[Q] Battery issues - AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-I777

I have been using my AT&T Galaxy S II for a while now, and I have run into a bit of an issue. I had been able to optimize my phone's battery to last almost 26 hours, but I don't even mind not getting that. I wouldn't mind even 20 hours at a charge. The problem is that I get intermittent times when my phone barely lasts 13 hours, even when doing nothing on it. Anyone got any thoughts??

Take a look in Settings>About Phone> Battery Usage. It should tell you what is sucking the juice.
You might want to look at what processes are running in the background too. You may have wifi/GPS/BluTooth enabled on those days... So many possibilities. Haha! Good luck!
*I also found this post over in the General Forum: [REF] Known identified battery drainers

This has almost everything to do with how you use your phone, and the conditions of your environment. If signals are weak, or you are checking email a lot, or getting a lot of texts, battery life can easily cut in half. Doing battery tests in a proverbial vacuum are the only way to really be certain, but they never represent actual use.
If you can get about 1 hour of screen time per 10-15% of your battery, you're fine.
If you can get about 1 hour per 1-2% of your battery during screen-off standby, you're fine.

Related

[Q] Question for S2 owners re: battery

Hello everyone,
A while ago (right at the launch of the S2, total coincidence) I made the transition from a "regular" cell phone to a so-called smartphone.
I took a look at the S2 and liked what I saw, but read absolutely horrible things about the battery (i.e. not being able to get through a day with it). To me, that's not an option as that means I can't rely on it and thereby defeats the purpose of a mobile phone for me.
So I looked elsewhere and got me a Motorla Defy (installed Cyanogenmod 7.1 on it). I'm happy with this phone as the battery usage is okay to me; during the week it easily lasts a whole day to 36 hours with plenty of room to spare (not going to claim a consistent 48 hours, but it could get there every now and then). It gets these easy 36 hours with the following usage pattern:
- Internet connection is always on (it switches automaticly between wifi and mobile internet depening on availability)
- a few widgets (stock quotes) are always on and refresh about once every 5 minutes
- e-mails refresh about every 5 or 10 minutes, not sure, I'd have to check
- usually facebook app is on as well in the background so I get notices when somebody sends me a message
- regular texting during the day
- a few calls every now and then, usually only a few minutes a day
- reading the news online with the browser, not constantly but checking every now and then
- general browser usage while looking for adresses or random info etc
- little to no gaming
A few days ago somebody told me that the battery problems with the S2 had lessened due to new Android updates and such. As my brother needs a new phone I was thinking on giving him mine and getting an S2 myself, if battery quality is any good.
So basicly, my questions:
1) can I expect the same battery durability of the S2 as from my Defy now that the problems are supposed to be fixed
2) can I also put Cyanogenmod on it (as I'm used to this and like it) without any battery problems
Any information or feedback in this regard is much appreciated, thank you.
Please use the Q&A Forum for questions Thanks
Moving to Q&A
No thoughts on this?
Battery use is very hard to gauge because the phone doesn't do exactly the same every day. In essence, estimates on battery life are like MPG ratings for cars: different styles and circumstances dictate usage.
Having said that, the less the screen is on, the greater the battery life, in general. If you are not happy with battery life, there is an official 2Ah battery which should yield around 20-30% extra usage.
I don't think SGS2 had any real big battery problems, or at least my set has never had big issues. Pretty much the same battery capacity since I first got mine and now with the newer firmware versions.
At the end of the end it all depends on how heavy you use your phone, how strong WIFI/3G/2G signals you obtain, running apps/widgets etc. Sure, the battery life is not great on SGS2 but it's also no worse than other mobiles with similar screen sizes.
I'm sure you can manage 24h with your usage, if not then you can always later buy the higher capacity battery which Samsung have released. It's slightly thicker but barely noticeable.
i got my s2 about a month ago with 2.3.3, battery was pretty poor at the start, wouldn't last a full day, but with some tweaking, i can now get roughly 2 and a half days use, albeit with light use. currently looking at my juice defender status in notifications, and says phone has been unplugged for 57 hours.
what i did/use.
2.3.5 stock firmware
juice defender ultimate
froze wifi sharing, ap mobile, social hub with Titanium Backup
screen brightness down to about 20%
turn off wifi when not needed
Basicly, what I'm wondering about is whether, given the use above, I could unplug my phone at 6am on friday to go to work, and only have to plug it in again at 8am on saturday with room to spare for any unforseen circumstances
Seems I finally found the question to which no answer can be found on the internet

[Q] Battery life

Well, this question is for my lucky friends who have their new toys
Battery life is so good?
Post your test here!
Don't have screens for ya but battery life is more than adequate. My gf and I used it for about 5 hrs last night and it dropped to about 45%
(Games, xda, Netflix, and just tinkering around)
I'm curious what kind of battery life you folks are seeing, now that you all have had time to get some real world experience with the NT.
Thanks!
10 hours of continuous usage with 25% brightness.
Sent from my HTC Mecha using Tapatalk
Yea, the battery life and responsiveness of the device is definitely top notch.
I'm pissed as hell the bootloader is locked, but this device is an absolute steal for $250 bucks. Especially if you can manage to discount that price down.
Extremely responsive and awesome battery life considering I'm running max brightness and wifi 24/7.
I'm always surprised when I'm done using the Nook that it was still running. Granted, I ran it until it had only had around 20% left. But hey, if your sitting in one spot using your nook for more than ten hours, then you need to find something else to do. ^_^
Lucifus said:
... if your sitting in one spot using your nook for more than ten hours, then you need to find something else to do. ^_^
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good book, nice day, under a tree? Done that many times just reading off my PDA.
Thanks for the feedback!
The battery life is definitely adequate.
I can usually go 2 day without charging thus far. I keep brightness at ~20% or so (I can't stand brighter, it actually bothers my eyes).
I also use multi-picture-live-wallpaper and it doesn't seem to drain my battery at all.
I do some pretty heavy use of it as I am reading on it and studying for med school for probably ~6 hours at a time
Battery life is great. BN's numbers seem dead on.
Lasted the flight from San Francisco to Sydney
I'm getting around 10 or so hours of use at 2/3 brightness. Battery life is amazing on this. I charged it last night. Took it off the charger at 10am didn't touch it till 10pm tonight. It was at 99 percent then. I think it turns off wifi when it's sleeping.
Drewmungus said:
I'm getting around 10 or so hours of use at 2/3 brightness. Battery life is amazing on this. I charged it last night. Took it off the charger at 10am didn't touch it till 10pm tonight. It was at 99 percent then. I think it turns off wifi when it's sleeping.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, it definitely turns wifi off on its own when sleeping
Yeah Ill echo the comments here, battery life is absolutely superb and the responsiveness of the unit for the price is fantastic. Sadly its a case of if only B&N....to fully realize what the tablet would be capable of.
I have to agree that battery life is amazing on this thing.
I've got wifi turned off full time (to avoid updates from B&N) and the battery just seems to last forever. Granted you always use less battery when you're not going online, but still, it seems to really really last.
Frankly it's making my phone quite jealous.
Umm, my nt's battery isn't as impressive as i hoped. I use 25% brightness, wifi on, no fancy live wallpaper. I noticed for every few minutes of sjurfing, battery would drop a percentage or so. For usage of about 3hr withoit wifi, i would use up about 40 %.
Anything i could do to tune it up a bit? I do noticed amazon appstore is always running, so is clock, contact, tb, and my yahoo mail app. Any help is appreciated.
rvr350 said:
Umm, my nt's battery isn't as impressive as i hoped. I use 25% brightness, wifi on, no fancy live wallpaper. I noticed for every few minutes of sjurfing, battery would drop a percentage or so. For usage of about 3hr withoit wifi, i would use up about 40 %.
.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That sounds about what I'm getting and I'm wondering whether it's defective or not (still within return window).
edit: Probably normal - ran into some threads on B&N's boards where other people are averaging 5-7 hours. If I idle / read, I get about 1% every 8-10minutes or so so B&N's time estimates were definitely not "video," "browsing" or "games." Wifi on, installing or rebooting a few times, it drops to 5-6 hours tops between 100% and close to 0%.
My phone gets -way- more time, even reading.
the battery on this is great one of the biggest things going for it. better than my phone for sure.
For you guys with bad battery life, you might want to try better battery stats. Then check for partial wakelocks. That's usually the culprit on my phone. It seems weird some of you are getting half the battery life of the rest of us. Personally I haven't even turned wifi off at all, and also haven't turned my brightness below half.
It's in the google market, it won't show up on the nook. I downloaded it on my phone then used the app share my applications then back up to sd. Upload to dropbox. Then download it with dropbox on your nook.
Drewmungus said:
For you guys with bad battery life, you might want to try better battery stats.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I looked at this (and other battery programs), but wasn't sure what they did. Now I sort of do. I'll check it out! Wifi on definitely uses up at least 20-25%ish extra battery, and I *have* been moving a ton of stuff to/from sd cards and uninstalling and rebooting a lot, but the above did seem very short. Too bad there isn't a battery hardware test
Failing those applications it may be worth doing a full reset; Especially since most other owners are reporting MUCH better results.
Before I start nuking things around, I used BetterBatteryStats, check for partial wakelocks, and the highest % is from ActivityManager-Launch, which occupies 0.3% or 5minutes or so since I fully charged it.
Also, i noticed "Wifi Locked" is extremely high, like 89%, whereas wifi On is only 26%. What does that mean?
I'm not fully versed in how Android handles power management. So what should i be looking out for? Thanks!

Side by Side battery comparison - CleanRom 1.6.5 SP1

First of all, let me say thanks to Scott for all of his work on CleanRom. I know there has been a lot of discussion lately in his thread about battery usage. Some people are getting outstanding battery life and some people can't make it more than a few hours. I have been one of the people that can't make it more than a few hours no matter what I do. I did a clean wipe of everything before installing the ROM and have even tried to reinstall. The odd thing is my wife's phone does fantastic with this ROM. I finally decided to test things side by side lastnight. My phone should have had the clear advantage because I turned off all syncing options and froze any apps that had been downloaded just to make sure there was nothing running. Meanwhile, her phone syncs like crazy to facebook, email, etc and also has various apps running like weatherbug. I let them both sit overnight and after ~9hrs here are the stats I measured:
Battery % left : 79% (mine) vs 88% (hers)
Data used overnight: 75kb (mine) vs 744kb (hers)
Time awake: 3min 32sec (mine) vs 9 min 42sec (hers)
Time in Deep Sleep: 9hr 19mins (mine) vs 9hr 6min (hers)
Everything points to the fact that I should easily have more life left than hers. I am also attaching a couple of screenshots and the betterbatterystats files to this post. Maybe we can track down why everyone's battery life is so different. Tonight I plan to swap batterys between the phones to try to determine if my battery is the problem.
wow that's pretty good on your wife's phone but horrible for yours especially considering you turned off syncing.
I agree. I have no doubt that her phone could easily still be at 95% or more if I made all of the same adjustments to hers as I did to mine. That is why I am hoping someone on here with more knowledge about this stuff can help to determine what is going on.
It honestly might just be a faulty battery, I was having similar results with mine and my friend's phone, too. I tried multiple ROMs, Kernels, etc. But it slowly got worse and worse to the point that I would go down from 100% to 60% in little over an hour, doing nothing but listening to music with the screen off and auto-sync etc off. I bought a replacement battery, though. And this one is working just fine. You might just be having bad battery luck, or it might be your device, I know some people have returned their Rezounds because of battery life/heat problems, and the replacement generally fixes their woes.
so what did your betterybattery stats report?
Thanks for running this test. It would be very helpful to everyone if you could pinpoint this to a battery difference and I'm waiting to hear your results after the battery swap.
What helped my battery life most was to uncheck the box under "settings -> applications -> start automatically" It has something to do with a task manager. It probably wouldn't explain why your wife's phone does better but it could help both of you get better battery life.
bik- The betterbatterystats file is attached. I see a lot of activity on her phone but very little for mine. The only thing that stands out to me is I have alarmmanager waking my phone for 10 mins and she had it waking hers for only 5 mins. I am not sure exactly what alarmmanager is though.
HTGaming- Thank you for the suggestion but I have already done that as well. I think I have literally turned off everything possible on this phone because it is driving me nuts to burn through battery like this. My OG droid used to us 30% in a day max and now I burn through that in an hour if I am using the phone for anything at all. Pretty much the only thing I had running on the phone lastnight was 4g service which her phone also had.
Another thing you can do to compare the two phones is to install battery monitor widget to see what the drain is on the phones. I used to have decent battery life but ever since the update, it's been worse. The one thing I noticed is that now my phone draws more current when sleeping than it used to. The drain is consistently close to 300ma, whereas before it would be less than 200ma when sleeping.
You have to have the widget on for the monitoring to be active unless you change the preferences.
I swapped the battery's lastnight and here's the results. Hers is still clearly better than mine even though betterbatterystats shows way more activity on her phone again.
Battery % left : 84% (mine) vs 90% (hers)
Data used overnight: 279kb (mine) vs 498kb (hers)
Time awake: 5min 32sec (mine) vs 12 min 8sec (hers)
Time in Deep Sleep: 7hr 58mins (mine) vs 7hr 59min (hers)
Someone posted that they saw different PRIs on phones even after the OTA. Do your two phones have the same PRIs?
damnn thats just weird
Im starting to think that some Rezound batches are differently tweaked than others. My first Rezound had great battery, I would stream music for 5-6 hours on 4G and would still be above 60%. My last two however were completely horrible, on 4-5 hours standby it losses closed to 20% with lil to no use. Same settings/apps as my first Rez. I regret returning my first Rezound, it truly was the perfect phone.
There really has to be a reason why some come with a 3.8 V bat. opposed to a 3.7 V. HTC wouldn't just send out two different types of battery for no reason.
You are missing 1 key info in your analysis, which people always seem to leave out when talking about battery life. The screen on time. I see in in the graphs but it's hard to tell the exact number. Because of the 720p screen on our phones, that makes a big difference. When my screen is on, the phone uses up at least 600 ma/hr. That is conservative, usually it is more like 700-800. We'll assume 600 for now. That's 10 ma/minute. Based on the stock battery, that is 0.6% per minute. So having a difference in screen on time of 10 minutes will give you 6% difference in battery life.
i am also unable to go for even most of a day on one battery charge - and i have 3 extra batteries that were from ebay that dont work even that long...
i do notice it when the screen is on the most - yest i used the gps for an hour and a hlaf without plugging the phone in and my battery lasted about 3 hours after that and died....
very bad....
very interested to see if its the phone or not - great work...
I'll try to answer a couple of questions in here. I got very frustrated yesterday so I flashed an ICS rom to see how my phone did with it. It is equally as bad. This morning, I got into work with 97% life, checked my email for about 2 mins and was already down to 90%. I have the screen display set to 30% brightness too. I am amazed that people can used 2-3 hours of display and still have 70% battery after 10 hours. My screen at 30% brightness probably drains 2% per minute. I think tonight I am going to try to install one of the stock RUU's just to check and see if the OTA upgrade possibly didn't install itself correctly.
HTGaming - I will check the PRI's tonight.
Bluesnake - Both phones were purchased the same day so I would guess they are from similar if not the same batch. Both have 3.7 batteries. Infact when I first got my phone, I could have display on auto, sync everything every half hour, use the screen for random browsing throughout the day and still go home with over 70% left. Somewhere along the line my phone has developed some sort of draining problem though and no amounts of clean installs seem to fix it.
b5fan - Both phones were off the entire night. I think screen usage was maybe 10 seconds for both of them. They literally just sat there on the nightstand while we slept and mine drained 2x faster with nothing running while hers ran facebook, email etc.
I checked the PRI on both phones and they are the same. I re-ran the stock RUU tonight so I will see if that makes any difference. I highly doubt it will but I am running out of ideas.
I guess I was thrown by the screen shots. They both show some noticeable screen time.
the only other thing I could think to check is the email type, push versus pull, and the frequency.
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using Tapatalk
b5fan said:
I guess I was thrown by the screen shots. They both show some noticeable screen time.
the only other thing I could think to check is the email type, push versus pull, and the frequency.
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The screen time was probably just from me getting all of the data off in the morning like the screenshots and battery stats. Her email was on push and my email was set to not sync at all. Basically she had a fully functional phone and mine was set to do nothing which is why the battery drain is so hard to explain.
I did run the stock RUU image lastnight for my phone. I put it in airplane mode overnight and it was at 97% when I got up which is a huge improvement. I took it off airplane mode at 6am today and when I got to work at 7am, it was down to 90% so I guess I am in wait and see mode now. I have no email accounts/facebook accounts/ or anything else setup right now. It is only the stock image so there should be nothing draining battery today.
I can confirm the phone is no better now after the clean RUU install. Let it sit overnight and it was down to 80% this morning. I did not even setup any email accounts or download any apps yet. This is just the stock image from verizon.

[Q] Question about S2 battery usage

Hi everyone
So I recently got a S2, upgraded it from stock Gingerbread to stock ICS via Kies, then flashed CM9. CM9 was great, but I quickly noticed worse battery drain than that of GB. I sorted out all wakelocks, now facebook is the top one in better battery stats list and it's only 10mins in a day so I don't think that's a problem. When charging, vbus_present shows up and keeps the phone from sleeping, but that's a normal thing when the phone is plugged, right? CPUspy shows the phone is in deep sleep the majority of time I don't use it, so I assume I have no wakelock problem.
But even then, the battery still seems a bit bad. When in deep sleep with wifi and mobile data off, it would lose around 1.5% per hour; and with moderate/high use (internet with wifi or gaming), I'd be lucky to have it last 3 hours. Charging to 100% from zero takes about 3 hours.
I also tried recalibrating the battery through BC, but haven't noticed too much of a difference.
Recently I found a guide on disabling fast dormancy via the build.prop file. Still waiting for results though.
So, my questions
1, My battery usage seems normal, doesn't it? 1.5% per deep sleep hour is acceptable I guess, but 3 hours of usage seems a bit short. Too short.
2, What effects does fast dormancy have?
1) Totally unacceptable. Mine lasts at least 7-8 hours with high use..
Does your phone heat up while the heavy use ???
What brightness level do you use for the display ???
How many apps do you have that can gain internet access ???
2) By default, the Samsung Galaxy S II has Fast Dormancy support enabled. One of the goals of Fast Dormancy is to increase the battery life of a device, by limiting the amount of signaling between the phone and the cell network. But, when Fast Dormancy it is not enabled in the network and is enabled on the phone it ironically works the other way around, and actually drains more battery than before.
Luckily, Fast Dormancy can be disabled on the phone. For the Galaxy S II, do the following:
Dial *#9900#
Press “Disable Fast Dormancy“
Press “Exit“.
Easy as that!
Thanks for the suggestion I have brightness manual and at around 20%. Wifi is disabled when not used, and mobile data is always turned off unless I need it, so basically apps only get internet access when I want them to. I have also disabled sync for both google and facebook, but fb still pushes notifications to me while it's connected. Is that a major battery drain, and if yes, how to disable it?
Anyways, facebook, instagram, youtube are the only apps than can access the internet. No messengers or anything that may keep a wakelock.
My phone doesn't heat up during normal use, maybe a bit when I do some gaming (Max Payne?)
Also, *#9900# doesn't do anything on my phone. It doesn't bring up a menu or anything like that.
Bump. Guys?
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
Install BetterBatteryStats (search for it on here/Google Play), might help you nail what's causing the drain.
Yes I did, as said in my original post. After a night the highest wakelock are just around 10 minutes, and that one was facebook. Uninstalling it however had no effect.
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
Thinking logically, there's got to be something else in those stats (partial wakelocks in particular) that's causing that drain. There's no way having fast dormancy enabled/disabled is either going to cause/fix the drain you've mentioned getting '3 hours of usage'; (I can get 5 & a bit hours screen on with CM9 & variable usage/mostly 'moderate' use) given everything else you say you've tried.
Post BBS logs here if you want someone to have a look.
Edit to add - Also post a screenshot of the 2nd screen in settings/battery, the one that has history 'details' at the top, with the 'mobile network signal' bar underneath the main battery graph.
Here you go: pastebin.com/1UwicChJ
I just registered half a day ago and don't have enough posts yet to paste links, so sorry the phone was only on battery for nearly 2 hours with some light browsing and facebook, but I hope it works.
Anyway, I looked through my running processes, and dsp manager is the only non-OS process running, besides facebook. I got CM9 so it came by default. Could dspmanager be the culprit?
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
It's a new phone he's got there and I doubt it could be anything battery related itself.
I'm using CM9 nightlies and I get around 9 hours moderate use. It has been said though that a lot of these CM9 builds have battery drain and heat issues.
I use Juicedefender to help with the battery life which seems to work.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
MistahBungle said:
Edit to add - Also post a screenshot of the 2nd screen in settings/battery, the one that has history 'details' at the top, with the 'mobile network signal' bar underneath the main battery graph.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
About 1/3 of this time was on wifi browsing. The drop is much more drastic if I play games.
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
A couple of observations. There's nothing that stands right out in the BBS log. The other one is, looking at that graph you've lost ~15% over a bit under 2 hrs. The screen has been on most of the time the phone has been awake (confirmed by the BBS log) if you look at the respective bars. You've also been using WiFi for most of the time the screen has been on/phone has been awake.
Roughly speaking, going by the screenshot, you'd get ~5hrs+/- screen on time if you kept using the phone in the same way you had during that just under 2 hrs, and this is pretty much normal. I haven't had drain issues for ages, so I double checked my details on the 2nd screen of settings/battery to make sure CM9 is reporting these details accurately (screenshot attached). Certainly in my case, this screenshot reflects what my phone had been doing for the just under 5 hrs it had been off charge/since last reboot; that is, >90% of the time in idle/deep sleep. So it probably isn't CM9 reporting these details inaccurately in your case either.
The BBS log & screenshot don't illustrate the problem you talked about in your OP. Now, if I had to take a stab in the dark at what's causing problems when you do have them (and FWIW, I do believe you're having the problems you mentioned in your OP at times), in the absence of any other info, maybe your WiFi router is constantly sending the phone packets (what's been referred to as a 'dirty router' on here before) when you're connected to WiFi & not actually using it. This scenario has been known to cause relatively high levels of drain.
So to be honest with you, based on that screenshot & the BBS log, I'm not really seeing a problem.
Now, if you want to post the same again when you actually have a problem with drain similar to what you described in your OP, happy to have a look at them. But for that ~2hrs covered by the BBS log & screenshot you posted, that's pretty much normal.
MistahBungle said:
A couple of observations. There's nothing that stands right out in the BBS log. The other one is, looking at that graph you've lost ~15% over a bit under 2 hrs. The screen has been on most of the time the phone has been awake (confirmed by the BBS log) if you look at the respective bars. You've also been using WiFi for most of the time the screen has been on/phone has been awake.
Roughly speaking, going by the screenshot, you'd get ~5hrs+/- screen on time if you kept using the phone in the same way you had during that just under 2 hrs, and this is pretty much normal. I haven't had drain issues for ages, so I double checked my details on the 2nd screen of settings/battery to make sure CM9 is reporting these details accurately (screenshot attached). Certainly in my case, this screenshot reflects what my phone had been doing for the just under 5 hrs it had been off charge/since last reboot; that is, >90% of the time in idle/deep sleep. So it probably isn't CM9 reporting these details inaccurately in your case either.
The BBS log & screenshot don't illustrate the problem you talked about in your OP. Now, if I had to take a stab in the dark at what's causing problems when you do have them (and FWIW, I do believe you're having the problems you mentioned in your OP at times), in the absence of any other info, maybe your WiFi router is constantly sending the phone packets (what's been referred to as a 'dirty router' on here before) when you're connected to WiFi & not actually using it. This scenario has been known to cause relatively high levels of drain.
So to be honest with you, based on that screenshot & the BBS log, I'm not really seeing a problem.
Now, if you want to post the same again when you actually have a problem with drain similar to what you described in your OP, happy to have a look at them. But for that ~2hrs covered by the BBS log & screenshot you posted, that's pretty much normal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay, much appreciated so I guess I'll take it from your reply that 5 hours with wifi browsing isn't too bad. Seems okay, but I still find it a bit strange that (in my case) wifi browsing uses just as much battery as games do. I always thought it was a light activity!
Or maybe it wasn't the battery that had a problem, but that I set my expectations a bit too high. I came to this S2 from a BlackBerry 9700, whose battery would last half a week with very frequent use. But anyway, I just got this phone for a week, so I consider myself a pretty heavy user. Probably when I get familiar with it, I won't feel the need to play with it every five minutes and battery will last a bit longer then! xD
Nah. Anything with screen on is far from 'light activity'. Screen consumes far & away the most juice. In saying that, I've seen some people on here say they can get 8-9 hrs screen on with 2000mAh battery. How they do it I have absolutely no idea.
But if yeah, 5 hrs with the screen on most of the time whether browsing or playing games (games in particular are very CPU/GPU intensive & thus use a lot of zzzzs; unless they're really basic games like chess or similar), or anything else isn't too bad. Can you do better ? Obviously, if people say they can get 8-9 hrs. But it's not a matter of doing A, B & C and you'll magically end up with massive screen on times. Every phone is setup & used differently, and getting the absolute max out of every charge takes a lot of trial & error and experimenting with settings/setup.
There are tons of threads about the subject on here if you feel like going down that path. For me, I'm happy with the battery life I get these days because you can really obsess over it & spend a lot of time stressing over it/trying to maximise it for often very little gain. I'd rather simply use my phone a lot during the day & charge it at night.
Yeah Crackberries are like Japanese cars, they can run on fumes pretty much ;-) Having a dual core processor, a decent GPU & a huge screen kinda changes things.
There is one thing you can do fairly easily tho. And that's to make sure the phone spends as much time as possible in deep sleep when you're not using it. That will ensure that you have enough juice to get you by when you do want to use it. Simple ways to help achieve that is to turn off data/WiFi completely when you're not using it (tho many people don't like to do this for different reasons; which is perfectly OK if you're happy to live with the resultant drain), and make sure you've got no apps that are doing things they shouldn't be doing (like syncing, for example) while the phone should be sleeping. Again, there are lots of threads about same if you ever feel like a bit of light reading ;-)
So yeah, if you do find you experience drain that's not normal/outside the usual pattern you have, definitely post details & people can have a look for you. And as you said, you'll get to know what really is normal with regard to drain & so on is as you use the phone more (I tended to use it constantly for that first couple of weeks as well).
nyancatland said:
Okay, much appreciated so I guess I'll take it from your reply that 5 hours with wifi browsing isn't too bad. Seems okay, but I still find it a bit strange that (in my case) wifi browsing uses just as much battery as games do. I always thought it was a light activity!
Or maybe it wasn't the battery that had a problem, but that I set my expectations a bit too high. I came to this S2 from a BlackBerry 9700, whose battery would last half a week with very frequent use. But anyway, I just got this phone for a week, so I consider myself a pretty heavy user. Probably when I get familiar with it, I won't feel the need to play with it every five minutes and battery will last a bit longer then! xD
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Already took such measures. Wakelocks killed my battery over my first night with the phone, and I woke up after 7 hours to find a ~50% battery completely empty. Now things are alright, I clear CPUSpy stats before I sleep and wake up to around 95% of deep sleep time. Overnight drain varies between 5 and 10%.
And yes, yes you are right. Maybe I should stop going nuts. I'm checking BBS and CPUSpy every hour, reading every XDA thread on battery, and calculating my battery drainage every morning I wake up :laugh::laugh::laugh:
Re: dirty/'noisy' WiFi networks, have a look at this post as an example of what I was talking about above.
MistahBungle said:
Re: dirty/'noisy' WiFi networks, have a look at this post as an example of what I was talking about above.
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Umm...so I just woke up, and noticed a wakelock in the kernel category. It was PowerManagerService, and it occupied around half an hour. Overnight, aftet I've slept 10 hours (got a day off ), my battery came from 24% down to 13%. That's a rate of roughly 1% per hour. Is that normal? And also, what is that PowetManagerService wakelock?
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
Fantastic. Looks like you got your 10 posts That tip is about as useful as "don't plant cauliflowers in concrete".
trojans63 said:
Turn off wifi and dont play games and your batter will last longer
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Crazy Battery Life on 920

The first week I had my 920 I was lucky if the battery was at or above 40% by 12 noon. The 920 is my 2nd phone line and I am using it mostly to learn WP8, to surf the web some and listen to a lot of podcasts, usually 6+ hours of them a day. The past 4 days the battery in the 920 is showing insane runtimes. It is currently 11:30pm and it has been off the charger since 8:00am, over 15 hours with overs 8 hours of audio podcast listening. The battery is currently reading 61%. I originally got the impression that LTE was killing the battery, but that is no longer the case.
I have a Share Plan with AT&T with 2 phones, a Galaxy Nexus (GSM model from Play Store) and a Lumia 920. I use my Nexus as my main phone line, to access GMail and Google Reader (a lot of Google Reader feeds). The Nexus has been off the charger the same period of time and is showing 41%.
For me wifi destroys my battery for some reason I get 15 hours with wi-fi on or 28 with it off
Interesting, mine will usually run for 24-30 hours before hitting 15%, including regular usage. 4G gives it a whack but generally I find similar to other phones, if low coverage it chews the battery
Reading all the doom and gloom of 4G LTE on various mobile phones, after my 1st weeks experience, I was expecting similar results going forward. But, after 2 weeks of use, the battery falls in line with the results you mention. And, with that I am not complaining.
same situation here.
It looks like the phone needs some days to warm up and get long lasting.
Also I see that wp8 is heavly optimized for background task in order to not consume a lot of battery eg: my phone lasts more than 2 days with light usage.
I listen to podcast for many hours and it doesnt affect the battery that much, in fact I'm surprised by it because I know audio playing takes a load on the cpu.
Mine.. overnight without charge or using the phone it drained from 100% down to 35%. BS
Two words: Background tasks.
Make sure you don't have unnecessary background tasks running. I have less than 5 and my battery runs more than 2 days easily.
How do you kill or monitor background tasks?
I had really good battery time of 19 hours the first day of installing the new firmware, then I enabled bluetooth again and it drains like crazy. its hit or miss but people seem to think that whatsapp drains battery. I personally would like to disable LTE (its really slow in my area) and just keep bluetooth that seems to give me 12+ hrs of battery.
randy_c said:
How do you kill or monitor background tasks?
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You can block background tasks for 3rd party apps in Settings->Applications tab->Background tasks. There is no way to monitor these tasks because WP OS doesn't offer any such capability.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to block 1st party apps and if they are misbehaving (like sync something over and over), there is nothing you can do about it.
Turn on Battery Saver can also effectively kill all background tasks. But that's draconian. I still would like my smartphone do something in the background for me.
Don't forget, the biggest battery drain factor could be your cell phone signal. If you keep the phone in a fringe area, the cell radio will drain your battery very quickly while try to maintain communications with cell towers. This is outside the OS and you can't do anything about it.
I had a weird battery drain the day after the last upgrade. No apps running in the background BAR the movie that i had paused.. I lost 80% without using the phone in a 6 hour period (post charging). After a reboot it seems ok. Perhaps i should pause another movie to see if it happens again....
I must say that I have mine 2 days and the battery drains too fast... I dont know what to do .. Maybe because its new ? Some one can help me maybe ?
rotter123 said:
I must say that I have mine 2 days and the battery drains too fast... I dont know what to do .. Maybe because its new ? Some one can help me maybe ?
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Click to collapse
don't judge a phone's battery life until a week later.
foxbat121 said:
don't judge a phone's battery life until a week later.
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Click to collapse
in wp8 is 2 weeks later
My battery is pretty inconsistent. MOST of the time it's awesome, and will last like 20-25 hours without needing to charge, but that just makes it especially jarring when every now and then I go to check my phone at 4 in the afternoon and it's at critical, and I have no idea what causes it.
Plus when it does die I have to put it on the charger for like 2 hours before it will let me turn it on.
I found interesting point in the battery life today, if the screen is off, the battery drain is in the range of 3-4% which is good, however, if the screen goes on the battery drops like 15% in just 25 minutes. After thinking I tried to set the screen sensitivity to normal and it solved my problem. I kept the screen on for more than 45 minutes and the battery went down almost 6% only which is good. I still have to test more to give a concrete evidence.
Sent from my LT15i using xda app-developers app
I usually run a battery discharge app Saturday night. Then a full recharge with the phone off. That usually gives me dependable battery life of about 12 hours a day for the entire week. If I forget and not run the discharger I notice it midways into the week when I only get about 8 hours out of it.
AT&T lumia920:
after updating my phone to the 1314 update, my battery life got worse.
I went from 14 hours per day to only 8 hours.
thanks nokia -_-
note: I was not experiencing any connectivity issues on my phone.
let's see how many people here actually have NFC on and Auto-Brightness on... lol
I used the sleep app last night after charging to 100%, and then I fell asleep with it on.
I woke up to find the sounds still going, and when I checked my phone worried that I killed the charge, I found it still had 92% left. That's impressive.

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