So it's been two weeks to the day since I bought a 950XL dual sim from the Microsoft store to replace my ailing 925. I have so far had a mixed experience with the phone. When everything works as it should, I love this thing. Not a resuming screen to be found, everything opens like lightning, the camera has blown me away. However, the one thing I noticed out of the box even a couple days after all the apps were reinstalled was that the phone when connected to cellular data would stay running hot in my pocket, with the battery draining to empty in a few hours time on standby. I updated from .29 which was installed on purchase to .76 then to .107 with essentially little to no improvement in battery life despite the usual tricks of disabling Skype in the messaging app and background uploading of stuff to OneDrive.
After a week of banging my head against the wall, only holding on to hope because I had one random day in which i received an amazing 20 hours of battery life without charge on moderate usage of news apps and 4-5 hours of constant Groove streaming, I think I discovered the culprit. One of my email accounts (Cablevision/Optimum POP3 email account) was set to download email "Based on my usage" and every single time I went to manage that account, it seemed to be syncing content. After I switched the setting to manual sync, I enjoyed a full week of amazing battery life. Then last night after being frustrated that that particular email account won't manually download the body of an email after tapping the "download (xx.xx kb)" button, I decided to update Outlook first (it hadnt been updated and I hadnt ventured into the store in a week thinking possibly the store app may also be causing my battery issues). This didn't work, So I ventured back into the account settings and switched from manual sync to "based on usage." Didn't fix the issue, but I decided to see if maybe I could leave that on and still enjoy the battery life I've had the past week. I wake up in the morning and take the phone off the charger. I don't do anything with it and wait an hour, and surprise surprise, the phone is a pocket warmer again while doing nothing and the battery went down much more than it had been the past week on standby, 10-15% this time instead of 2-3%. I pop back into email account settings, and the same account is syncing again. I let it go and see what happens. It just keeps syncing and syncing and syncing. Finally, I delete the whole darn account from my phone since it starts syncing immediately after a restart anyway thus not allowing me to turn the sync option off.
After deleting the email account, I wait a few minutes, then feel the phone with my hand. STONE COLD. No battery drain. Therefore I can only conclude after a week of experimentation that a major cause of battery drain on W10M is the OS constantly trying to sync email/contacts/calendar/god knows what when set to sync "based on usage".
I hope this may help others who find themselves having similar battery issues and have tried everything else out. With manual email sync on, I am enjoying 7am-11pm every day of moderate usage with cell data and location turned ON, without having to charge at all. Now if I can only figure out how to get these emails to download properly I will be golden.
After a week of banging my head against the wall, only holding on to hope because I had one random day in which i received an amazing 20 hours of battery life without charge on moderate usage of news apps and 4-5 hours of constant Groove streaming, I think I discovered the culprit. One of my email accounts (Cablevision/Optimum POP3 email account) was set to download email "Based on my usage" and every single time I went to manage that account, it seemed to be syncing content. After I switched the setting to manual sync, I enjoyed a full week of amazing battery life. Then last night after being frustrated that that particular email account won't manually download the body of an email after tapping the "download (xx.xx kb)" button, I decided to update Outlook first (it hadnt been updated and I hadnt ventured into the store in a week thinking possibly the store app may also be causing my battery issues). This didn't work, So I ventured back into the account settings and switched from manual sync to "based on usage." Didn't fix the issue, but I decided to see if maybe I could leave that on and still enjoy the battery life I've had the past week. I wake up in the morning and take the phone off the charger. I don't do anything with it and wait an hour, and surprise surprise, the phone is a pocket warmer again while doing nothing and the battery went down much more than it had been the past week on standby, 10-15% this time instead of 2-3%. I pop back into email account settings, and the same account is syncing again. I let it go and see what happens. It just keeps syncing and syncing and syncing. Finally, I delete the whole darn account from my phone since it starts syncing immediately after a restart anyway thus not allowing me to turn the sync option off.
After deleting the email account, I wait a few minutes, then feel the phone with my hand. STONE COLD. No battery drain. Therefore I can only conclude after a week of experimentation that a major cause of battery drain on W10M is the OS constantly trying to sync email/contacts/calendar/god knows what when set to sync "based on usage".
I hope this may help others who find themselves having similar battery issues and have tried everything else out. With manual email sync on, I am enjoying 7am-11pm every day of moderate usage with cell data and location turned ON, without having to charge at all. Now if I can only figure out how to get these emails to download properly I will be golden.
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