Battery Life with 8.1

[smoheath]

Hey HTC 8x users. I've upgraded to wp8.1 and my battery life is terrible. I know the 8.1 forums have a lengthy thread on this, but I wanted to see how many of you are experiencing the same abysmal battery life. I feel like no matter what I'm doing, if I'm actually using the phone the battery percent will drop 1% every few minutes. I used to be able to go several days in one charge. Now I'm lucky to get a day out of it.

I noticed that changing the settings doesn't really do anything. I get pretty much the same battery life with location on, Wi-Fi on, and some background tasks compared to location off, Wi-Fi off. I'm beginning to think that my phone is just old and the battery is on its last leg. Please share your experiences with your battery on 8.1. Thanks.

 

[EwingMCSE]

The main settings I found to fix the battery drain issue (so far) are:
1- Sync Settings (themes, favorites, etc.) has to be OFF
2- Battery Saver has to be OFF (counter-intuitive, but trust me on this)
3- Limit which apps can use Location Services
4- Screen Brightness should be hard set to Low or Medium. The Automatically Adjust setting turned into a battery drainer for me (Lumia Icon)
5- Automatic App Updates I have on, but I had to remove the WIFI only restriction or the phone would go into a battery draining overheat mode.
6- Remove and re-add your email accounts and set them to a less intensive refresh rate (I have mine on every 30 minutes for 7 days of mail).

Once I made those adjustments I easily get through the day at 50% and I'm using the phone pretty often. Yesterday I didn't use it much at all and finished the day near 90%.

 

[smoheath]

Thanks for the input. I have done all of those things except the email one. I'm not sure if I can anyway. I only have my one email syncing and it is the one associated with my Microsoft account.

 

[rocking23nf]

i find the battery drops to 50% really fast, then the last 50% lasts along time.

 

[Peter McNeill1]

I find no real difference between 8.0 and 8.1 for battery on my 8X but then I don't have cortana or play games.

 

[plasmid_uk]

Aparrently battery saver is actually draining the battery and this is because the device manufacturers (HTC etc.) dictate how this works through the firmware. So until the official update comes out OTA with the firmware it's no surprise that it's pants.

 

[smoheath]

So I finally did a hard reset and I didn't start from a backup. Battery saver shows more time left but I still have horrible battery life. No matter what app I'm using, it drains at 1% every two minutes. A thirty minute phone call dropped the battery from 40% to 10%. The phone became quite hot as well. I wish I could get 8.0 back. I've tried recalibrating by having it completely die and then recharging it to 100%. I'm fresh out of ideas. Wi-Fi is on but location and 4g are off. I have turned off pretty much all background tasks. This is super frustrating, especially since a few people are saying their battery life is better than 8.0. Ugh.

 

[MatchAttax08]

So I finally did a hard reset and I didn't start from a backup. Battery saver shows more time left but I still have horrible battery life. No matter what app I'm using, it drains at 1% every two minutes. A thirty minute phone call dropped the battery from 40% to 10%. The phone became quite hot as well. I wish I could get 8.0 back. I've tried recalibrating by having it completely die and then recharging it to 100%. I'm fresh out of ideas. Wi-Fi is on but location and 4g are off. I have turned off pretty much all background tasks. This is super frustrating, especially since a few people are saying their battery life is better than 8.0. Ugh.

I understand you. I hate my battery life. If you really wish to come back to 8.0, use Nokia recovery tool (free PC software from Nokia.) Though you might lose a few hundred megs of storage







Sent from my RM-875_eu_euro1_211 using Tapatalk

 

[Sashank Mishra]

Battery life for me in WP8.1 is slightly more than WP8.

Though it lasts less as I always keep experimenting with Cortana and other features.

I have Nokia(Microsoft) Lumia 720. ;-)

 

[benryder]

I'm having the same problem. I hardly make any phone calls, yet the battery usage for Phone is ridiculous! Let's hope the HTC firmware fixes it.

 

[smoheath]

I understand you. I hate my battery life. If you really wish to come back to 8.0, use Nokia recovery tool (free PC software from Nokia.) Though you might lose a few hundred megs of storage

Does that work for non-Nokia devices? I kind of assumed it wasn't compatible.

 

[Tobias K]

The main settings I found to fix the battery drain issue (so far) are:
2- Battery Saver has to be OFF (counter-intuitive, but trust me on this)
.

I was trying around a few days now, and this is the only thing that realy matters. I charge the phone every night, and over the day with normal usage I was at 50% with WP8.0 when i go to bed.
With WP8.1 the battery was empty each day at around 3PM.... I tried around with all that sync stuff and background apps and so on, the result was 1 or 2 hours more runtime ... so didn't realy help.
3 days ago I switched off Battery Saver, and now my runtime is just as it was with 8.0 ... perfect!

 

[TechFreak1]

Battery saver off, the heck? Lol.
Given the craziness occurring within the windows phone team as of late, this might just be the solution. Will try this tomorrow when my phone is fresh off the charger.

Edit: Nope hasn't helped, looks like this fix might be isolated to the 8x after all . Also an update was just pushed out for the preview maybe this address the battery drain?

 

[Samst22]

I turned off battery saver, set phone brightness to low instead of automatic, and set email accounts to check every 30 mins. Seemed to improve a lot. After the new update the other day the battery life has improved even more and it's actually better than it was on 8.0.