NY wrote
Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote

My old phone would barely last the waking hours of the day (ie between
being removed from charge and going back on charge) if I left wifi
turned on,

Er.... doesn't Wifi turn on as you use it then go off again?

No, GPS, wifi and mobile data are features that you can choose to enable
or disable. It's useful sometimes to turn on just mobile data and not
wifi, to force any WAN connections (web, email) to go by mobile, because
if both wifi and mobile are turned on, the phone usually (always?) uses
wifi in preference, maybe because that isn't usually subject to a low
monthly usage limit.

All three seem to drain the battery to some extent even if they are not
explicitly being used, though not as quickly as if a package is constantly
requesting a GPS fix or transferring data.

OTOH with my iphones, they don't use enough to need to bother
turning them on and off to get a longer time between charges.

and GPS and/or mobile internet would drain the battery in a few hours if
left on for more than just the precise time I needed them. My new phone
lasts fine with GPS, wifi and mobile internet left on 24/7, for a
similar 8 AM to 10 PM time off charge.

Not an Apple then.

Fraid so. My 6S only needs two charges a week most weeks
and it stays on 24/7 with everything on all the time.

Every iphone user I know is constantly asking if they can charge their
phone somewhere.

Bet that's because they are old phones with ****ed batterys.

Why does that not surprise me? :-) Apples must have some redeeming
features,

Yep, very elegant solid designs most of the time and no need
to give a damn about viruses or snooping on your data because
of the sandboxing that means that even the very very occasional
rogue app has no access to anything you don't want it to.

but they do seem to be very prescriptive in what you can and can't do
(with "how do I do X" being answered with "why on earth should you even
want to do X")

More that they wont let you do what is illegal in some
places, even tho it may be legal in your jurisdiction.

I'd much prefer to be able to record all phone conversations
so I can check what has been said after the call, particularly
with commercial operations that make claims when selling
you something so you can check what they claimed after
it turns out that they don't in fact actually deliver that etc.
But Apple has decided that they wont let you do that
because that is illegal in some jurisdictions.

The other thing you cant configure your iphone to do is
to automatically answering incoming calls which can be
handy in some situations like when driving around etc.

And they wont let the iphone show you what wifi it can
see even when the signal level is too low to be useful
to use. That's a pain when setting up repeaters etc.

and they invent their own network protocols (Apple Airprint) and
connectors (Apple Lightning) (which may be better, but they are unique to
Apple).

Sure.

I much prefer Windows for a "real" computer

Yeah, me too.

and Android for a phone/tablet.

I much prefer iOS for both.

Shame that Win 10 is becoming more and more dumbed-down

Yeah, tho it has some nice features, like being able to pair
windows so they always come up together. Trouble is that
its hard to justify a Win10 system just so I can have a pair
of Freecell Pro and Notepad. It's the only game I play and
normally don't watch TV without playing it etc.

and Apple-like.

Its nothing like iOS or even the Mac OS either.

I went on a night-school course on digital photography at the local
college, and all the class computers were Apples. A significant portion of
each lesson was taken up with people asking "I know how to do this on
Windows, but how do I do it on Apple" instead of actually learning about
the specific photographic package.

Sure, but that's true of any pair of OSs. And if Win10 was
becoming more apple like, they wouldn't be doing that.

I think there was something wrong with the software that was running on
my old phone (though I don't know what) because when my wife had to
borrow it for a few months between breaking her own phone and getting a
new one, she wiped it and set it up with her config and therefore her
set of apps, and it lasted a lot longer.

You must have had a program running constantly accessing the internet.

That's what I reckon. I wish I could have found out what it was. Whatever
it was didn't carry over onto the new phone when all my settings and
user-selected apps from the old phone were installed on the new one.

That's one area where iphones are magnificent, when the old phone
is replaced by another, so effortless to move to the new phone.

Samsungs now do something close, but must later than when apple did it.

There's no way anyone would design a phone which didn't turn the wifi off
as soon as you stopped using the browser.

It done like that because wifi allows it to do much better location
services when gps isnt working well inside buildings etc.

I'm not sure whether the phone maintains a connection to the router. It's
difficult to tell without rebooting the router, because a router's list of
known computers (its DHCP list) lasts even after a computer disconnects or
is turned off.

The better routers show the traffic for each device too.

It is plausible that wifi has a fairly short timeout and reconnects
immediately any app needs to access either the internet or another
computer within the house.

Normally not.