950 & Battery Life

[majortom1981]

Took phone off the charger at 7:00 AM at 100%, it's now 4:45PM and I'm at 76%. I wouldn't say I'm a "heavy" user, but I do my fair share of twitter, email checking, what's app and random web browsing.
I've only had the phone since 12/04, but it seems like the battery life's improved over the past few days.
I'm obviously not playing around with the phone as much as when I first got it, still I can tell the idle drain is more in line with what I was getting with my 925 on WP8.1.
I did drain it down to 5% (with battery saver off) once to the point where it shut down automatically. Not sure if it helped, but followed the advice of some commenters.
After a mildly disappointing first week, all seems to be good now.
Curious to see what the MS Systems Engineer will report back.

CFC

I hope he gives me an answer. I couldn't make heads nor tails of the xml file that was sent. Tells you how full or empty that battery was when the phone was taken off the charger and put back on even what processes where consuming high battery and their cpu usage also but its not listed in percentages.

 

[duncan0622]

I lost 7% overnight with data connection turn off. I still have more than 50% with a moderate use after hit home. It's not on par with my iphone but still satisfying.

I only feel warm when I am downloading something or using Edge.

 

[NIST]

I have a1520 on the new build that has crazy battery draining issue now. Any answers?

 

[Will McClenaghan]

I haven't read through all the posts ... sorry! ... but I have discovered something interesting. My 950XL started out well and I easily got through the day, but progressively it got worse and the phone was warm all the time. I went through the battery saver and turned off background access to apps that didn't need it including a suggestion I saw for Edge. I then noticed that Edge was using 54% of my battery! I then had a look at the open tabs in Edge and discovered that it never seems to close them and I had a huge number of open tabs that Edge kept updating. I closed them all and my battery life went back to where it had been at the beginning and it stopped running warm all the time. I'm pretty sure this is where most of my battery life was vanishing to. Perhaps there should be an adjustable number of open tabs to stop this happening in the future. I just check frequently and close all the ones I don't need.

 

[Paolo Ferrazza]

Adding my experience. Hard resetted phone then installed build .29.
Everything enabled except hey cortana and edge page prediction. Screen brightness @50%+Auto.

The first days battey life was not so good.
Now it lasts me about 25 hours with mid usage (facebook browsing, edge browsing, facebook messenger, whatsapp, telegram, some youtube video, email checks now and then, many other apps in background). Very happy with it!

 

[Paolo Ferrazza]

I haven't read through all the posts ... sorry! ... but I have discovered something interesting. My 950XL started out well and I easily got through the day, but progressively it got worse and the phone was warm all the time. I went through the battery saver and turned off background access to apps that didn't need it including a suggestion I saw for Edge. I then noticed that Edge was using 54% of my battery! I then had a look at the open tabs in Edge and discovered that it never seems to close them and I had a huge number of open tabs that Edge kept updating. I closed them all and my battery life went back to where it had been at the beginning and it stopped running warm all the time. I'm pretty sure this is where most of my battery life was vanishing to. Perhaps there should be an adjustable number of open tabs to stop this happening in the future. I just check frequently and close all the ones I don't need.

Disalbe page prediction maybe it is related.

 

[Vijay_Anand]

Had it a few weeks now an am still only getting around 5% drain over night. Idle drain is pretty awesome now. Edge still drains alot in actual use but if your idle drain is bad your config or hardware is broken. Wipe your config and set it up from scratch, do not restore from backup.

I'm unsung hey cortana, glance, location and have weather, breaking news tweetitum, 2 email accounts and a few other apps running in the background.

Is idle battery drain of 5% good? That's how it is for my 950 right now but I'm not entirely convinced this is ideal.

 

[jayramphone]

Had my phone for about a week. I am starting to see improvement in battery life. Fully charged at 7am this morning and now at 10% 11:10pm, after some pretty heavy wen browsing usage. Was actually at about 70% up to 6pm.
This is still not brilliant but it IS a marked improvement over previous days, so hoping the battery is 'warming up' (wrong terminology but hopefully you know what I mean)

 

[swanlee]

Well my idle time is great no complaints here I get 5% drain over night, the in use battery time is pretty bad, spent a day taking some video and pictures and a little edge browsing probably a combined total of 1hr of use and my battery knocked down to 50%. Glad they fixed idle drain but actively using the phone drains the battery way to quick.

 

[big_tweeties]

Well my idle time is great no complaints here I get 5% drain over night, the in use battery time is pretty bad, spent a day taking some video and pictures and a little edge browsing probably a combined total of 1hr of use and my battery knocked down to 50%. Glad they fixed idle drain but actively using the phone drains the battery way to quick.

Same here. I've only had the phone for a week but I feel like I should exchange it for another 950...it shouldn't be draining THAT much when the phone is in use. I've had my 920 for 3-4 years now and battery drain was horrible. It never got better. Seeing the small percentage of other 950/950XL owners with 1% of in-use drainage every 30-60 minutes makes me frustrated!

 

[n7slc]

Same here. I've only had the phone for a week but I feel like I should exchange it for another 950...it shouldn't be draining THAT much when the phone is in use. I've had my 920 for 3-4 years now and battery drain was horrible. It never got better. Seeing the small percentage of other 950/950XL owners with 1% of in-use drainage every 30-60 minutes makes me frustrated!

I'm calling BS on those who claim 1% an hour in use. With the processor, display and connectivity, there's just no way. I'd think that 5-10% would be more along the lines of acceptable.

My 950 only drains 1-2% overnight but will easily lose 25% in less than 30-minutes on WiFi just reading the news or my tech blogs. It's even worse if I use Edge, ugh.

 

[Ygglens]

I'm calling BS on those who claim 1% an hour in use. With the processor, display and connectivity, there's just no way. I'd think that 5-10% would be more along the lines of acceptable.

My 950 only drains 1-2% overnight but will easily lose 25% in less than 30-minutes on WiFi just reading the news or my tech blogs. It's even worse if I use Edge, ugh.

Yeah, there is no way the phone only drains 1 % an hour, while in use... You'd get a hundred hours out of the phone, if that was true, and that's simply not possible with todays battery technology. Not even while the phone is idle.

 

[big_tweeties]

I'm calling BS on those who claim 1% an hour in use. With the processor, display and connectivity, there's just no way. I'd think that 5-10% would be more along the lines of acceptable.

My 950 only drains 1-2% overnight but will easily lose 25% in less than 30-minutes on WiFi just reading the news or my tech blogs. It's even worse if I use Edge, ugh.

I should've stated I was paraphrasing with those numbers. I know its useless to compare different phones/OS, but my boyfriend has a 6plus and he was able to read news for 30 minutes and lose only 1-2%! Whereas with my 920 and 950, I'd be down 10-15%. Something isnt right.

I really hope that the next big update will fix this drain though...at the same time I'm a bit weary because my 920's battery life never got any better.

 

[dashrendar]

I just got my 950 yesterday and I'm going to give it about a week or so before judging battery life.

I disabled Glance, Hey Cortana and also the Cortana Unlock Search button thing because all these are different variables that could affect battery life.

Coming from 4 years of Android, and heavy root and Cyanogenmod type of user, there was this concept of battery calibration, where you would have to let the phone charge/discharge completely once or twice for the phone to accurately report battery life. Android has special apps to guide this procedure. It was common to perform this whenever a new ROM (not an incremental update) is flashed on the phone.

I am not sure if this concept is applicable to Windows Phone or perhaps they do this calibration in the factory or maybe it's bogus, but it's been discussed on the Android side of the world.