Hi,
my carrier Three UK only has a 3g network hence so switching off 3g is no possible for me. When at home I always connect to my wifi automatically using a tasker profile and my battery can last over the whole weekend with moderate use. However, when I am out or at work without access to wifi my battery can drain more than 60% in a matter of 10 hours, although I use a Tasker profile which only turns on autosync every hour for just 2 minutes. I could turn of background data completely, but to me that would defeat the point of having apps like gtalk, skype etcv on your phone.
What's your experience of battery life on wifi and 3g?
I have my atrix on Orange UK. I get round about the same battery if i have my phone on 3G and most of the time it says H. I can get much more time on wifi but not the whole weekend because i use it more heavily i guess. Although it also depends what rom your using…stock roms are pretty pathetic on battery life due to blur. I was using joker's cm9 and even though i had 3g on whole day my battery lasted 2 days.
urbik78 said:
Hi,
my carrier Three UK only has a 3g network hence so switching off 3g is no possible for me. When at home I always connect to my wifi automatically using a tasker profile and my battery can last over the whole weekend with moderate use. However, when I am out or at work without access to wifi my battery can drain more than 60% in a matter of 10 hours, although I use a Tasker profile which only turns on autosync every hour for just 2 minutes. I could turn of background data completely, but to me that would defeat the point of having apps like gtalk, skype etcv on your phone.
What's your experience of battery life on wifi and 3g?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For me, much better battery life on wifi (40-48 hours in weekend on wifi vs 30-36 hours in work days on edge/3G).
When your device is connected to Wi-Fi, then it will consume less battery as it needs less 'juice' to receive data from a Wi-Fi network than a cellular network.
However, if you are on 3G, but have Wi-Fi enabled, then your phone will consume more battery than with Wi-Fi disabled as the phone frequently scans for Wi-Fi networks. The scan time is configurable and stock ROM and CM7 scan every 30 seconds, whereas Neutrino ROM scans every 2 minutes. This means that Neutrino will have slightly better battery with Wi-Fi always enabled as it scans 4x less than normal.
To configure the scan time, you'll have to edit the build.prop.
Regarding your Tasker profile, it's the same thing. Tasker needs to 'detect' when Wi-Fi is on/off and scan for networks in accordance to your personal settings. Therefore it'll still consume battery while it scans and detects.
This brings in the issue of whether it'll be better to use Tasker profiles, or to keep Wi-Fi always enabled and the result will differ for every person depending on the Wi-Fi scan time, or the complications of the Tasker profile.
But putting complications aside, Wi-Fi consumes less battery than 3G, but only when connected.
Related
Heya all.
I'd like to know is there some android application that can control my 2G/3G settings based on a rule (something like AutomateIt, which does not do that) so that it stops my phone from trying to connect to 3G network when signal is low or lost?
Let me explain - I go twice a week to a gym which is actually in the basement of a building, and my carrier's network is very weak there, mostly no signal at all.
During those 2hrs period I've noticed that my battery drainage is larger than when I'm in the reach of the network.
Since I know that cell phones tries to log-on to the network using maximum power, and that 3G uses more juice than 2G, I concluded that my phone is trying to reconnect to 3G network when it looses signal instead of doing nothing.
Now, I don't exactly know how phones in general behave when they loose signal alltogether (I think they go from 3G down to 2G and then should go into some passive, listening-only mode, waiting for the beacon from the cell tower), but I guess that in such cases it would be better for me to force the phone to go to 2G (and keep reconnecting/listening on 2G) and later on, when it detects 3G, switch back to it.
Unfortunatelly, AutomateIt does not have radio control and I can't use it like I do at night to turn off sync and data and turn it on in the morning.
Also it does not have a rule related to network signal strength/type/whatever.
I can't use some timer app that would simply turn on/off airplane mode during that period, because I might not go to the gym sometimes, or I might simply be late or leave the gym later, so I'd still have larger battery drainage, even for a short period of time.
Many words, but I hope everybody understands my problem.
Cheers.
OK is it possible that nobody knows the answer to this?
I know that 2g/3g autoswitching should do it's job but watching my power drainage I get the feeling that phone keeps trying to force 3g and that eats the battery.
Sent from my Prime
what are others thoughts on some of the pros and cons of this update? i'm thinking it will actually save battery to have wifi 'always on' in standby mode rather than repeatedly switching between a on/off state which uses more energy.
It will definitely eat more battery if it's always on under the lockscreen...
Also there is an option to deactivate notifications when new wifi hotspots are around.. if you are about battery life you should deactivate this..
Ikkari said:
It will definitely eat more battery if it's always on under the lockscreen...
Also there is an option to deactivate notifications when new wifi hotspots are around.. if you are about battery life you should deactivate this..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I keep my Wifi always on because it consumes the least battery (vs 3G, LTE, etc).
If I don't play games on my Lumia 920 the battery can last 3 days.
This update is freezing my phone Dunno why but I have tested it. I occasionally get a freeze now and then, but when the keep wifi is on, it is like every couple of hrs... Will test it more though.
Ikkari said:
It will definitely eat more battery if it's always on under the lockscreen...
Also there is an option to deactivate notifications when new wifi hotspots are around.. if you are about battery life you should deactivate this..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wrong unless your phone is using 5-year old wifi chip.
Correct me if I am wrong, but is the wifi on this phone an on demand type system? From what I see on mine, the wifi unless being used for an actual update or downloading other content goes to sleep when the lock screen is on. It then wakes up if there is an update pushed to it or if something else needs it or of course if you unlock the phone. At least that is the way it appears that mine works.
Also your radio service are going to use much more power than the wifi will as they are higher power transmitters and receivers. There is a reason wifi only works within a few hundred feet and radio works for several miles that is due to the power difference. Of course with more power you get more battery consumption.
In the case of conserving the battery you are better off to use wifi when possible, leave it on and let the phone control it.
In my experience keeping Wifi on permanently lead to a remarkable decrease in battery life. That will depend on where you are though. If I have it sitting at home where it has Wifi connectivity it's likely that I would see better battery life because all actual transfers will happen via Wifi. At work though it can't connect to the Wifi network (private phone, work network) and so I have 3G running anyway while the phone keeps looking for Wifi networks to connect to.
The problem boils down to the fact that while you can switch off Wifi completely because everything can still work using 3G you can't switch off the phone part completely because only data is done over Wifi but you still need the mobile connection to receive calls/SMS.
I would suggest to anyone to simply try out what works better for them. For me it worked best to let Wifi deactivate automatically as it had been the default in WP since WP7 came out.
foxbat121 said:
Wrong unless your phone is using 5-year old wifi chip.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe Wifi is using less power when you are downloading something and need a lot of data... But when your phone is idle... Constant on Wifi is using far more battery power than 3G that checks for email or weather every 1-2 hours...
Simple enough...if you are consistently in an area with a WiFi signal, leave WiFi "always on"...it will consume less battery. If you're in an area without WiFi signal then turn it off, as searching for a signal will help run your battery down.
Sent from my LG-E970 using Tapatalk 2
Ikkari said:
Maybe Wifi is using less power when you are downloading something and need a lot of data... But when your phone is idle... Constant on Wifi is using far more battery power than 3G that checks for email or weather every 1-2 hours...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Again, simply not true unless you are using a 5-year old phone. Even if you are in an area that has no wifi connection, the extra drain caused by searching for Wi-Fi networks is minimum in a modern OS and modern chipset. I have left all my android phones (the ones that offer Wi-Fi always on feature for a few years now) wifi on all the time. Never have felt much difference vs if I turn wifi off. It annoys me that WP didn't offer this capability for so long.
foxbat121 said:
Again, simply not true unless you are using a 5-year old phone. Even if you are in an area that has no wifi connection, the extra drain caused by searching for Wi-Fi networks is minimum in a modern OS and modern chipset. I have left all my android phones (the ones that offer Wi-Fi always on feature for a few years now) wifi on all the time. Never have felt much difference vs if I turn wifi off. It annoys me that WP didn't offer this capability for so long.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tested a lot of phones Android and WP, my experience is that wifi always on is a battery killer... And I'm talking about state of the art hardware... It's just my 2 cent's but i keep it off...
When I don't charge overnight and wifi is always on my battery drops about 40%
with only 3G on about 8-10%
Foxbat: you can leave it any way you want to do it. I'm not saying Microsoft should remove the feature. But in my experience keeping Wifi on kills the battery faster. I tested it for my use case with always on and with Auto and in the end: Auto it was for me.
The best advice you can give to people is: try it out yourself and you will see what works best for you.
A picture or two says it all. See the attached files for my two testing: one with wifi always on for 24-hour and one with Wi-Fi in auto mode for 24-hour:
The right picture shows 0.0%/hour under current discharge rate... pretty impressive
Ikkari said:
The right picture shows 0.0%/hour under current discharge rate... pretty impressive
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The keyword is 'Current' -- means at that moment. You can derive the same thing from the left in various sections. The key here is that I don't see any discernible difference. Certainly not a battery killer in any sense as you claimed.
If you look at the first 12-hour period of both chart (when the phone is mostly sleep and not used), the result is almost identical. FYI, there are three push emails connected all the time: Hotmail, GMail and Corporate Exchange Email.
Yes the keyword 'Current' -- means at that moment... so your phone is not discharging although your screen is on... Very accurate app...
Ikkari said:
Yes the keyword 'Current' -- means at that moment... so your phone is not discharging although your screen is on... Very accurate app...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So, what you saying is that if you have the screen on, you will see your battery percentage drop immediately? You should return your phone if that is the case.
Battery app get its information from the phone OS reporting. If the OS reported the same battery percentage over a short period of time, the discharge rate won't be anything other than zero. That's limitation of the platform, not app.
Instead of criticize the app which is not the point of the post, why don't you post your findings where leave Wi-Fi always on kills your battery?
it' % per hour... and your phone is using currently using 0,0% per hour so if you leave it like that it will run for ever... so where is the mistake?
Ikkari said:
it' % per hour... and your phone is using currently using 0,0% per hour so if you leave it like that it will run for ever... so where is the mistake?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
% per hour is a unit of measurement. It doesn't mean you have to take one hour to measure it in order to claim its rate. That will be average rate on that hour, not current rate which is meant to see what your current usage pattern is. It can't be used to predict your battery life. If you notice that when you take your phone off the charger, it will stay on 100% for quite some time before it starts to drop. Does that mean your phone battery can last forever? Think about it before post these ridiculous statements.
Foxbat - you are trying to tell us how our devices should behave while we are telling you how they actually behave in the real world out there. You can repeat your 5 years story as often as you want to but it clearly doesn't live up to the factual reality we experience every day and I guess after trying it out with different ROMs on the 920 and leaving all other settings the same I know the effect it had pretty well.
Nice to know though that you are having a different experience with different devices.
As many know, you can set the phone to turn wifi off when the screen is off, this means it will default to using the 3G for data. As someone with unlimited data, either or will do for me.
However, is it actually more energy efficient for it to be running off the wifi rather than 3G? I noticed when wifi is enabled always, the 3G signal is hardly used at all.
wifi should be more efficient even if you leave it on when the screen is off. the difference between long range transmission (cell) and shorter range (wifi) is big.
you can also test it out yourself. play on your phone for a few hours a day, 1 day with wifi off (completely relying on 3g) and the other day with wifi on all day. see how much power you have left.
I'm experimenting a bit to see if the Omate TS would be a usable replacement for a phone (ie if it would work well during the day to read notifications, use for sports tracking, recieve calls and such).
It started out well - when I took the watch off charging in the morning I activated the phone, WiFi, bluetooth and paired my bt headset, and turned off cell data. I played around with the phone a bit (installed an app, played with that for a few minutes, checked settings and tried some new things there for maybe 10 minutes or so, and so on). I recieved two calls that lasted about 5 minutes each, and checked mails, facebook and such a few times. After lunch the battery showed 78% remaining, which sounded very good.
I decided to take a walk, so I turned off WiFi, enabled cellular data, and turned on GPS. Listened to podcasts through BT headset for the entire walk. One hour walk with RunKeeper, where I checked mail and facebook a few times during the walk.
After returning, the battery was down a lot, to about 25%, ie 50% battery drained in one hour. I checked the battery stats, and it looked like this: (not a link as I can't post links yet due to forum restrictions): imgur.com/WPQJNd4
I'm not surprised about WiFi and BT consumption as I had those enabled and used them quite a lot during the day, but what surprised me is the cell standby adding up to almost 50% of the battery usage, most of which seemed to be drained when I enabled cell data. Is GPS drain included in cell standby as well? Is this to be expected, or what's causing the excessive drain when using cell data connection? Any tips on how to improve this?
My cell coverage during the walk was decent, as I was outdoors and had at least 3-4 bars of reception the entire time.
cell standby is also the highest drain on mine. was on 2g only as well
Sent from my C6903 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app
Mine usually says that too. Although it still easily lasts me the day with the cell on.
speedyink said:
Mine usually says that too. Although it still easily lasts me the day with the cell on.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I get about 2 days of battery with emails only, light apps use. 3g and wifi on, no bluetooth connected, zero calls.
8 calls, some messages, BT always on with headset, on 2G GSM, light app usage with brightness on min and i ended on 4th day still with 40%battery left.
sethxp said:
8 calls, some messages, BT always on with headset, on 2G GSM, light app usage with brightness on min and i ended on 4th day still with 40%battery left.
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Click to collapse
That's quite impressive!
I tried again today, took watch of charger when leaving for work. 1 call, 10-15 minutes of "play" (installed an app, changed some settings, re-arranged some icons and such). BT with headset, WiFi and phone enabled all day, mobile data connection off. Recieved quite a few notifications during the day that I checked briefly, but other than that quite idle. When leaving the office at the end of the day I had 52% battery remaining.
Not too bad, but out of that the cell standby and phone idle together consumed half of my battery. Reception is ok, ranging from 2 bars to full (goes a bit up and down). I can't complain about the wifi / bt / screen battery drain, seems the phone standby is the only major battery hog for me.
Cell Standby is a battery hog for me too : about 10% an hour. Cell signal is good. Will try now to disable the mobile data to see if it helps.
P_
sethxp said:
8 calls, some messages, BT always on with headset, on 2G GSM, light app usage with brightness on min and i ended on 4th day still with 40%battery left.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's amazing, what is your setup (hw revision, firmware, settings, etc)?
Disabling cell, wifi, bt, gps, lowest brightness on modified stock (the 2014 testing as a base, ensec, xposed) and I can just make it barely back home on 2nd day with light usage (check the time mostly).
In comparison, my Pebble gets to 30-40% on the 4th day and will die out completely by the 6th day.
Even though the cell standby seems to drain a ton of battery, overall it's acceptable. For normal usage (WiFi on, BT on, paired with headset, phone on, a few widgets and apps that are pulling info from the web, receiving a couple of notifications per hour, checking time/notifications a few times, making a few calls and such) I seem to average about 6-8% per hour. Half of that is for the cell standby, so turning the phone off would probably double my battery life.
I know there are a number of "battery saving apps" out there that modify settings and behavior to save power. Mostly stuff like turn wifi off when screen is off, enabling it once every few minutes to check notifications, and similar. Anyone know if these apps can tune the phone power consumption in any way?
stingray454 said:
Even though the cell standby seems to drain a ton of battery, overall it's acceptable. For normal usage (WiFi on, BT on, paired with headset, phone on, a few widgets and apps that are pulling info from the web, receiving a couple of notifications per hour, checking time/notifications a few times, making a few calls and such) I seem to average about 6-8% per hour. Half of that is for the cell standby, so turning the phone off would probably double my battery life.
I know there are a number of "battery saving apps" out there that modify settings and behavior to save power. Mostly stuff like turn wifi off when screen is off, enabling it once every few minutes to check notifications, and similar. Anyone know if these apps can tune the phone power consumption in any way?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I started running Deep Sleep Battery Saver as I had prior experience with it working well on an SII as a set it and forget application, where other similar programs require much more customisation. keep in mind my omate is not a daily driver, it spends half the week on the charger and the other half on my wrist, and I only use a sim card in their sparingly. as such, I don't have proper data, but I've definitely been able to make it through the day with light usage, occasionally forgetting to recharge until the next day
I think there may be something wrong with either the battery or the circuitry which monitors and reports on the status. I can watch an hour long video with negligable 4% battery loss one day, and another day a similar video draining over 20%.
Certainly with all the radios switched off and very light usage my TS was on 92% well into it's 2nd day...
However soon as you use it... it gets murdered.... lol....
From wednesday till now, few calls, bluetooth on, some texts, very light usage.
sethxp said:
From wednesday till now, few calls, bluetooth on, some texts, very light usage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Still amazing! Which model hardware do you have? what rom? are you running any additional apps or just what's default? I'd love to replicate your setup on my 1/8 1900
--fg
Truesmart, EU 512-4 2100 working sensors firmware with patch, removed some bloatware, all auto sync off (manual), switched to 2G gsm only, brightness to min, bluetooth always on because crappy mic. Additional apps:facebook, my budget book, hangouts, es file, airdroid, quikpic, teamviewer...
Hi
I have a twin-sim and dont really need BT or WIFI connection.
But what use the most power? Bluetooth, wifi or mobile data?
Good question. I would think cellular or WiFi if you can adjust the max data rate.
Mobile data
Wifi
Bt
In that order
3kgt said:
Mobile data
Wifi
Bt
In that order
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So basically BT saves the battery most.
But, if you leave phone on desk all day and do many trips around the building the phone and watch connects and disconnects several times a day.
Dont you think that would use large amounts of battery, both on phone and watch?
I have the same problem. I'm wandering around a lot but my phone stays in one place. I'm getting out of the Bluetooth range which triggers Cellular Auto On. Than, switches on data connection, than sending data to Samsung account to tell that I'm out of the range just to divert all notifications/calls. Sometimes before all that process is done I'm coming back
At this stage I can only guess that it's draining battery a lot.
In theory, power consumption should be cellular > wifi > BT. I've been doing some experimenting to see how battery life is affected when the Gear S is constantly connecting and reconnecting to BT and connecting to wifi. I've set cellular to off for this first experiment since there is a delay before the Gear S tries to connect to cellular after it loses BT or wifi.
Bt, by the end of the night, my watch is around 50%. Wifi by the end of the night from all day use (considering it will be on 3g between times) leaves my watch at around 15-20% by the end of the night.
I have wifi permanently off ( as suggested by another poster wrt to solving some pairing / call forwarding / notifications issues)
I get the BT switching on off all day long going in and out of range but my battery life is still good 54% after 12 hours. I didn't make any calls today but did receive lots of notifications ( mainly BT but also when out of range)
Ive not noticed much of a delay transitioning over - maybe 30 secs before the pedometer kicks in
I leave wifi off also and just leave it on auto. At the end of the night when I go to bed it's always between 30 and 45%