New 930 - Horrible Battery Life

[AirSlab]

I've had mine for about 5 months now and my battery is great. It manages about a day and a half, maybe two days at a big push.

I don't know WHY some have such poor batteries. I find it a little unfair to criticize the phone and damn all 930's as having poor battery because both in terms of reviews and even here we see that some have it good, others not.

I don't baby my battery but I do use it intelligently. I limit the phone to 3G, location service off and I'm quite selective about what I let run in the background. I will concede that Internet absolutely slays the battery, but overall I'm really happy.

Much like the random overheating, this may be a mystery that we may never really solve.

Strength to you all!

The Slab.

 

[AirSlab]

Ha you're right about that camera! I have a 930 and my dad just got an iPhone 6. He's very happy with what the 8MP snapper can do, especially in comparison to his old 13MP Sony Xperia Z. I've developed the irritating habit of, everytime he takes a picture, taking the exact same picture with my 930 and simply saying "Not quuuuuuuuite PureView. Nice try though."

 

[dj9928]

My battery seems to drop to 90% very quick, I put it on the charger at night before bed, woke up this morning, checked emails etc, about 5-10 mins worth of use, it was at 90% before I even got out of bed.

In saying that after that is does last me all day, I had it off the charger yesterday for example at 6am, it was fairly well used yesterday with about 10 mins of calls, 8hrs of music and radio, 30 mins of youtube, email syncing every hour and other browsing etc, it died last night at 10pm. Should add I had the denim update download and install in the middle of that.

So we'll see what its like on denim

 

[cnbc86]

I have the same problem on my Lumia 930. The battery discharges about 7% to 8% an hour. I'm on denim with the dp. I don't think it has been that bad before denim. After I switched to the 930 I was happy about battery life. Now I don't get though a full day. I disabled all apps in the background. Except of whatsapp (I guess it has something to do with it) don't use hey Cortana Bluetooth is always disabled. I'm really getting unhappy about it I don't buy a phone with tons of features to disable them just to get through the day with the phone. Has anything had the same problem and found a solution for it? I hate to say that because I'm using windows phone since its on the market but I'm thinking about getting an iPhone not because I like it just because it works

 

[knightblaze]

About the battery. If you just got the phone and did updates ext, I recommend doing a hard wipe/reset. I was having battery issues and once this was done my battery went from 12 hours to 1 day and 10 under normal to moderate use.

 

[E50]

I actually love this battery. Lasts ~4 days. 4-5% is gone after every night. I use WiFi all the time, email, FB, weather and calendar sync non stop. Although I don't use a lot of browsing or games, that's the key. But I don't need them. Or if I do I still manage to go arround 2 days.

 

[anon(5518418)]

I've had a few Windows Phones in my time and despite having the biggest battery the L930 was the worst. The best was probably my old L620, and it has a 1300mAh battery so go figure that.

 

[freestaterocker]

Hi, I have have bought the Lumia 930 two days ago and I am pretty shocked by the battery life to be honest. I come from the Huawei W1 and on several occasions during the past 2 year I got up to 5 days of battery life out of it with moderate usage. But right now, 15 hours after recharging it, my Lumia is already at 27%!


The things I did today:

• The first 8 hours: sleeping, it gradually dropped from 100% to 93% during these 8 hours.

• I got up and checked the news and email, 1 hour after I woke up it dropped another 10% to around 83%.

• I then played GTA San Andreas for 30 minutes, the battery dropped another 20% to around 65%

• I then took the dog for a 1 hour long walk, I snapped some pictures(31 pics+3, 2minute videos) with the Lumia during this, it dropped 10-15% to around 50%

• It then went stand by for 1.5 hours, it dropped a percent or two.

• After the standby I checked out Spotify and the FM radio for about half an hour, I downloaded my music lists on Spotify for offline use, battery dropped 5-8% to 40%.

• Standby for another half an hour

• I then had my phone on for half an hour just only browing the internet, googling for Lumia battery issues and such, the battery dropped 10% during this to 30%.

• Then I went on to Windows central on the PC and wrote this reply whilst checking the battery graph on my Lumia, and right now, about an hour later it is at 21%.

• I just went to the toilet and took my phone with me, but after a few minutes of ONLY internet browsing I already saw the battery percentage drop once again, so..

Exactly 16 hours after charging the phone I am at 18%. I played a graphically intensive game for 30 minutes, I did quite a bit of internet browsing, used the camera to take 31 pictures and 3 short(2 minutes) videos and that's about it. I only use WiFi, so no 3G or whatever, automatic screen brightness and 16 hours is what I get. Wow. And when you substract the 8 hours of sleep from it, I get 8 hours of use before needing a recharge. !? I am at a loss for words, so I'll just post this...

For many people this is a pretty heavy day. All those pictures and video with that powerful camera, the gaming... There are millions of modern smartphone flagship owners that would be thrilled to get that far on a battery that size. But I do feel Nokia should have been able to wedge a larger battery into the 930... The HTC One M8 is thinner at similar dimensions, and has a 2600mAh battery. I would've liked to see at least that much. My 830 holds its own with a 2200mAh cell, but it powers a 720p screen, a snapdragon 400, and 1GB of RAM.

For a true flagship (at the time) with an undersized battery, yours performs rather well.

 

[mcraine]

I've had my 930 for about a week. So far I've always made it through the day without recharging. The battery percentage does drop quickly at the beginning of the day as many report but it seems to slow down and I usually wind up with 25 to 35% left at the end of the day. My usage is mostly phone calls, playing podcasts, and I've been taking five to ten pictures a day. I also browse my OneDrive photos a lot and read news and Facebook. Until I read this thread, I had not switched LTE down to 3G. Just did that. I'm now expecting to see even better performance. I'm not sure if this makes a difference but when I got the phone, I ran all the updates and then hard reset the phone. I then set it up a s a new phone and re-installed each app one at a time. On the second day I purposely used the phone to excess until the battery was dead and the phone shut off. I then fully charged it to 100% before using it again. I've experienced none of the problems many have reported with the phone. It works perfectly. It does get a bit warm occasionally.

 

[My930]

I am facing a similar problem. Took the phone off the charger at 11:30 am and by 3pm it was at 51%. I opened facebook for a couple of minutes, and listened to music for about two hours and browsed the internet for about 10minutes and that was it. I had to put it back on charger as i will be mobile later. From my experience, the battery would have drained at the same pace even when below 50%. It barely last for 8 hrs under normal usage and can go only up to 13 if i dont use it for 60% of the time. I am getting really frustrated and i can benefit from any suggestion. By the way, all background processes are disabled and the battery is on saver mode and blue tooth is disabled.

 

[Mech0z]

How much battery does your phone drain while you sleep with Denim, mine dropped 4% in battery save mode, seems abit too much

Is the Microsoft health step counter hard on the battery?

 

[cyb3rdud3]

Battery life is nowhere near that of the iphone 6+. However having used my 930 for several weeks it has definitely improved. I was ready to through it in the bin after a few days but I'm glad I stuck with it.

 

[freestaterocker]

And you have Glance, expandable storage, and replaceable battery/back cover.

I don't use glance, as the entire IPS display would be on all the time, and I imagine the battery life would take a pretty substantial hit because of it. I never need to take the cover off, but the expandable storage is extremely helpful to me; I have a little bit over 39gb of just music stored locally.

My only really complaint about the 830 is that is seems a tad bit underpowered at times. I would've happily paid more to have a Snapdragon 600 or 800 inside. I would lose a little battery life, but that's not something I'm worried about. I finish most days with more than 50% battery remaining as is.

 

[chrislee1973]

Re: New 930 - Backward step in battery Life

I bought a 930 about 5 days ago. Fully charged it from out of the box, spent 2 days changing set ups, downloading stuff etc so not surprised battery life didn't come close to my old 925 (at this stage). The phone has had 3 days of normal low, day to day use. Removing from the charger, after one hour it drops to 86% and by the end of the working day, it is flat. ALL of these posts can not be wrong. I am a Nokia / Microsoft supporter and a reseller to businesses of these devices. Come clean please Microsoft, what's the problem?...this is a seemingly backward step or a great deal of people have a faulty device/battery.

 

[infinidim]

I just got a used 930, it hadn't got 8.1 Update 1 on it when I got it so it needed an update and a hard reset. After a few days, it's lasting 5.5 hours on 4G and 7.5 hours on 3G. For a > 2000 mAh battery, this really isn't acceptable.

I have had the 930 since it first came out in the UK and the battery life has been quite bad. I have done all the things that have been suggested to improve the battery life on it but it still doesn't last that long. I'm hoping that when they finally release Windows 10 Mobile for it the battery life will be better and it will fix a few of the bugs that 8.1 has on the 930.

 

[Harrie-S]

I have had the 930 since it first came out in the UK and the battery life has been quite bad. I have done all the things that have been suggested to improve the battery life on it but it still doesn't last that long. I'm hoping that when they finally release Windows 10 Mobile for it the battery life will be better and it will fix a few of the bugs that 8.1 has on the 930.

Get some wireless chargers for in your house/car/ office and battery live problems a gone. You have to spend some money but ... That is what I did at least. And don't expect to much battery live improvement from W10.

 

[areithropos]

As some reviews state confirming my personal experience the Lumia 930 has a rather bad battery life.
Typically it lasts 15 to 20 hours for me and theoretically more than 24 hours up to 30 and past.
But it depends heavily on how I use the phone, the numbers past 20 hours require me to almost never use the phone actively besides calls and only one or two hours of active usage.

It is nice to hear from some guys that their phones last constantly more than a day but after searching and reading some reviews coupled with my experience I cannot confirm such statements.

To give an example of active usage: I watched a YouTube video over mobile data, two let's play videos to be more precisely, and it lasted one hour; I was at 50% at the beginning and at 11% one hour later. A drop of 39% in one hour and such actions should be avoided if one wants to use it more than a few hours.

 

[kanrakuuuu]

Weird thing is yesterday I tested the battery against a Note 3 (similar specs), which still gives me five or more hours of screen time per charge. As we know, the 930, umm, doesn't. I set them both up for navigation, set the brightness approximately the same (the 930 never really gets very dark, part of its battery problem I think, although Windows 10 makes it easier to make it darker) and during a 45 minute journey the batteries both lost about the same: 17% for the Note 3 and 19% for the 930, although Windows 10 Maps has less dark colours (for the OLED screens) than Google Maps, so that counts in the 930's favour. I was really surprised, because honestly, I can lose 19% sometimes just using readit for half an hour, and all it's doing is displaying text on a black background. I thought something more taxing like mapping would be worse, but in fact it's better. So after all that, I felt left with more questions than answers... Is it the apps? Something to do with Windows OS? Something else?

 

[areithropos]

That is like my experience; every time the display is on, the battery drain is quite high while reading a text or using it for navigation.
I like to read on my phone and that is why I am quite disappointed because with my 930 reading is hard work for the battery.
Some battery saver features for CPU and display would be helpful maybe.

Playing is another thing: I was able to empty the battery in roughly two hours (Sims Free Play and Lara Croft Temple Run). Also bad is watching a video over mobile data.

I am not sure what the reasons are because using much dark on the screen helps a bit but overall the screen-on time is disappointing, and the new Lumias 950 seem to have similar problems and thus I am still hoping that maybe a new firmware update could help here a little (pessimistic as I am at times I think Microsoft is not doing much for a phone which gets called old).

 

[Hutzi]

I would love a black and white mode like iOS has on WM10! I use my iPod only for Spotify and so I have that mode on constantly. The Lumia 930 just had a crazy 1080p screen! No way for achieving great battery life on a pixel dense screen like that. Well not with a battery of 2.4AH. Just compare the pixel density of the Lumia 930 and the current iPhone 6s for a second. There. You have your answer! My screen takes up 75% of my battery when I use my phone. It's just physics in a way.... WM is already pretty battery efficient on the current build. I have my screen set to aromatic by the way. In addition to the colour settings WM10 adds detailed brightness settings. The issue here with the Lumia 930 is that you simply cannot put that slider to the absolute minimum. All your greys (and there are a lot of them in WM10) will have a purple tint, especially when looking at the screen in the dark! This is a calibration issue this phone suffers from the get to. So to conclude i just think the ONE thing that has to improve in technology the most is battery technology. Whether it's electric cars, smartphones or Ultrabooks. They all have to improve SUBSTANTIALLY to keep up with higher resolution displays and SOCs. I'm looking at you x86 Surface Phone...