I don't believe 90% of what I'm reading about battery life

[socialcarpet]

Turn everything off so that your phone battery works properly, sounds like a great solution!

Definitely not, but it works for now.

Personally I already turned most of this stuff off on my 900 already, just because it was awesome to use the phone all day and still have 65-70% battery left for the evening. I just don't care if my weather tile is updating every 30 seconds or if Bing knows my precise coordinates at all times. None of that crap is necessary, I'm always going to choose more battery life over having everything switched on for convenience.

Like I said, I'm confidence a software update will address the battery life issue sooner rather than later. In the meantime I thought I'd share some proven, practical advice.

 

[brmiller1976]

No, I think I figured it out.

I streamed "She Ra" on Netflix on my Surface, while playing "Plants Versus Zombies" on my Lumia 920.

Then, I started playing "Midnight City" by M83 on my PC.

The next morning, battery life had over DOUBLED!

Everyone should try this and see if it improves battery life. It sure worked for me!

 

[Brent920]

I wonder how many people have returned 920s for replacements on what the battery monitoring software says.

They're lithium-ion batteries, notoriously difficult to gauge the charge. The software needs time to learn the phone usage to make a realistic estimate.

Here's mine, I doubt it's correct, but over time I expect to get a more realistic figure.

 

[steeleblue]

I bought my phone from ATT 2 weeks ago. I have Bluetooth turned on all th time (because I'm constantly getting in and out of my car), I have wifi turned on all the time, I have location turned on all the time for just about everything. I make/receive 10+ calls a day, text some, no Facebook, 3 email accounts set to poll every 15 mins (don't need it more often), and I play about 30 mins of games a day. I'm charging over night and taking it off the charger at around 7 am or so every morning.

With all that I'm plugging it in at night around midnight and usually have 20-30% left. I don't know what makes mine different except that when I got it I ran it down to 10%, fully recharged overnight, ran it down again and recharged again. One thing in my favor may be that I have very good LTE coverage wherever I go so the phone isn't constantly searching for a signal.

Personally, I think that if you have to turn off everything you need just to use the phone then either you have a defective phone, a battery meter that needs re calibrated (which is what I did initially), or the phone just isn't for you. If I were getting the same bad battery life as some posting here I would exchange the phone. If the second one acted the same I would get a different phone.

 

[dkp23]

Definitely not, but it works for now.

Personally I already turned most of this stuff off on my 900 already, just because it was awesome to use the phone all day and still have 65-70% battery left for the evening. I just don't care if my weather tile is updating every 30 seconds or if Bing knows my precise coordinates at all times. None of that crap is necessary, I'm always going to choose more battery life over having everything switched on for convenience.

Like I said, I'm confidence a software update will address the battery life issue sooner rather than later. In the meantime I thought I'd share some proven, practical advice.

my experience with my 900 i didnt have to turn off anything except for bluetooth. I had locations on, 3 emails updating as they arrive, live tiles, LTE zone, constant whatsapp texting over 2 hours of surfing using IE, with some phone calls and i never had to worry about battery lasting through bed time. No issues, i never had to check or anything, now i do. So for me, the reason i am upset is because i didnt have to monitor or turn all these settings off before on my 900 and when i get a phone that is supposed to be better than the 920 and hvae to deal with 6 hour battery life, it upsets me.

 

[cardinalryan]

If you aren't getting good battery life, then you have a defective phone, period. My wife and I both have L920's and we each, consistently, get a full days use, and then some...and I'm talking heavy use. I'm not saying you aren't experiencing poor battery life, but I am saying that you have a defective phone if you are.

 

[rockstarzzz]

Not that anyone seems to care about it on this thread but I've switched everything off, battery saver - I only got 7 hours on it with 44 texts sent and received and 17 minutes of music on phone (no streaming). Now if that is normal phone, I am baffled but I think it is not.. Hence an exchange.

However my question was - "defective phones" : how much does Nokia care about this?

 

[PerseusPrime]

The guys who manufactures lithium ion batteries have a fail rate of about 4% so there is no real way for the phone manufacturers to test each one before the put it inside their polycarbonate unibody shell. One downside of unibody: cannot replace the battery easily. If you see the apple forums, there are huge threads with people having issues with their batteries or screen responsiveness on some iphone 5 devices. There has got to be some combination of stuff.

I personally did not install skype yet but I did install nokia drive. I do believe when I turned on NFC it drained faster but I do get about 28 hours of battery. I mainly check email, play dalton the awesome, listen to my music, podcasts, watch couple videos on youtube, check weather for the day, twitter feeds, nextgen reader, always on LTE and wifi at home.

 

[Joe920]

My impression is that the battery calibration is so bad that people can't really test whether anything is causing drain. This morning the level stayed at 100 percent for two hour of use. From that I conclude that the screen and the cell radio use no power. Wait, that can't be right.

Edit: I guess this point has been made a few times already. Still, I'm curious why the battery calibration seems particularly terrible on the L920.

 

[rockstarzzz]

Maybe someone with a Lumia 800 or 900 can shed light on this. I remember they had good number of battery issues for first 2-3 months until Nokia released a patch for it. I would have thought Nokia would learn from mistakes!

 

[jsk0703]

I'm not suggesting this is entirely the problem, however it's definitely not helping : Battery consumption after playing certain games - Microsoft Community

We are aware of reports that some customers are seeing higher than usual power consumption from certain games such as Angry Birds Star Wars. We are working with developers to update their games so that they suspends as expected when the user navigates away. In the meantime, customers can help ensure that the game suspends properly by using the Back button instead of the Windows button when navigating away from the game. Please be sure to install the updated game when you see the notification in the Windows Phone Store Hub of your phone.

 

[mlm1950]

I don't believe the other 10%.

 

[Dos101]

Not that anyone seems to care about it on this thread but I've switched everything off, battery saver - I only got 7 hours on it with 44 texts sent and received and 17 minutes of music on phone (no streaming). Now if that is normal phone, I am baffled but I think it is not.. Hence an exchange.

However my question was - "defective phones" : how much does Nokia care about this?

If you contact Nokia they will be more than willing to help with a replacement. IMHO they are treating customers very well and are doing everything they can to make sure we all have a working phone. That being said, I wonder if Nokia/MS knew about these issues before hand?

 

[rockstarzzz]

If you contact Nokia they will be more than willing to help with a replacement. IMHO they are treating customers very well and are doing everything they can to make sure we all have a working phone. That being said, I wonder if Nokia/MS knew about these issues before hand?

Sure customer service is excellent but won't you expect quality control to be excellent too? 20-30 odd handset are understandable but 90% as the OP said?

I do understand there are surely ways in which you can keep your battery for longer but if I switch off my phone I bet after a month it will have only lost 5% battery!

 

[ferganer]

The problem in my case is that the battery life is not bad per se, but it is inconsistent. I had my battery drain only a few percentage points over night, but last night I fully charged the battery and, when I woke the phone up in the morning, it told me that the battery is low and then I got the "Goodbye" screen. I did make sure nothing was running in the background. Go figure.

 

[abhishek8605]

Sure customer service is excellent but won't you expect quality control to be excellent too? 20-30 odd handset are understandable but 90% as the OP said?

I do understand there are surely ways in which you can keep your battery for longer but if I switch off my phone I bet after a month it will have only lost 5% battery!

90% is not a statistic. It's based on his opinion. Also, this is one forum, and if the reports are true that 2.5 million handsets were sold in the first batch, do you realize how small the percentage of people with faulty devices are? You only hear about the faulty devices cuz the rest of the 95%+ or so people with this device are enjoying it and not on here trying to solve the problem. Relax...if there's a faulty device, just go and get it exchanged, and who knows, it's probably because of the modifications AT&T made to the OS cuz so far no one with the international unlocked version has any complaints.

 

[All5horizons]

to put it simply, lte heats the phone up and drains the battery rapidly. On 4g i get 10 to 12 hours without having to turn everything off (essentially making it a dumb phone).

kcco

 

[mlm1950]

90% is not a statistic. It's based on his opinion. Also, this is one forum, and if the reports are true that 2.5 million handsets were sold in the first batch, do you realize how small the percentage of people with faulty devices are? You only hear about the faulty devices cuz the rest of the 95%+ or so people with this device are enjoying it and not on here trying to solve the problem. Relax...if there's a faulty device, just go and get it exchanged, and who knows, it's probably because of the modifications AT&T made to the OS cuz so far no one with the international unlocked version has any complaints.

I thought I read that carriers weren't allowed to make changes to WP8, unlike in Android, where it creates all sorts of issues.

 

[rmeigs]

I don't care who you are, I GUARANTEE you if you turn off all of those things, uninstall Nokia Drive beta and turn on battery saving, you will get MORE than acceptable battery life.

First, I don't have any issue with battery life. I only recharge every 24 or so hours and have lots of "stuff" running.

But, if I had to turn off everything, what would be the point of having a "smart device"? I have it to get mail, text, tweets, turn-by-turn direction, local recommendations, take pictures, watch the weather, make calls -- you get the point. And active tiles -- this is one of the big pluses for the WP OS. I don't want to press a button to check the temp, or email, tweet, etc. If I wanted to do that I'd go back to Android.

 

[mcbredditor]

To put it simply, LTE heats the phone up and drains the battery rapidly. On 4G I get 10 to 12 hours without having to turn everything off (essentially making it a dumb phone).

I don't even have LTE in my area. I have HSPA+ your '4G'. I have experienced these issues with my three lumia 920s.