Torrenting is a great example of something I positively do not want to do when on battery power and hoping to rely on my phone to get past the day.

This is why I suggested a dual mode. Smartphones today are very close to being powerful enough that they can begin to replace our laptops. So why not? A phone that operates with a dual mode: full on desktop type machine when connected to power and external display. Then with practical limits for when it is on battery power (which you can turn off, if you know what you're doing). These limits are worth having as the default setup as it's the kind of thing most people would rather not think of. The limits then help (as they do on iOS) to manage battery life and, to some extent, memory usage.

It requires some rethinking of how to build apps and their UIs for dual operation, but Qt has everything there to make it possible (so does iOS/OSX, for that matter — Android doesn't really). Besides, almost all good apps these days have to consider that duality anyway. Now they're just released as two separate applications.

It's the device I've been talking about for the past couple of years. Motorola had an early experiment on those lines, but it was quite limited. It could be that the time is right for Jolla to now do it.