Post Battery Life Thread!

[emmzone22]

I just spent 12hrs on 4G at a football game and still had 59% of the battery left. On my previous phone, the Droid RAZR, with the same or probably even less usage (I had to baby the battery), and only using 3G, my phone would have been completely dead.

 

[alostpacket]

Day 2 on my phone and I went from 6am to about 2pm before I got the first low battery notification. Not impressed at all. That was with moderate web browsing and maybe two phone calls. Was on WiFi most of the time too. Screen seemed to be the biggest draw. Are you guys doing anything special to get these results?

RADIO

"Moderate" web usage can be deceptive.

Because of the way the radio works, it is possible, depending on what "moderate" means, that you will end up using battery as if you were using it more heavily.

Every time the radio wakes up to connect and transfer data it goes into a High power mode and has what they call a "long tail" in which it stays in high power mode, then goes into a low power mode, then goes into standby. This can take about 5 minutes from your last data transfer.

So if you were to perform a data transfer every 5 minutes, you would never let the radio go back into standby mode.

That, and being on WiFi, Chrome defaults to pre-loading pages it thinks you might click. (You can change this in Chrome's settings).

Also, if you ever have a weak radio signal, your device will often increase the power to the radio to struggle to get a good signal. This is true for WiFi and cell radios.

Sometimes disabling background sync can help avoid apps that misbehave and load data in the background periodically. But I generally prefer to have background sync on.

SCREEN

And of course it depends on your screen brightness, the colors of your wallpaper, and colors of the pages you visit.

Pure black uses no power on a AMOLED, but some colors like greens (I think) and even dark greys, can sometimes use more power than an LCD, depending on the color.

One thing to do would be to set your brightness to low or medium and see if that helps. It might be that your device is too aggressively increasing brightness because you are in a bright room or such.

Hope that helps

 

[blumeany]

Well, today I tried taking my Exchange email off of push (just did every 5 minutes) and set my screen brightness to low from Auto. Unplugged my charger at about 6:30am today and it is now 10:43am and I just got the 15% battery warning.

Noteable apps:

Tweetcaster
Facebook
Google+
Exchange Email
Gmail

Current battery stats (TOP 3):
Screen 26%
Wi-Fi 22%
Android OS 21%

Before I made those changes, Screen was by far the worst culprit.

I'm running off of WiFi at home. Did just notice that my WiFi wasn't on at work just now, but usually it is. Regardless, not sure why phone is running so hot all the time while on 4g. Any way to improve the radio outside of rooting and replacing it?

 

[alostpacket]

Wi-Fi 22%
Android OS 21%

Those are waaaay too high. Do you have weak WiFi signal? Congested WiFi area? Weak 4G/cell/etc?

Something is keeping the radio on.

today I tried taking my Exchange email off of push (just did every 5 minutes)

This will kill your battery in no time because it keeps the radio from going into low-power, then standby. Push is far superior. Better (than 5 min pull) would be every 30 mins or every hour. Every 5 mins keeps your radio in high power mode almost constantly.

Tweetcaster may be wasting your battery as well. Not sure about G+, do you actively use it a lot? It shouldn't be high on the list.

 

[shalemail]

Well I am 6 days in. So far so good. I get easily through a day with the X. I have Wifi at home and at work so that certainly helps but even over the weekend while I was out and about I still had all day battery life.

Screen on a reasonable brightness, vine videos, playing with the camera - taking pics, YouTube, tracking baseball and football scores, still playing with settings on the phone, changing wall papers and ringers, still downloading apps, still working on different set ups ... etc. Off charger at 7am still have like 30% after 11pm when I go to hook it up to the charger.

Tried hard Friday to run it all the way to 0% but I was tired and only made it to about 22% lol gave up and plugged it in and went to bed.

 

[blumeany]

Those are waaaay too high. Do you have weak WiFi signal? Congested WiFi area? Weak 4G/cell/etc?

Something is keeping the radio on.

This will kill your battery in no time because it keeps the radio from going into low-power, then standby. Push is far superior. Better (than 5 min pull) would be every 30 mins or every hour. Every 5 mins keeps your radio in high power mode almost constantly.

Tweetcaster may be wasting your battery as well. Not sure about G+, do you actively use it a lot? It shouldn't be high on the list.

Ok, put it back on Push.

I think I might have found part of the problem. I had the charger that came with the phone at work. At home, I have been using the charger from my old phone. Yesterday, I did a full charge at work and my battery life has seen a marked improvement. I haven't plugged it in since about 4pm yesterday and I'm currently at 54%. Even left the phone on overnight (although I've got the nighttime assist settings on, so it shouldn't have been doing too much.). We'll see how long it can go today.

I'm usually on Wifi for most of the day, either at home or at work. Really only use 4G when I'm driving or in cases where I'm in an area that he Wifi isn't strong enough.

This morning, Android OS is at 28%, Screen is at 21%, WiFi is at 17%, Phone idle 10%, and Google Services 7%.

Was thinking of adjusting or ditching Tweetcaster, but I'm not sure the official Twitter app will be much better.

 

[doogald]

This morning, Android OS is at 28%, Screen is at 21%, WiFi is at 17%, Phone idle 10%, and Google Services 7%.

This is pretty much what my phone does. Sometimes Plume (twitter client) sneaks in there; usually cell standby is in there. Android OS use I am sure is mostly active notifications, touchless control listening, and background updates.

 

[krouget]

Here are my battery stats from average usage over the weekend, mostly on wifi. The active notifications really do change how the phone is used, and make a lot of sense. I remember when purchasing decisions were partially hinged on a notification light-- which means this will really limit my options, if other makes don't reproduce this feature.

Also, these stats are with auto-brightness on and everything running as a smartphone should, which includes Google Now (infamous for nuking battery on my GNex). Battery saver is on, but I don't notice any difference in performance, so whatever it's doing, it's invisible to me. LTE doesn't seem to hinder it much, either, since the radios and reception are usually right on. Based on my estimates, I should be able to get over four hours of screen time with this device, and a fair bit more if I consciously adjust it for battery savings. For now, I just need it get me through my waking hours, which it does.