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Battery life.

Tyseyh

Tyseyh

Android Expert
What are your battery life averages?
Just curious before getting this phone.
Also, what kind of usage?
 
well same as iphone 4, one day then need to be recharged, i use whats up, listen to music, play apps sometimes, and it needs to be recharged daily, according to my experience.
 
I expected daily with it being a smart phone, how many hours? Roughly? Does it last you all day at least?
 
Two things count against any new smartphone;

a) The battery needs a good few charges for the battery meter to read accurately.
b) Any new phone (as in new to the user) probably gets loads more usage than it may get after the novelty wears off.

I've been using the phone all the time, installing apps, setting things up and playing games just to see how they run (and on the great screen). As a result, I'm killing the battery very quickly.

A good measure of how great a phone is comes down to how much you fiddle around with it for no reason!

Over the coming week or two, I'll get a better idea on how likely it will be for me to safely manage a full day with normal usage.

However, I do have a portable battery charger (7,000mAh) that I take with me a lot so I can do charges on-the-go if necessary.

Gone are the days of having 7 day battery life on a phone (I even got almost 10-14 days from my very first BlackBerry) but if you can't head off somewhere at 8-9am and still be able to use it at 9-10pm on the way home, it's going to a problem. I have fairly high confidence that the Xperia S will manage this*, but time will tell.

(* Not if my usage includes watching 2 or 3 films with the screen brightness on max!)
 
Today I took my XS off charge at 6.05 and through the day listened to music/podcasts for approx 7hrs, it's 19.17 now and it's on 19%. Bit worse than my old IP4 but as jonmorris says it will get better.
 
how long did u all intially charged up for? ive left mine all day in the hope it gets a good charge to start off with
 
I'm still finding the battery rather poor, and needed to give it a top-up yesterday around 2pm. It was down to 10% by the time I went to bed at 1am, and would never have lasted had it not been given a boost.

However, I am conscious of the fact that I'm running a lot of stuff in the background (a lot of it simply because I can, as it has plenty of memory and doesn't slow down!).

For a few hours yesterday, I was logged in to Skype (our company uses this for staff to contact each other via IM) and that's a battery hog. I quit that, but still have Facebook, Twitter and Gmail updating - as well as Facebook and Twitter being updated separately using Timescape. I've now disabled that, although I do quite like the latest implementation as the widgets look pretty good.

I'm now going to see how things go today, without Timescape or Skype. I don't want to turn anything else off as the day you need to disable things like Wi-Fi, 3G, instant email etc is the day you may as well not have a smartphone!
 
Thanks for that, mines just turned up at home now so I'm just off there to get it.
Little bit excited!
 
I just charged mine till the green led was shown and it was full. I left it on for around 2 and half hours.

There is nothing in the manual to tell us to charge it for a long period of time for the initial charge.
 
wah007 said:
I just charged mine till the green led was shown and it was full. I left it on for around 2 and half hours.

There is nothing in the manual to tell us to charge it for a long period of time for the initial charge.
Click to expand...

No there isn't. I had mine on charge for 6 hours first time.
 
Might just be me, but I was under the impression that a brand new phone should be charged for at least 12 hours for the first time (even if it says fully charged fairly soon after the charge begins).
 
Tyseyh said:
The letter is got from phones for you with my phone says charge it for 14 hours.
Click to expand...

i got mine from P4U, im pretty sure thats just a generic template and 14 hours is probably the longest it will take for any of the phones they sell to fully charge.

Pretty sure that the green light is a good indicator, i was always told not to leave it on charge once the battery was full and to let it run down below 10% before charging it back up, and try to charge to full every time rather than charging it 50% every night or something
 
The lady at the O2 store told me 16 hours first charge, she also told me that I would need to turn my phone off for an hour several times on the day of my no. swap and even better still she said that I would have to pay
 
Batteries have limited charge cycles, which is recorded on the battery (there's an IC chip inside that ensures you can't overcharge it, or let it run down too low). The phone can measure the battery, so it can show its condition and - supposedly - report the battery level more accurately. That's partly why you need a few charges at the beginning to get the meter to read properly, not that you're actually conditioning the battery.

Some retailers are still stuck in their ways of thinking back in the 90s when you had Ni-Cad and Ni-MH batteries. By charging/draining a few times, you're using up valuable charge cycles for no real gain. Far better to just top up as and when, and then let it settle down naturally.

I'm sure there are websites that explain this in more detail, but there are also plenty of sites that seem to still think you should condition a battery - and that's probably why the advice is regularly given on forums, from shop staff and even networks or the manufacturers themselves!
 
I've now turned off the Timescape automatic updating, and killed the widgets from the home screen.

As a result, the battery isn't dropping anywhere near as fast as it was before.
 
jonmorris said:
I've now turned off the Timescape automatic updating, and killed the widgets from the home screen.

As a result, the battery isn't dropping anywhere near as fast as it was before.
Click to expand...

Hello Jon. Please could you tell em how to do this? The Timescape on my phone isn't running but I'd like to know what to do with the widgets please.
 
By default Timescape will be manual updates only, but if you don't intend to do any updates (manual or automatic) just delete the widgets by hold/dragging to the trash. Job done.
 
Now that some of you have had the phone for several days and are now settling down to normal use rather than constantly playing with all the features on the first day, how is the battery holding up?
 
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