• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Average Battery Life???

Had very light use for the last 1.5 days. Wifi on the entire time. Right now I'm sitting at 35% after 28 hours with the extended battery. This is getting better and better after each charge.
 
this phone rocks on wifi - i can get 30 hours with heavy use, however it stinks on lte or 3g if you have a bad signal. light to moderate use i can barely get 8 hours.
 
I was getting only 5 to 6 hrs of life for a couple of weeks now. I read a few posts where people were experimenting with disabling background data. I tried it myself last night.I also at the same time, changed the network from cdma/lte to just cdma and left the wifi on all the time. I am now at 38% battery life 18.5 hrs later.

My exchange mail seems to still be getting emails right on the mark as well, but my calendar is having trouble updating (this may be unrelated). I have a funky exchange servie (lotus notes traveler), but I'm using Enhanced Email as the client. It has been the only client I have tried so far that understands how to accept meeting invites with my server. Even touchdown does not know how. my understanding is that EE has a known issue with ICS and Calendar updates, so this may be the cause of this issue.

I put CPU Spy on and it still shows that I hardly go into deep sleep even though I got 18.5hrs out of it so far. I now need to figure out what apps are going to malfunction with the background data disabled. I tell ya, I was ready to trade this in for a iphone (I was getting pretty depressed with the battery performance, or lack there of).

18hrs of life on a standard battery is just fine with me, but I still want to know what bad things are around the corner with background data turned off.

Tonight I will try just switching onto the cdma/lte and see the effects. Tomorrow I will kick background data back in.

I probably should try to see why I cant deep sleep before I do any of these additional experiments.
I also have Set CPU set for set to "ondemand" state.
 
I can definitely get 24hrs with moderate use. Last night after about 3 hours screen on out of 17hrs of fairly substantial use (I tend to measure my use by screen on time) I was still at 25% at midnight when I put it on the charger and went to bed. I'd say most of that was on wifi and about 2 hours out running errands in 3g/4g mode.


My suggestions:
If you are not in a 4G area or are borderline, switch to CDMA only mode (there's not toggle that works for a stock ROM - even rooted, but I use the app "4G toggle for razr". Its really just a shortcut to the radio selection setting screen but it saves a few clicks.

Keep WiFi on. WiFi uses way less juice than even 3G, and 4G seems to be a battery hog.

Keep screen brightness LOW. I keep it at 10% and keep a brightness toggling widget handy if it gets too bright where I am. Auto brightness seems to set it unnecessarily high.

Turn off any syncing you don't use - twitter, facebook, skype, google books, currents, docs, etc. There are a lot of people that say google+ syncing is really problematic and a battery/cpu hog so I also shut that off. I un-synced google photos cause I have no desire to have all the extra folders in my gallery.

Rumor has it the next update will help, but google isn't talking. That theory is based on google supposedly pulling the ICS update from the Nexus S because it caused extended "Android OS" keep awake times and excessive battery drain - similar to what users on the Galaxy Nexus are reporting.
 
Tim K said:
My suggestions:
If you are not in a 4G area or are borderline, switch to CDMA only mode (there's not toggle that works for a stock ROM - even rooted, but I use the app "4G toggle for razr". Its really just a shortcut to the radio selection setting screen but it saves a few clicks.

Keep WiFi on. WiFi uses way less juice than even 3G, and 4G seems to be a battery hog.

Keep screen brightness LOW. I keep it at 10% and keep a brightness toggling widget handy if it gets too bright where I am. Auto brightness seems to set it unnecessarily high.

Turn off any syncing you don't use - twitter, facebook, skype, google books, currents, docs, etc. There are a lot of people that say google+ syncing is really problematic and a battery/cpu hog so I also shut that off. I un-synced google photos cause I have no desire to have all the extra folders in my gallery.
Click to expand...

This is pretty much the story. I would only add that for every app that is installed, check to make sure that the notifications and/or 'detect location' settings are shut off, or at least check to see if the app has them, so that you know to try shutting them off if your battery life takes a hit for some "unknown" reason.

For me, screen time and whether or not I'm on a weak 4G signal are the two primary factors of the battery life equation - because I've ensured that everything else that was mentioned was checked.
 
New to Android phone and ICS. where do you check to see if the apps have these features enabled or not? I went to setting > apps. I see some of the apps have privileges that I might not want to grant now that I'm getting up to speed on this stuff. Short of uninstalling the apps, how can you modify the various attributes under the permission settings for apps? I know superuser is brute force to allow or deny root access, but can you modify the permissions from the setting > apps view?
 
neverhappy said:
New to Android phone and ICS. where do you check to see if the apps have these features enabled or not? I went to setting > apps. I see some of the apps have privileges that I might not want to grant now that I'm getting up to speed on this stuff. Short of uninstalling the apps, how can you modify the various attributes under the permission settings for apps? I know superuser is brute force to allow or deny root access, but can you modify the permissions from the setting > apps view?
Click to expand...

In regards to what others mentioned, you just open any app that gets data from the web and go into its setting individually.

For example, open Facebook, go to settings, and click on "Refresh interval". The more seldom it refreshes, the easier it is on the battery. I have mine set to Never and I just refresh it whenever I open the app.
 
I get 8 hours with heavy usage with the extended battery, on LTE all day. and by heavy usage I mean I dont put the phone down at all :):)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom