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

Should I stay or should I go?

S

Scram

Lurker
Last week I took the proverbial giant leap (for me), small step (for mankind). That is, I ditched my trusty old iPhone 4 and bought a SGS3.

My reasoning was this: SGS3 is cheaper than iPhone 5, it has a bigger screen, it's more powerful, and app/developer support is no longer a factor.

For a few hours after I unpacked and started using the phone I was quite satisfied. However, the warning bell started ringing when my battery depleted from 70% to 25% in one evening. "Must be an Android gimmick", I thought, and went ahead to disable or uninstall 90% of the bloatware.

That has improved the situation somewhat, but I still see a 20% battery drain overnight, with WiFi, GPS and push disabled.

A that point I started wondering whether jumping the iPhone ship was the right decision. My 2 year old iPhone 4 did 2-3 days on a single charge with 3g, WiFi, push and email fetching every 30 minutes, and perhaps 10-12 hours of active use on a single charge. I suspect iPhone 5 would show comparable battery performance.

So the question at hand is: why should I keep my SGS3 and keep playing the "whack-a-mole" game with the software, trying to figure out why the battery drains so quickly without any apparent reason, when I can pay just a little more and get an iPhone 5 which I'll be able to use for far longer and with more network features enabled?

The worst thing is, I genuinely like my SGS3. It's a fantastic phone but I simply don't want/need a smartphone that needs to be charged every night.
 
Which carrier is the phone on ?

Look on XDA, there is a thread for an app called BetterBatteryStats you can download the app from there and it will help you find out what is whacking the battery, lots of good info in the thread itself.

Some US carrier firmwares seem to hit the phone harder than stock, but its worth looking to see if its something simple.
 
The carrier is Telenor (Norway).

Just to explain what I'm used to in a smartphone: prior to SGS3, my iPhone has always had full iCloud sync (email, calendar, contacts & notes), 2xPOP email accounts on 30minute fetch, 3G, WiFi (always on, setup to automatically connect to my home and work network, which is close to 18 hours a day in total), push notifications and location services. I always have anywhere between 6 and 9 apps I always use open in the background. I don't do any gaming, but I do use Mail, Safari, Twitter, Alien Blue (reddit client), and Kindle a lot. I also listen to music through Spotify for maybe 2-3 hours every day.

Having said that, I've never had to charge the iPhone 4 more than once every two days.

That is what I am used to, and I have certainly expected better from a modern flagship smartphone :(

I've downloaded and installed BBS and will see if it will allow me to improve the situation. I still have a week to return the phone, so I'm not in a hurry, but I would much rather keep it than have to use iPhone again.

I was also pondering the possibility of nuking the default SGS3 firmware altogether to make sure I have no useless bloatware on my phone. That is, installing stock Android 4.1, or maybe some other ROM. Is that possible to do on SGS3?
 
20% overnight is nothing strange and instead of lettign it sit doing nothing, you could just as well charge it overnight and not worry about itthe whole following day.
 
It gets much better with time as the software learns your battery capability. I've had mine since July and I now get over two days on a charge. The early days are rough with all the playing I did on the phone and the software not being optimized, but it does get much better.
 
Like you, I switched from an iPhone to the S3. I'm still kind of on the fence about the decision- I like the extra features and powers of an open operating system, but I do miss the elegance and simplicity of the iOS.

That said, I had battery problems similar to yours when I first got mine- my battery would run out during the day, going from a full charge in the morning to about 6% by the late afternoon- when I was hardly using it. I took the phone back fully intending to exchange it for an iPhone 5... but the clerk at the store suggested that I let him replace the battery, first.

Sure enough, that did the trick. My S3 now easily lasts all day long.

You might want to try that before you give up.
 
Scram said:
Last week I took the proverbial giant leap (for me), small step (for mankind). That is, I ditched my trusty old iPhone 4 and bought a SGS3.

My reasoning was this: SGS3 is cheaper than iPhone 5, it has a bigger screen, it's more powerful, and app/developer support is no longer a factor.

For a few hours after I unpacked and started using the phone I was quite satisfied. However, the warning bell started ringing when my battery depleted from 70% to 25% in one evening. "Must be an Android gimmick", I thought, and went ahead to disable or uninstall 90% of the bloatware.

That has improved the situation somewhat, but I still see a 20% battery drain overnight, with WiFi, GPS and push disabled.

A that point I started wondering whether jumping the iPhone ship was the right decision. My 2 year old iPhone 4 did 2-3 days on a single charge with 3g, WiFi, push and email fetching every 30 minutes, and perhaps 10-12 hours of active use on a single charge. I suspect iPhone 5 would show comparable battery performance.

So the question at hand is: why should I keep my SGS3 and keep playing the "whack-a-mole" game with the software, trying to figure out why the battery drains so quickly without any apparent reason, when I can pay just a little more and get an iPhone 5 which I'll be able to use for far longer and with more network features enabled?

The worst thing is, I genuinely like my SGS3. It's a fantastic phone but I simply don't want/need a smartphone that needs to be charged every night.
Click to expand...

Unless you never turn your screen on (read: use your phone) for 2-3 days, I call BS on your iPhone battery lasting that long. Charge your phone nightly like everyone else does and it'll be a non-issue.
 
First, as was suggested, get battery metrics to see what is actually using that much power. You don't want to ditch the phone or battery if you have a renegade app. CPU Spy app is nice for showing how much time your CPU spent in each frequency/deep sleep. If it isn't sleeping, find the app that's wakelocking it.

Finally, ensure the battery gauge is calibrated: on a full charge, erase battery stats, reboot, leave phone unplugged until it completely runs out of power; place on charger, power on, and leave it there until it is fully charged.
 
Szadzik said:
20% overnight is nothing strange and instead of lettign it sit doing nothing, you could just as well charge it overnight and not worry about itthe whole following day.
Click to expand...

i think 20% battery consumption is too high over 7 or 8 hours of screen off, but i am a minimalist when it comes to apps and probably have fewer things sending and receiving data than most. after two weeks, i've seen about a 6-8% drop over ~7 hours during the night, and if i use the phone for 5-10 minutes when i wake up, the battery settles at about 10% lower than when i went to sleep.

so far, so good.
 
I don't have any renegade apps. I have disabled all the Samsung bloatware, and I didn't install anything beyond popular apps such as Chrome, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Skype and Kindle.

After charging my phone overnight, this is what my battery screen looked like before I went to bed the same day:

dldTU.png


And mind you, I used the phone a lot less that day than usual. I also didn't have any email configured at all (as opposed to 3 accounts on my iPhone) and had the display set to only 50% brightness (~75% on iphone).

And that's just not good enough. When I buy an Apple phone, I expect it to just work. When I decided to make the jump to Android I expected there to be some problems, but never for one second I thought that I'd have to jump through so many hoops only to get my battery life to half of what my 2 year old iPhone showed with much more use.

Galaxy S3 is a fantastic phone and I honestly wish I could keep it, but 20 hours of battery life is just not good enough for me. It doesn't really matter if it's a hardware or a software problem, I just need a phone that does what I want and does not require recharging every day.

Unfortunately S3 is not that phone, so it looks like I'll have to go :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom