it out of airplane,etc.In the field take steps to reduce power usage such as reduce brightness, only recharge to 80%. If cold weather let you phone warm up a little in a pocket before turning on, recharging, same with power bank. Adjust your usage if it looks like your power won’t last trip.

Thank you. It seems from your info that if I don’t navigate or do music or read very much, the phone should last many days.

8 days is a lot to ask. In your place, I’d probably take a power bank sufficient for at least one full charge. Especially if you might need the phone for navigation in a pinch.

Dan, I will probably take a 10K brick because that is what I have.  Violates the principle of packing your fears, but I rationalize that by leaving the heavy camera at home.

You could also use a smaller power bank. I was in a pinch a while ago and bought a Goal Zero Flip charger, because that’s all the vendor had. It will charge my iPhone 12 1.5 times, roughly. Much lighter weight than my 10k Anker, and good for short trips.

Search for power saving tips for your phone. There are various functions to disable that will stretch battery life. I have an S25 Ultra. I can go about 4 days in airplane mode with all power saving options enabled using the phone for photos, navigation and texting.

Is it accurate enough to take the battery bank capacity (in mAh) divided by the phone battery capacity to find the number of recharges you’ll get? For my iPhone 13 Pro, this is is 10,000/3,095 = 3.2 charges. I’m also using the Alpine Mode phone app to manage the power settings, seems to work well.

No.  You lose almost half your mAh from inefficiency of the electronics and the process of discharging one battery and charging the other.

And the question is, how much of your phone battery do you use each day?  I use about 40% of my android per day – I take a gaia track and listen to podcast on earbuds which take quite a bit of power.

The relation between mAh specs and reality is too complicated.  All you can do is try using a powerbank. 10,000 mAh is a good – they’re common and many people find that sufficient.  Then see if that’s enough for your trips.  I found that 10,000 mAh was barely enough, so I got a 13,000.  Or, if the powerbank never went below 3 out of 4 bars, for example, maybe get a smaller lighter one.

Have a plan B if your powerbank is discharging too quickly.  For me, that’s turning off gaia tracking and podcasts.  If I set it to low power mode, all apps suspend when the display goes off.  So if I just don’t look at it it consumes very little power.  I can still look at the gps map occasionally to see where I’m going.

A dirty secret is the mAh rating is power in to the power brick to charge it, not power out.  Due to inefficiencies it will likely be 20-40% less than than that number in terms of charging external devices.  Also note that the mah is based on the battery voltage (3.7-3.85) not output voltage.

they should rate based on wH of output, but where’s the fun of that.

If I really wanted to calculate – I use 40% of my android 5000 mAh battery per day.  That’s 2000 mAh.

The charge inefficiency is about 1/3, so I’d need 3000 mAh of powerbank per day.

For 4 days, I need a 12,000 mAh powerbank.  For 5 days I need 16,000 mAh.

That matches reality pretty good – with the 13,000, it’s good for 4 days but for 5 days, I barely have enough

Thanks, interesting. I use the phone for occasional navigation and some music to fall asleep to. Last month on a 3-day trip I had 35% remaining in the phone with no recharges. I’m hoping this week’s five day trip and work with one 10K battery bank. Of course, I’ll need the InReach topped up, so perhaps will take the 20k. It’s the tyranny  of Lighterpack, of you know what I mean ;)

I would take just the 10K. I guess I’m tyrannized by lighterpack : )

If that is inadequate on a trip(s) then increase.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I found this formula on the Internet:

Power Bank capacity * Conversion Rate *  Phone Battery health rate / Phone battery capacity,

In my case, 10,000 x 0.8 x 0.93 / 3100 =2.4 times. The conversion rate is the energy loss due to circuitry inefficiency. Apparently, as the battery health deteriorates it increases the charging time. Makes sense.

Last point: I mainly using my GPS watch for navigation, using the phone much less. The Epix Pro can go five days with GPS on for eight hours a day. I still have 40% left at the end of the week. Amazing.

hmmm….

If you have 10,000 mAh powerbank, I think you can charge about 6,666 mAh of phone battery based on what I’ve measured.

That would be 2.15 times of charging a 3100 mAh phone battery.

Close enough to your 2.4

Jerry – roger that. I’ll test this week. Off to Bear Lakes Basin tomorrow!

Bear Lake Basin is awesome – I went through there in 2019