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Benson's Avatar
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#13
Originally Posted by pycage View Post
Yes, as long as battery capacity of smartphones is as poor as today, there's no benefit from cramming all functionality into one device. Yesterday my G1 phone died during the day because some 3rd party app behaved badly and drained battery while running in the background.
Devil's advocate: By eliminating the redundancies of the 2-device model, you can combine basically everything but one battery in one device. Replace the other one with a battery pack or spare batteries for the all-in-one, and suddenly you have more total stored energy, less total power consumption, and don't risk losing half your functionality while you've got plenty of juice for the other half -- you should be better off.

Realistically: swapping out spare batteries almost invariably requires a shutdown, and charging from a USB pack is too slow, and can be awkward to leave connected while device and battery pack are in pockets/holsters. But if you can get around those, the total-energy advantage is significant.