I keep a small notebook next to the phone when I test games on a mid-range
Android. Two columns, nothing else: the time, and the battery percentage. That
is it. No average, no score, no verdict.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that this is the whole method.
For months I finished a session, looked at the phone, and wrote something like
"ran fine for an hour". That sentence is almost always wrong. An hour contains
minutes, and the minutes are where the interesting things happen.
Here is what the notebook shows, again and again. Ten minutes in, nothing has
changed. Fifteen minutes in, the back of the phone is warm. Twenty minutes in,
the frame pacing starts to stutter in a way that no average will ever show,
because the average is computed over a session that includes the good part.
The battery column tells the same story from another angle. One percent every
eight minutes is normal for the games I play. One percent every four minutes in
the second half is not normal, and it is usually not the chip. It is the screen
held at full brightness, or an app that keeps waking up in the background.
What I like about the notebook is that it is boring. It does not depend on my
mood, on the weather, or on how much I like the phone. Anyone can copy it. A
stopwatch and a piece of paper will do.
I keep the longer version of these notes on my own blog, but the short version
fits in two columns.
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