S3 Battery Drain Thread - 1) False Cell Standby report 2) Standby Drain

[kasper007]

My battery has been getting killed since jelly bean....When I go to check whats using battery, I see "screen" then "media" then "SD card" and my phone gets awfully hot as well. Can anyone tell me what thats about?

 

[Samsparkin]

Since jellybean update my battery drain has become very bad. Version 4.1.1. Wish I had remained with ics. One thing u can do is turn Google Now off. Keep the home button pressed to access. Go in settings n turn it off. If u wanna keep Google now on, turn off Google location settings found in privacy settings. This keeps searching for ur location. U can turn off location in maps too. Rest of the things have been stated in earlier posts very well by others.

 

[Samsparkin]

Despite the Samsung Galaxy S III shipping with a very respectable 2,100 mAh battery, it isn

 

[fmzd]

When I first got the phone I noticed that I was barely getting through the day on a full charge. I blamed that to the fact that I was 'playing' a lot with my new toy. Trying things out, researching and downloading apps, etc. After about a week, I went into a more 'steady' usage and I also had adjusted a few things (not really looking at energy consumption improvement only, but it was part of it) and I saw a significant improvement. At least, I would be able to leave my phone disconnected through the night, after a full day of usage without recharging, and it would still have energy in the morning. I had a feeling that one adjustment that helped was leaving my brightness selector in manual, and relatively low.

I have not updated to JB.

However, since this weekend, things changed for the worse, and I am not sure what is causing it. I downloaded one app on Sunday, but I haven't used it at all. I even 'force stopped it' just to make sure it was not doing anything. But I am seeing a significant battery drain. I'll have to read this thread again to look for hints.. but.. it is frustrating that even after having been able to get out of this issue.. I am back in it...

I have noticed that the phone is warm even without using it.... so it must be something that keeps it 'running' without me really noticing it...

 

[Mar]

I have also noticed that Samsung accounts can sometimes go rogue and fail to sync. They keep trying and using up battery. The best way to deal with it if you really want to have that account active is to remove it and then readd it. Hopefully that time it will sync properly.

 

[h@ystack]

This is a fantastic thread. A huge thanks to John P and everyone else who spent time investigating this issue. I just got a GS3 a few days ago and I got really upset when I realized how poor the battery life was, especially compared to my iPhone 4. Just to give you an idea: today I ran both phones with about the same amount of usage. Both phones came off the charger around 9:30, and by 3PM, the iPhone was down to ~98% and the GS3 was down to something ~60%. This is absolutely ATROCIOUS. Both phones were in standby almost the entire time, connected to my home wifi, and I was running Easy Battery Saver on the GS3 (which turned the radios off while the screen was off, which was most of the time.)

I'd like to summarize all of our findings for the benefit of other users (as well as to confirm that I understand what's happening.)

1) Standby drain bug
In Settings > Battery, there is apparently a bug that shows "Cell standby" as consuming *much* more than it actually does. I read in another thread that apparently some Samsung software dev pulled a Michael Bolton a-la Office Space whereby they moved the decimal place over one spot, so the usage is shown as being very high. However this bug appears to be purely cosmetic, and does not actually affect the battery drain.
In my case, this value has always been at the top of the battery usage list.

2) Chrome bug
There is apparently a bug in Chrome that causes extra battery drain when a specific option is set. To fix this (other than uninstalling Chrome), run Chrome, press the menu key, Settings > Developer Tools and uncheck Enable Tilt Scrolling.
In my case, I had this enabled, so I just disabled it.

3) Samsung services
According to John P (post 70 in this thread, link here) he found a big culprit: the native Samsung apps. He force-stopped 4 Samsung apps (services?) and he found that after a week's worth of use, his battery life is fantastic. Other users in this thread have confirmed this seems to work well.
I'm going to try this tomorrow.

4) LTE consumption
According to yogi799's findings, as discussed in this thread and his own thread, LTE sucks up significantly more juice than wifi, so if your phone is on LTE it will draw more power than if it's just on wifi. The solution to this is to go into Settings > More settings > Mobile networks > Network mode and choose "GMS/HSPA (Auto mode)". This will allow your phone to use 4G, but not LTE (which I guess is 4.5G.)
In my case (and I'm sure most other people) the default is "GMS/HSPA/LTE (Auto mode)" which will allow the phone to use LTE. But I was on wifi all day, so I'm not sure if this affected me. However I changed the option as described above so we'll see.

Someone, please read through this to make sure I got everything correct, and please add on if I've missed something.

I have done the above, and I will be testing out the phone over the next few days, and report back.

After spending time reading this entire thread, I realize this should be the first post in this thread. Lots of people not reading and just typing.

 

[h@ystack]

Although it has only been a couple of days, I wanted to report the massive difference in my phone battery life.

The first couple of nights I had this phone it was plugged in, so I didn't know the difference. A few nights ago, it was at about 50%, so I didn't plug it in. My gf said she heard the battery warning beep around 3 am. We left it off the charger the next night and I lost 40% over night. We plugged it in the next day, and I unplugged it around 5 30 am. I went to pick it up to leave for work at 730 am and it was already at 85%. (after only 2 hours of non usage, sitting on my night stand)

All this while in sleep mode.

I see a lot of you offering up the standard suggestions of wi-fi on/off, screen brightness, blah blah blah blah. As has been stated in this thread already, ad nauseum, that is not the issue. We are not talking about losing battery power while using the phone, that is obvious (to most, at least).

The Samsung cloud accounts were my direct culprit. By deleting those, I lost 3% overnight. And while I usually lose about 80% while at work for 10 hours or so, that was not the case at all yesterday either. I am in a low service, no wi-fi area as well.

I offered this suggestion up to my gf. She has had her phone for a couple of months, and today she is reporting massive changes in her battery. So, apparently, these Samsung account don't only impact sleep mode.

I also offered this up to my neighbor here at work, and he said his battery is hardly dropping at all today.

Granted, this is only a couple of days worth of "experimenting" for me, but I've never seen such a direct impact on a phone life. I have had 5 smart phones from various makers and I tweak everything to try to get an extra hour or two out of it. But those minor, common tweaks everyone does has never had such an impact like removing these Samsung Accounts.

My phone has been unplugged since 10pm. I woke up at 7 am and started using it a bit to check facebook, and send a couple of texts. I have been at work since 8, and it is now noon. I have used facebook, Words with Friends, and had the music player running constantly. I've done some things on amazon MP3, and checked email. (don't tell my boss )

I am currently at 70% remaining. I sync nearly everything, I am on 4g LTE, but I do leave bluetooth, gps and wifi off when not in use.

Like I said, I've never seen such a dramatic change.

thank you for posting this. I am now convinced that every phone has something running in the background causing these 8-10 hours usage times that are so common.

 

[griffly16]

Great thread. I've had my S3 since October after years of iPhones and was a little disappointed with the battery life. I'd recently rooted and flashed my phone and tried all suggestions but still nothing seemed to improve the life of the battery - around 4% per hour drop when not being used, total life of around 16 hours with light/moderate use.

So a couple of nights ago I just did a few things to see if I could get an improvement. This is what I did. I don't know which of these helped (or didn't) but all I know is that now I have great battery life.

1) used Titanium backup to delete Samsung apps.
2) deleted my Samsung account on the phone
3) froze any apps I wasn't sure about deleting using Root App Delete
4) re-flashed to latest official 4.1.2 JB ROM using Odin
5) Charged battery to 100% and used Battery HD to do a full calibration of the battery. This took about 90 mins.
6) recharged to 100% post-recalibration

Now the Samsung apps etc have obviously re-appeared with the new ROM flash, but just wondering if something had been 'left behind' that may have caused a drain previously?? No idea if this is possible or even makes sense.

The attached picture shows the current battery level I have wifi, data on permanently, no power saver, no juicedefender running. Really pleased. I think it'll be a long time before I upgrade anything - unless the next JB release is stupendous

Edit: added battery discharge graph a couple of hours later

 

[Gnuig]

Hi All.

Thanks for a great thread... I'm reviving it since I had this exact issue beginning from last week, took me a long time to try to solve and I never really did manage to pinpoint the intruding app/process.

I was running BBStats and did find an "removed app" hogging a lot of battery, along side k9 mail (I love this app) - but as others mentioned, I think I may have screwed up some setting with folders, causing the app to run crazy... anyway, it does use more battery than other apps, especially when a lot of things get pushed/polled ( I have 4 Imap gmails running, and 3 pops - none set to poll - just doing these manually).

It could also have to do with Samsung account, as I did log in recently, but this seems more unlikely, as I also have many of the std. Samsung apps either turned off (deactivated) or unistalled via root.

Another well pointed out app, that I indeed think is to blame, is Chrome - i only just installed it recently (2-3 months ago i recall) but had since then "deactivated" in the progs, since I recall it did actually do something intrusive on my battery use then...

Anyway, to make a long story short, I decided to run CWM and install an older rom from March (and backup all my current sms/mms data - with go backup - works quite well) thus booting up with a properly running rom with all my existing apps and e-mail setting in k9 etc.. Only other fix for me, was now to activate Chrome and turn off the "tilt-on" thingy, update Chrome and all my other apps, and I'm back to expected battery use ;-)

This issue was driving me crazy, but I do believe it has to do with k9/chrome, as I still have a lot of the samsung stuff turned off, and as I mentioned some uninstalled, but I did in fact get the problem of my battery draining. BBStats also only reported k9 and the "removed app" - that could well have been chrome. Anyone?

After getting everything up and running again and updating all my apps, I'm now back to a battery drop of 41% over a 22 + hrs. period ( I hit numbers almost identical to previous poster

I hope this may inspire others to solve this issue, and it may be a good idea to keep a regular backup image of your rom for such possible crazy android situations :-o

Cheers.

Update: Added some screenshots from today ( I'm running Wanam Lite, and still on 4.1.2 - to keep the radio option etc. ;-)

 

[sgbsvw]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for this thread, it's really helped solve (well, almost) the intermittent problem with my battery life on my S3. My problem began a couple of weeks ago, and after following the instructions of almost every post in this thread I may have eliminated the problem. (Also, my phone is unrooted).

Before disabling chrome, force stopping the samsung apps and installing BBS I saw battery drains of around 6-8% an hour, and that's with power saving on. I also noticed the area around the bottom of the phone was getting pretty warm. Looking at my battery statistics, screen was taking anywhere up to 40%, cell standby 20+%, android system around 10% and device idle also around 10%. The rest was taken up by mundane apps. All syncs are turned off, screen brightness is at lowest.

The highest wakelock keeping the phone awake now is wlan_rx_wake. By turning off the WiFi, the battery life improved a lot and the time spent in deep sleep finally surpassed the time awake by a large percentage (20%). Now it just looks like some app is trying to access WiFi constantly. Facebook messenger looked as if it was the culprit, as it was using up 22% of the battery. I uninstalled it but there has been no change.

After looking into this issue, people had said to assign a static IP address to the phone. This stops the wakelock wlan_rx_wake from appearing, and now it is listed as deleted_wake_locks which takes up 27% of the kernel wakelocks.

Once again, thanks for this thread (I wanted to have an input, so it was the reason I joined these forums) and I'll keep trying to get to the bottom of my problem using the advice given here

Edit: It appears that the reason for the battery drain was due to a change in router, once I'd assigned a dedicated IP to the S3 the battery went back to normal pretty much.