It certainly has the Achilles heel of many electronic devices today. When we're talking about MacBooks and iPads, things get better. But when it comes to Apple's smartphone, the thing gets complicated (especially the “no-Plus” iPhones).
Hardly a user who uses an iPhone 6 / 6s a lot can reach the end of the day with some battery. It is quite common that this type of person will have to recharge the iPhone sometime late, whether in the car, at work, with some external battery. Thinking about it and knowing that these accessories sell in bulk, Apple went there and created the Smart Battery Case.
I will not go into the merit of the cover's look as this has already been widely discussed in the comments of this article and in MacMagazine on Air # 160. What I want to discuss here is how apparently Apple actually managed to create something different from what we have seen in terms of technology / usage.
Normally, battery cases have a switch through which we can turn on / off the external battery that powers the iPhone. This is cool at first because you can control exactly when you want to recharge the device, correct? For the one that comes in the cat's leap from the Smart Battery Case.
It does not have any of these switches, much less LEDs indicating the battery level (both the battery level of the case and the iPhone are shown by iOS, on the Lock Screen or in the Notification Center). That is, taking into account that the case has 100% battery, when fitting the iPhone in it it will automatically be recharged. Or not.
Jesse Hollington (senior editor of iLounge) shared something interesting that seems to be the case with the Smart Battery Case. According to him, the idea of ​​the case is not to recharge the iPhone but rather to serve as a source of power / energy for him. It looks the same, doesn't it? But no.
Think of an ordinary battery case. Usually, as soon as a person uses it:
- Recharge the case and iPhone at home.
- When leaving the house, the case has the switch off after all the iPhone has 100% battery.
- Use the iPhone until the battery approaches zero.
- Connect the external battery of the case to recharge the iPhone.
- The case then loses the battery while the iPhone gains.
- Upon arriving home, both the case and the iPhone are recharged again and the next day the cycle is repeated.
Now think about how the Smart Battery Case works:
- Both the case and the iPhone are recharged at home.
- When unplugging the case / iPhone from power and leaving the house, the iPhone will continue with 100% battery, being powered by the battery of the case.
- When the battery of the case runs out, the iPhone's sim will be used.
- Upon arriving home, the double case / iPhone recharged again at night and the cycle is repeated the next day.
Did you notice that there is one less step in the case of the Smart Battery Case? Yes, and it is very important because it involves battery cycles. Basically, when using the Smart Battery Case, you are doing only one recharge cycle per day because when you leave the house and use the battery of the case first, as if the iPhone was still plugged in.
In the case of a case with a traditional battery, the iPhone recharged twice a day (from the case's battery and at home), probably coming very close to completing two daily cycles.
The perfect Hollington analogy, see s:
Think of it this way: using a battery case for iPhone simply as a backup, when plugged in when your iPhone's battery runs low, similar to having two glasses of water, but only drinking from the first when that glass is empty, instead to take the second, you pour (the water) from the second glass back into the first. It doesn't make much sense, does it?
Taking into account that iPhones batteries are designed to retain up to 80% of their original capacity for 500 complete charge cycles, this can make a huge difference. Of course, traditional battery cases can also work like Apple's, after all, just leave the switch on like this, when leaving the house in the morning, the same logic as the Smart Battery Case followed. The difference is that the Apple case does not give the user the option to do something other than that, other than taking the iPhone out of the case and placing it in the middle of the day (which I do not imagine many people doing).
To complete, there is still the “problem” that the Smart Battery Case solves and that, until then, nobody really imagined to be a problem: the presence of extra antennas to improve the quality of the cellular signal since the traditional cases with battery at least according to Apple they can generate some type of signal loss.
Interesting
