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S III Battery use

liteon163 said:
As for the guy using 95% in 9 hours, how bright do you have your screen?

And stop using Task Killer. It sort of helped on Gingerbread and earlier versions of Android, but ICS is quite adept at managing its own tasks. Also make sure you don't have too many apps updating in the background.

I don't understand how, but it appears that you aren't on 3G, LTE, or wi-fi. Maybe this has something to do with your battery's charge draining so quickly.
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My brightness was set at about 70% today because i was outdoors most of the day and had to see it in the sun. I turned off wifi and LTE since I did not need it at the time. I have sync off for all my apps so I don't think that would be a problem.
 
My phone just went from 100% to 83% in less than 2 hrs! It was mostly on standby, with wifi on. Is this normal? I have since deleted the task killer.
 

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I'm so impressed by this phone. I got some spare batteries on ebay but I do twice as well with this as I did with the Rezound. I'm a heavy user and I do great with this. I was so surprised.

I use the power saving built into the phone along with GREEN POWER PREMIUM.

Amazing how much I can do on a full battery. Sometimes I even get through a whole day and I use my phone plenty.
 
Wow, I don't know whats wrong with mine...

I've only had it two days, but with light use (getting/replying texts... using browser a bit) mine seems to be burning battery at a rate of 10% an hour. I don't even really have any apps installed yet, have Wifi off, etc.

If I am using it, with a web page open or something I can literally watch the battery drop 1% every couple of minutes. I just did a full recharge, and after an hour its down to 93%, and thats with only 6 minutes of screen use :( . Whenever I have the screen turned on, I find myself rushing to get whatever I needed to do done before the battery loses too many %, lol.

This is on Bell (Canada) with a LTE signal of 2-3 bars at home.

I hope that there is something I can do to fix this or it improves on its own. I'll do a full drain today and see what my total time is, but I have a feeling I will be lucky to get 10hr :(, and I really haven't started using it heavily yet. I will be pissed if it doesn't get at least 12 hr with moderate use since I work 12 hr shifts.

I guess I could improve it by shutting off LTE but that seems kind of stupid considering the LTE network was the main reason I bought this expensive phone over the cheaper ones without LTE.

I was going to buy a spare battery anyway so it will be interesting to see if the 2nd battery performs better than the one that came with it.
 
Have you tried adjusting your screen brightness?

Is it on Auto? Always found that not very helpful. I prefer manual control. Up when I need it up and down when I dont. I dont need autobrightness constantly using my sensors to gauge the best settings for me, using power.
 
Just turned off the auto setting... now have it on almost minimum brightness... I also made sure as soon as I got it that S-Voice wakeup command was off as well as the Smartstay.

My battery dropped 2% in the couple minutes it took me to wake up the phone, go into settings, and lower the brightness :( . Now at 90% just over 1h30 min of use, 13 min screen time :( .
 
Have had my GS3 for about a week. Using Power Saving. Have been told GPS, WiFi, Sync are battery hogs. So, turn off when not needed. Seems like doing this, I can get perhaps 2 days on a charge with reasonable calls and texts.
 
ideaman4u said:
Have had my GS3 for about a week. Using Power Saving. Have been told GPS, WiFi, Sync are battery hogs. So, turn off when not needed. Seems like doing this, I can get perhaps 2 days on a charge with reasonable calls and texts.
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If I turn off sync, will I still get automatic notifications for emails and such... If not then I will probably leave it on.

Seems kind of dumb to have a "smart phone" and then have to turn off all the features that make it "smart".
 
alexander323bc said:
This is about right for me. I get about 12 hours of my battery. Keep in mind when you streaming Pandora your using 4g. So even thought your using the same amount of data as you did with 3g its at much higher bandwidth so your using more battery. The thing that kills my battery the most is the Face Book app. I could be wrong but this is how it was explained to me
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Facebook on my phone shows that it uses a lot of battery power on my phone as well, its usually one of the highest on my list. But when I stream music I ONLY do it over WIFI. My numbers are with everything turned off besides data.
 
If I keep mine on 3G, battery life is awesome. On 4G, it's constantly switching between 3G and 4G when I'm at home or work due to being deep inside a condo or warehouse.
 
I think theres definitely something up with mine...

Since the last time I posted, I've been walking around with the phone in my pocket in a LTE area, I didn't get any texts, get any calls, or even use it for browsing. Only time I took the phone out was a few times to check the clock. Left the house with 80% and about 2h use. Pulled the phone out to check the time a couple hours later and its at 68% when all it had been doing was sitting in my pocket on standby.

The battery seems to be draining very fast... Its now at 40% after 7h... but only 26 min of screen use in that time, and I really haven't been doing anything with it. When I am using the phone, just browsing the internet, it seems to be draining by 1% every 2 minutes, pretty unacceptable.

Really annoying. Phone seems to be warmer than it should be too (when just on my pocket on standby).

Anyone know what the issue could be? Bad battery or phone? I already returned one GS3 (crooked screen) and it was the biggest hassle in the world dealing with my provider to replace the phone, I DON'T wanna deal with that again. I only had the crooked screen one for about 4 days and never really checked the battery on it (the wall charger was broken too so I had to charge it off the PC and never really got it to 100% cause it took forever).

I just got out of an iPhone 3GS and as much as I love these GS3s I've been having more issues in 1 week with two different phones than I did in 2 years with the 3GS. Impressed with the capabilities, not impressed with quality control.

My suggestion to people considering this phone is to make sure the store you get it from has an easy return policy because it may take a few tries before you get a good one. 0 for 2 here.

If this doesn't improve in a few days I'm going to try getting a new Samsung battery and see if that fixes it. If that doesn't work I am going to have to buy one of those awkward giant 4800mah batteries that turns the phone into a brick before I get the battery life that some of you on here are getting.
 
crazyp05 said:
I think theres definitely something up with mine...

Since the last time I posted, I've been walking around with the phone in my pocket in a LTE area, I didn't get any texts, get any calls, or even use it for browsing. Only time I took the phone out was a few times to check the clock. Left the house with 80% and about 2h use. Pulled the phone out to check the time a couple hours later and its at 68% when all it had been doing was sitting in my pocket on standby.

The battery seems to be draining very fast... Its now at 40% after 7h... but only 26 min of screen use in that time, and I really haven't been doing anything with it. When I am using the phone, just browsing the internet, it seems to be draining by 1% a minute.

Really annoying. Phone seems to be warmer than it should be too (when just on my pocket on standby).

Anyone know what the issue could be? Bad battery or phone? I already returned one GS3 (crooked screen) and it was the biggest hassle in the world dealing with my provider to replace the phone, I DON'T wanna deal with that again. I only had the crooked screen one for about 4 days and never really checked the battery on it (the wall charger was broken too so I had to charge it off the PC and never really got it to 100% cause it took forever).

I just got out of an iPhone 3GS and as much as I love these GS3s I've been having more issues in 1 week with two different phones than I did in 2 years with the 3GS. Impressed with the capabilities, not impressed with quality control.
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Do you turn your wifi and 4G off?
 
THE W said:
Do you turn your wifi and 4G off?
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Wifi is off...

So far I haven't tried turning 4G off. I may do that over the next few days if it doesn't get better. I just hate the fact that it seems like I have to turn off all this phones selling points to get reasonable battery life.
 
Ok, how about this. If you are basically on your phone since you got up texting, facebooking, voxer, news apps.....in other words being tied to your phone, how long should it last. I seem to get 4-5 hrs out of it on those kinda days. My friend just got one and reported the same.
I'll have 100% in the am, mess with it for 30 mins or so then it sits in my truck for most of the day with me checking in 4-5 times and the battery is still pretty low by the time I get home at around 5 pm. It's better than my old Infuse for sure but I was kinda expecting the battery life to impress the hell out of me due to how ICS handles itself etc.
 
I turn wifi off while away from home and try to remember to clear the RAM every morning. I don't use battery saver mode....mainly because I assume it will monkey with my screen brightness and I hate that. Guess I could turn that on when the phone is not in use but it just feels like I shouldn't have to.

Note, I had an iphone 4 and got about the same battery life from it when I was tied to the phone.
 
How many of the people who are getting 13+ hrs of battery life are on LTE?

From what I've been reading it seems like a lot of the people reporting fast battery drains are on LTE networks... I will try turning that off over the next few days.
 
crazyp05 said:
Wifi is off...

So far I haven't tried turning 4G off. I may do that over the next few days if it doesn't get better. I just hate the fact that it seems like I have to turn off all this phones selling points to get reasonable battery life.
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4G is a battery killer no matter what phone you get. You only have to switch it off when you're not using the phone.
 
crazyp05 said:
How many of the people who are getting 13+ hrs of battery life are on LTE?

From what I've been reading it seems like a lot of the people reporting fast battery drains are on LTE networks... I will try turning that off over the next few days.
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Im on LTE myself and the battery life is pretty trash. Someone posted settings to disable lte and I tried it and it works but the issue is that sometimes it will drop the signal and reconnect quite often. Pretty annoying. Im about to just learn to live with it.

A friend of mine has the phone as well and I ask him how long is your battery lasting and he tells me two days, Im wayyyy more tech savy than him so I know he hasnt disabled anything and I have everything turned off and my battery still sucks.

Im not sure how often these two day people actually use their phones though, I pretty much stay on my phone at work or not. But still when I wake up in the middle of the night and take the phone off of the charger (at 100 percent) go back to sleep and wake up 3 hours later with 94 percent battery its a little annoying.
 
I do not have 4G in my area and I don't do Facebook. I keep the WiFi on when at home. Have a couple weather widgets going, ScoreMobile, calander and music widgets on my home screens. Yesterday in 24 hours my battery was down to 42% with about 2 1/2 hours of screen time, 10 min of calls and basic texting, email, internet ect.
 
For all you people having issues, it might actually help if you went into the phone settings, select battery, and tell us the top battery users (or even post a screen shot).
 
ylexot said:
For all you people having issues, it might actually help if you went into the phone settings, select battery, and tell us the top battery users (or even post a screen shot).
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Mine is standby by far (which I know is a bug).

2nd biggest use is screen, but I still don't get why my phone will be dropping at least 10% an hour with under 30 min of screen use.

Will get some screenshots over the next few days.
 
@above 10% an hour? Yikes!

Mine usually drops at a rate of 5% per hour on standby with Wifi/GPS/4G off.
Battery life on this phone is great!! (And coming from a Razr Maxx, that's saying something!)
 
My replacement phone's battery life totally sucks. Its been 7 hours and I am at 40 percent with my old phone I would be 10-15% higher. Something is askew :(
 
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