How is your 950Xl battery doing?

[badMojo69]

I dont under stand why WH runs all the time. I mean you have to press the button to activate WH. Seems silly and it's not like it's really faster than just entering the password, but it's great for 1 hand use.

 

[dannejanne]

I think any battery problems that exist today are more because of the W10 software than anything else. Using current build of W10 on my 1520 I see the battery life drop by a great margin. It gets almost twice as bad it seems on 10 compared to 8.1 while using the phone. Standby is great though. So I'm pretty sure we'll see optimzations in the next coming builds regarding this which will affects all phones that runs it.

 

[Jon_Rubinstein]

Battery is garbage.....all the story about needing several cycles is BS....I already went through 6 full charges since Wed.....woke up this AM, used the phone for 45 minutes and battery is now down to 71%. This is a joke.....MY wife just got an Iphone 6s+ Thursday.....we tried the same thing this AM. WE both woke up at the same time, both bateries 100% charged. We both used it for 45 minutes browsing the web. After 1 hour her battery shows 91%, mine shows 71%. THis is a JOKE. MS needs to get their act together....no wonder there is no advertising for WM 10.

 

[Slovenix]

Battery is garbage.....all the story about needing several cycles is BS....I already went through 6 full charges since Wed.....woke up this AM, used the phone for 45 minutes and battery is now down to 71%. This is a joke.....MY wife just got an Iphone 6s+ Thursday.....we tried the same thing this AM. WE both woke up at the same time, both bateries 100% charged. We both used it for 45 minutes browsing the web. After 1 hour her battery shows 91%, mine shows 71%. THis is a JOKE. MS needs to get their act together....no wonder there is no advertising for WM 10.

True, me and my gf compete too and the result is completely the same xD

 

[TheBadGuy_88]

I'll add fuel to the fire as well, coming from a 1520 to a 950xl I'm gonna say battery life can Best be described as "suspicious". I'm not ready to fully commit to calling it bad because based on using 10586 on both devices I will say Windows 10 uses much more battery life as a operating system at this point than is acceptable based on wp8.1 standards. The 1520 handled this build a little better though which worries me.

 

[TexasLabRat]

Some observations from someone who was in the insider program for several months:

1) 1%-2% per hour in standby is pretty typical for all w10 phones at this point. Usage goes up as you add more background tasks that have to be updated via apps (facebook, weather, cortana interests, etc)

2) The default mailbox settings are crazy. All mailboxes come with default push-mode which causes constant network traffic (and battery drain). Knocking it down to 15 minutes will have a measureable effect

3) Turning off stuff you don't use can help. NFC, bluetooth, etc are all candidates to look at if you don't use them.

4) Turn off the "include photos from the cloud" setting in the photo app. The syncing from onedrive is a major battery hog.

5) W10 actually gets pretty good battery life in standby if it's not doing all this background stuff in my experience. For the guys testing overnight drain, try it with airplane mode on and see the difference.

6) Make sure you check out the battery saver in settings->system periodicaly to see what apps are causing the most battery usage, and turn off background tasks to those that you don't need/want to be updating all the time in the background if it's causing measurable battery drain.

7) Doing a restore on a w10 phone from a 8.1 restore point seems to pull in a lot of legacy nokia-era apps and settings which can affect stability and battery use. Make sure you've done a clean install with no restore (either out of the box or after hard reset) before you draw too many conclusions.

Hope that helps

 

[elindalyne]

Literally every app I've installed, installs with background app functionality enabled by default. Sorry Plex. I really don't need you always on. Same for you The Guardian and Lumia Creative studio....

 

[Kaenon11]

The battery is shoddy off the charger.
I take it off and there is extreme drain like 15-20% in the first hour before it stops freaking out.

 

[Slovenix]

Some observations from someone who was in the insider program for several months:

1) 1%-2% per hour in standby is pretty typical for all w10 phones at this point. Usage goes up as you add more background tasks that have to be updated via apps (facebook, weather, cortana interests, etc)

2) The default mailbox settings are crazy. All mailboxes come with default push-mode which causes constant network traffic (and battery drain). Knocking it down to 15 minutes will have a measureable effect

3) Turning off stuff you don't use can help. NFC, bluetooth, etc are all candidates to look at if you don't use them.

4) Turn off the "include photos from the cloud" setting in the photo app. The syncing from onedrive is a major battery hog.

5) W10 actually gets pretty good battery life in standby if it's not doing all this background stuff in my experience. For the guys testing overnight drain, try it with airplane mode on and see the difference.

6) Make sure you check out the battery saver in settings->system periodicaly to see what apps are causing the most battery usage, and turn off background tasks to those that you don't need/want to be updating all the time in the background if it's causing measurable battery drain.

7) Doing a restore on a w10 phone from a 8.1 restore point seems to pull in a lot of legacy nokia-era apps and settings which can affect stability and battery use. Make sure you've done a clean install with no restore (either out of the box or after hard reset) before you draw too many conclusions.

Hope that helps

It's a pretty good list tbh.

 

[dgabriel]

Mine is doing terrible. I got it wednesday and let it restore all my settings, messages, etc. Charged it overnight to 100%. Unplugged it at about 9 am Yesterday and by noon I was critical. Even tried enabling Battery Saver at around 50%. Considering doing a hard reset as 4-5 hours of battery life with very little usage seems wrong even for a new phone.

My experience exactly, this morning started at 100%, hit battery saver mid-morning when I realized I was losing like 1% every 10 minutes... then by 1pm, only 7 hours later, dead. I even turned off wifi, bt midway, and haven't ever turned on or setup hello as I saw how fast that was draining my friends 950 in the last week... Sadly win 10 provides an underwhelming mobile experience, this is clearly the the result of an unrefined and incomplete OS.

 

[camptime]

Don't have my 950 XL for 3 more weeks still but I switched most of the apps that are running in the background off that has increased my old 920 usage by a few hours, I can get about 7 hours out of the phone with moderate use. Way to many apps have a default to run in the background. All apps should be required to ask permission for this on first use before you can accesses the app.

 

[peachy001]

Fwiw, my 920 was choppy at first but then levelled out after 1 week. 3 yrs later on 8.1 I could get to 6pm, then it helped to be on charge. 10 is hit and miss on my 920, but at times, very good. Weirdly, at times it seems to bleed electric. I hope people are tweeting Gabe et al, and mentioning it. I do fully expect some new updates and firmware over the next month or so. Fingers crossed. Gabe uses an xl, so he has a personal incentive to raise the bar.

 

[maestromato]

Today after 13 hours of use, I have 51% battery left and battery saver says I have 12 more hours... I am not having excessive drain like many of you

 

[david90531]

I find the battery does really well (drain slowly) when at higher percentages (80-100%), and then it drops quicker but still not horrible. Again it's miles better than my L920 and also an android phone that I used in the summer.

 

[ferretzombie]

Is there an app that will tell you screen on time?

 

[thaman04]

Do you think having dual sim makes a difference with the battery even when there's no second sim card in?

It's definitely more of a OS/software issue than the battery itself. I've seen drastically different levels on my 920 with each Insider build. Also - W10M seems to enable the background agent for every app... so I recommend going through that setting and disabling apps you don't need background agents running for.

 

[zkyevolved]

I think this would be software optimization problems. Take a device with a SD810 from Android, and the 950XL, put them both in airplane mode and let them sit for a few hours from 100% and see the difference. My much more efficient SP4 is draining battery in sleep mode like no other... It's software issues probably. I think MS is dropping the ball on Day 1 issues. Hopefully they will get hammered out with the next 950XL update.

 

[Rvacha]

My battery runtime was horrible for the first day and a half then settled down. Weekends are vacation time for my phones, very little use, so they mostly sit there. I made a couple of short phone calls, checked my shopping list a couple of times, half a dozen Emails, half a dozen texts, a couple of 4 minutes video recordings, 20 photos, paired it to 3 cars, 2 speakers, and 2 PCs. It was last charged 49 hrs ago (Friday morning) and still has 19%/8 hrs left according to battery saver. That puts my 950 XL at ~57 hrs on one charge. This is right in line with my L1520 running 586.11 during a weekend

I have an AboveTEK USB voltage and current monitor. Once fully charged the 950 XL pulls a constant 80mA, which is exactly the same as my L1520. Not terribly scientific, but close enough to indicate to me that idle power is roughly equivalent

On a related note for virtually every charger I tested the 950 XL charges at 1.5A which is respectable, but not super-fast (the L1520 does 1.2A). Since the AboveTEK has to be in line with the USB, I cannot check the included charger. In a couple of days I will have an Aukey Qualcomm certified 18W/3A Quick Charge 2.0 wallcube charger along with a DROK USB power monitor (USB 3.0 compliant where the AboveTEK is 2.0). We'll see how fast that one is

[Edit] My "test conditions" are HC and WH disabled, Glance screen set for 15 seconds and for the L1520 cellular data turned off (it has no sim card and was burning power "hunting" as a result best as I can tell). No social media apps.

 

[Chad Welsh]

This is the same as my Surface Pro 3 when I went from windows 8.1 to windows 10-Battery drain was excessive and stands by was horrible. Windows 10 does ALOT of background talking ALOT!!!! You really need to go to the background apps and figure out which ones you want to keep talking and shut all the other off!!!
MS really needs to tone down on the all the gossip this operating system does behind the scenes- telemetry and everything else cause its destroying battery life compared to 8.1 and since the OS is the same across platforms besides being compiled for different architectures I think this is a significant issue!!!!.

Battery saver is only a stop gap bandaid since it shuts off all the background talking when it critical and it should be critical all the time not just wen the battery is too low to deal with the chatter!!!!

 

[Joe920]

As I mentioned elsewhere it looks like overnight a runaway process had been draining almost faster than wireless charger could handle.

Just guess work at this point, but I wonder if it could be the music app trying to read and update file info from OneDrive. I have 4000+ songs in my OneDrive>Music folder, so if it scans those one by one, no wonder the phone gets a bit warm. I have Groove set to show only local music, but I'm not sure if that disables reading OneDrive file info.