1020 Battery Issues

[tgr42]

Alright guys, I have some pretty solid evidence... HERE Maps nukes the battery! Right around 2PM this afternoon I opened it up and used it for about 5-10 minutes. I searched for a location, browsed the map, searched for another location, got directions, browsed the map some more, and exited the app with the back button. Or so I thought. But somehow it continued to drain my battery like crazy:



Around 7PM I noticed the problem and confirmed that no apps were running. Under Background Tasks there was no entry for HERE Maps, and everything that could be disabled was disabled except for this battery monitoring app. I then powered the phone off and back on and left it alone for a while. As the graph shows, it returned to its normal rate of drain.

So.... uhh... wtf HERE Maps...? And is there a way to use Microsoft's app instead or am I stuck with this? I used to have Bing Maps on WP 7.5 and it was mediocre but at least it didn't kill my battery. Don't tell me I have to either use gMaps or power my phone off and back on after every time I check the map. *sigh*

 

[SwimSwim]

Wait, you guys are having problems with bad battery life? Weird. The first day I got my 1020, it's battery life was a bit subpar. But after one full drain and recharge, my 1020 has done nothing more than blow me away with its superb battery life, a great step up from my 900.

EDIT: Just read the post right above me

Ok, so HERE Maps are the problem? I can honestly say I've not even touched the app, so I can't speak from personal experience. However, seeing as I'm going on a big trip this weekend, I won't experiment till Monday, seeing as it sounds like a bug and I don't want my battery to suffer whilst I try and have fun.

Interesting stuff, perhaps someone should forward this to Nokia and/or WPC?

 

[John20212]

I think its a safe assumption that an app or combination of apps are causing the battery drain, the real thing that bugs me here is that Microsoft has not implemented similar funcions in WP8 that it has in Win8 i.e. closing open apps from the swich app view, and swiping down to close apps (being used to my Surface I actually tried doing this on my WP before realising its ... a WP).

I am really hoping with WP8.1 (or sooner) Microsoft implements similar solutions to dealing with open apps as it has in Win8.

 

[JANGEL13]

I emailed Nokia Care about my problem and asked if my battery might be defective. Here is their response

Thank you for contacting Nokia Careline.

In respnse to your concern, we would like to inform you that the battery is not defective unless it intermittently happens, due to the fact that the handset was brand new, and the issues were already isolated.

If you continue to encounter issues regarding the battery or if you have any issues with it, you can get back to the Point of Purchase or Point of Sale for further assistance.

In addition, for more information regarding the power management details under the phone's specifications you may visit the link below:

http://www.nokia.com/us-en/phones/phone/lumia1020/specifications/

If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact us again. To ensure proper handling of your case, kindly continue using the current subject line.

You may also call Nokia Careline at 1-888-665-4228 from Mondays to Fridays at 10:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. EST (closed on national public holidays) for immediate assistance.

 

[JANGEL13]

What do they mean by "the issues were already isolated"?

 

[John20212]

What do they mean by "the issues were already isolated"?

I would email them again and ask them to clarify, because after reading their answer you posted I have no idea what they are talking about.

 

[Yangstax]

According to the Power Management specs of Lumia 1020, the maximum wifi browsing time is only 5.5 hours while L920 is 9 hours. The maximum wifi browing time of L925 is 7.2 hours and L728 is 7 hours. So the specs of L1020 has clearly indicated, for whatever the reasons, the internet browsing time is considerably worse than that of L920. If you do a lot of internet browsings L1020, you will see faster battery drain. The rest of specs for 3G talking, music playback and video playback are comparable. It looks like that you will have to live with this problem of L1020 in return for getting the great camera.

 

[SwimSwim]

The internet theory seems legit, I do notice browsing the web seems to take its toll on my battery life (I.e: using the WPC app to post on the forums).

Meanwhile, my 1020's battery has held up stupendously this weekend at the amusement park, despite me constantly snapping pics and then editing them, as well as playing around on my phone.

 

[redeyss]

I also noticed bad battery life on day one of use. I killed the battery and charged it over night and the next day was good but third day was very good. As good or better than my 920.
Edit: I didn't use here maps

 

[sfiorito]

My wife's 1020 is having HORRIBLE battery drain issues. It gets extremely hot and lasts about 4 hours. I've soft reset multiple times, disabled as much as I can, etc. I'll try a full hard reset tonight to see if it improves, otherwise it's going back. Too bad, I had really sold her on the 1020 but between the pre-order delay, wrong color camera grip, and now this she is none too happy. I've had a 920 since release so I know how to manage battery life, but hers is consistently bad. Hopefully its just defective.

 

[GloriousGlory]

My wife's 1020 is having HORRIBLE battery drain issues. It gets extremely hot and lasts about 4 hours. I've soft reset multiple times, disabled as much as I can, etc. I'll try a full hard reset tonight to see if it improves, otherwise it's going back. Too bad, I had really sold her on the 1020 but between the pre-order delay, wrong color camera grip, and now this she is none too happy. I've had a 920 since release so I know how to manage battery life, but hers is consistently bad. Hopefully its just defective.

Was having similar issues as well on the first couple of days. Make sure you turn of double tap to unlock and glance/peek. I believe that's one big culprit to battery draining. Aside from that, if you go to the field test menu (##3282) and use 3g only that may or may not help, not sure if that was a factor for me.

I'm easily getting 18-20 hours of battery life with normal use now.

 

[sfiorito]

yeah, I turned off glance, etc. Turning 4G off is not an option. I'm not going to pay money for a next-gen phone to then cripple it. I might as well give my wife an old flip phone that lasted days. Honestly a lot of these "solutions" are not at all. Can you imagine some non-technical user buying a new phone and having to hunt down all these settings?? Or explaining to them that this cool new phone that does all these things, but they need to be disabled because it'll turn the phone into a useless hand-warmer.

I really want WinPhone and Nokia to do well, to have an alternative option. I enjoy the OS and the hardware, but they really need to get a combined software/hardware solution that properly resolves this. There's got to be a way for the OS to flag offending apps or services and at a minimum notify the user or suspend them to keep these issues from cropping up.

 

[GloriousGlory]

yeah, I turned off glance, etc. Turning 4G off is not an option. I'm not going to pay money for a next-gen phone to then cripple it. I might as well give my wife an old flip phone that lasted days. Honestly a lot of these "solutions" are not at all. Can you imagine some non-technical user buying a new phone and having to hunt down all these settings?? Or explaining to them that this cool new phone that does all these things, but they need to be disabled because it'll turn the phone into a useless hand-warmer.

I really want WinPhone and Nokia to do well, to have an alternative option. I enjoy the OS and the hardware, but they really need to get a combined software/hardware solution that properly resolves this. There's got to be a way for the OS to flag offending apps or services and at a minimum notify the user or suspend them to keep these issues from cropping up.

Has she used the phone down to a very low amount and recharged it yet? I also hear the first cycle is poor. Just a possibility

 

[bikertomk]

I initially had horrible battery life on my 1020 as well. I read the tip for the soft reset and did that, I also disabled double tap to wake. Ever since then, my battery life has been crazy good! I'll have to re-enable double tap to wake to see if that was really required or not.

 

[tgr42]

yeah, I turned off glance, etc. Turning 4G off is not an option. I'm not going to pay money for a next-gen phone to then cripple it. I might as well give my wife an old flip phone that lasted days. Honestly a lot of these "solutions" are not at all. Can you imagine some non-technical user buying a new phone and having to hunt down all these settings?? Or explaining to them that this cool new phone that does all these things, but they need to be disabled because it'll turn the phone into a useless hand-warmer.

I really want WinPhone and Nokia to do well, to have an alternative option. I enjoy the OS and the hardware, but they really need to get a combined software/hardware solution that properly resolves this. There's got to be a way for the OS to flag offending apps or services and at a minimum notify the user or suspend them to keep these issues from cropping up.

A lot of these "solutions" are based on ... shall we say ... incomplete understandings of what is actually going on. Also, different things have different impacts depending on each person's own circumstances. For example, if someone lives right next to a tower that only does 3G and is barely in range of a tower that does LTE, and the phone insists on using the LTE tower all the time, then disabling LTE may help that person tremendously. If you live right next to the tower that does LTE, disabling LTE may not be so helpful to you. It may in fact make things worse. I don't know if towers work this way exactly but you get the idea, right?

Then you get people who change 5 things at once and have no idea which one (if any) had any effect on the problem, but they don't bother to then isolate which thing actually helped. They put themselves in a position where they aren't qualified to say which of those 5 things was helpful, if any, but then often do so anyway. Maybe with a disclaimer, maybe not.

It's also difficult for people to accurately diagnose and correct issues that are intermittent and possibly dependent on various conditions. For example, I was getting good battery life until I ran HERE Maps, then I started getting huge battery drain until I restarted the phone. After that, battery drain was normal. So HERE Maps is screwing things up, right? Well, it sure seems like it, but my observations don't constitute 100% evidence of the truth of the situation. Maybe my battery discharge curve was just being non-linear. Maybe the battery level wasn't being reported correctly. Maybe something else behind the scenes happened when I ran HERE Maps that doesn't always happen the same way when running HERE Maps, and that was responsible for the problem. WHO KNOWS.

I agree with you that OS and hardware vendors certainly don't seem to care to give end users any tools to help diagnose problems, and this is a big mistake. As technology has evolved and gone more mainstream, end users have been given less and less to work with. As a result we've become nearly powerless to understand and resolve all kinds of problems that would probably be super easy if only we had the tools we need. Sure, the overall experience is better when everything works as it should (no weird scary techie things to confuse people!) but with the complexity of these devices and the scale they're used on, it leaves the door open to producing a very large amount of frustration.

 

[Anne Peltier]

Mine worked fine for 5 days, then started going through the battery like it was going out of style. I did the usual trouble shooting, like shutting down all background services, Bluetooth, and wifi to no avail. Talked to ATT support and they are getting me a new one as there must be something that went wrong with either the software or hardware that couldn't easily be solved. It also started running hotter at that point, like it was doing a lot of processing. I was using 17% of battery/hr doing nothing. The phone was very impressive until that happened.

 

[sfiorito]

So, I finally managed to track down the issue. I was ready to reset it but instead I decided to backtrack all the things we set up. I noticed things improved once I removed one of her email accounts. I noticed that it wasn't syncing properly, even though the settings were correct. I had also noticed the mail app had locked up a couple times just trying to read messages. I think it was stuck trying to sync even though it wasn't working, but it gave no error message! So now, she's good getting an average of 5.3% discharge rate, averaging 10-12 hours of battery life! Again, I wish the OS could've just warned me that something was misbehaving! So now she's much happier with the phone, we just need to trade in the black camera grip for the yellow one she was supposed to receive!

 

[SwimSwim]

I'm still baffled as to how people are getting poor battery life. Aside from the first drain/charge cycle, my 1020's battery has been incredible. 20 hour battery life consistently. Perhaps some 1020s were shipped out with defective batteries?

 

[Anne Peltier]

As an update, I pulled the sim card to put in the old phone while getting ready to send it in and noticed that it had cooled down (ie the processor wasn't working hard). So I charged it back up and put the sim card back in to see what would happen and now it runs cool again and instead of a battery drain of 17%/hr, that same 17% lasted 12 hours. Obviously something was making the processor work very hard, but whatever it was released by doing that. Our other phone is a 920 with the same processor that we use the same way and we've never had an issue with that one. I know this doesn't solve the problem, but may shed some light on where to look for things that are making the processor work when it shouldn't be.

 

[videian]

I'm still baffled as to how people are getting poor battery life. Aside from the first drain/charge cycle, my 1020's battery has been incredible. 20 hour battery life consistently. Perhaps some 1020s were shipped out with defective batteries?

Mine has been quite good as well, when I first got it, about three weeks ago, it was equal to iPhone 5 or gs4 (have owned both). Now it surpasses them both.