I know I am posting a lot about the Librem 5 lately, but I feel like this stuff should be highlighted.
When looking at the battery life of the Librem 5 from the perspective of other phones you might be disappointed. I think this is fair, but just remember Purism has made a lot of progress and there is more to come.
That being said an angle I don’t think I have considered yet is that for the SoC the battery life we have already is very impressive. I’ll give you a frame of reference.
I have an MNT Reform which uses the same SoC as the Librem 5. It is a full up laptop and it is surprisingly capable. Mine has a LIFEPO battery capacity of 16,000 mAh. I can get about 4 hours of battery life out of it while continuously using it.
The Librem 5 has (I believe) a 4,500* mAh battery and gets about the same results, and while the Librem 5 has a much smaller screen, and is not powering a keyboard with backlighting or a trackball, it does have a cell modem and wifi/bt card. It also has a cameras, leds, GPS, ambient light sensor, gyro, and other sensors that it is powering.
In a single day I was able to bring the Reform with me fully charged. Use it for about an hour at lunch, and by the time I got home I had anywhere from 30-20% battery left. The same is happening with the Librem 5!!!
They use the same SoC but the Librem 5 has only 1/4th the battery capacity and is matching battery life with it and there are improvements still coming.
- thanks @irvinewade for the battery size correction.
Edit: If you add a laptop dock solution to take advantage of the convergence on the go, you basically enable the phone to last all day without an issue. What I especially love about the laptop dock that @Kyle_Rankin talked about in this thread:
is that you can use it to buffer the amount of power needed during use, and NOT actively charge the phone, thus not wasting a charge cycle. This means you can charge at night. But also have a full mainline Linux computer with you at all times.