Are you suffering from bad battery life?

[fieldbaker]

I bought the Nokia Lumia 1020 and noticed right away that it suffered from battery problems. I don't want to go into details on this thread but you can read about what i did on this thread (http://forums.windowscentral.com/nokia-lumia-1020/246740-discharge-rate.html). I'm aware that the battery needs some time and a few cycles to get normal, I did this. I gave it 1 week but battery only improved very slightly. Tried every tip you can find on the forums, nothing helped.

Long story short.. I turned everything off, no sim card, hard reset, soft reset.. everything you can turn off on the phone was off and the phone would still discharge very quickly. I began searching these forums and others and found that the problem occurs on many lumias and some people claimed it happens on Samsungs etc aswell. Thats why I'm posting here on W8 forum.

Symptoms: 3-10% discharge rate/hour on IDLE(It could lose over 20-30% when sleeping - Compared to my 2 year old iPhone that dropps 1-2%). And remember, everything was turned off. I tried several hard resets and soft resets. No sim card. Every setting OFF. Sometimes over 20% discharge rate/hour on load. It seemed really random, sometimes it could spike and lose battery so fast and sometimes it seemed rather stable.

The problems were so bad I had to return the phone. I like Nokia and I like W8, but these problems seem to occur for many.

Threads about poor battery life:
http://forums.windowscentral.com/nokia-lumia-1020/243573-1020-battery-drain.html
http://forums.windowscentral.com/nokia-lumia-920/215695-lumia-920-battery-your-opinions.html (This one has over 70 pages of complaints)
http://forums.windowscentral.com/nokia-lumia-820/241572-poor-battery-backup-after-amber.html
Lumia 1020 battery life appears poor? - Nokia Support Discussions
and the list continues

I'm creating this thread to see if many others on W8 phone are having these issues? Please post if you experience the same issues.

 

[Jazmac]

Question, what cell phone did you have before you got your first Windows phone?

 

[Boris Lozac]

Question, what cell phone did you have before you got your first Windows phone?

Trying so hard to figure out what does that have to do with anything

 

[Muessig]

So let me try to understand, you've clearly had a phone that had a battery fault and you've done enough research to confirm that times over. In that research you've seen that some people have had battery problems but often not quite as bad as yours when you had everything off.

Did you try to try a replacement phone at all? I this kind of excessive drain you've described is not common at all.

 

[Ultimateone]

There are enough battery threads on here, my 1020 has a loss of 2.7% battery per hour and I use the phone with various apps.

Its also WP8, not W8

 

[fieldbaker]

So let me try to understand, you've clearly had a phone that had a battery fault and you've done enough research to confirm that times over. In that research you've seen that some people have had battery problems but often not quite as bad as yours when you had everything off.

Did you try to try a replacement phone at all? I this kind of excessive drain you've described is not common at all.

I don't think the battery was faulty, because i once got it down to 1% discharge rate and then it lasted long. This seems to be some kind of software issue because it would spike and start draining heavyly until you soft reset it, sometimes i had to hard reset it. Then it went normal again to around 2%, then it would happen again. This is with no apps installed, so no background apps were running. It was really weird. I contacted Nokia and they just linked me tips to save battery-faq.

I tried to replace it, my supplier didn't allow for exchanges. So I had no choice but to send it back. I'm asking here about it because I really liked WP8 and I'm a fan of Nokia. I'm thinking about buying a 925 and give it another chance, but I'm unsure because of this experience so I'm just asking around and see if more people are experiencing the same problem i had.

 

[Boris Lozac]

There's certainly some issue, as the poll "do you have random battery drain" suggests, plenty of users voiced this issue. I got it down to not happening anymore, started quiting tabs in Internet Explorer rather then just backing out of it, installed a different weather app etc, and it didn't happen for a long time. Lying, it happened a few days ago but i changed email options to download every mail i have, not just the last 7 days, and that triggered the drain, but at least in that case i knew what happened.

 

[Oxymoron428]

Wow, 2.7% percent an hour is bad? My 928 sometimes gets to 12.7%, and that's on a good day. Sometimes its 30% an hour, but that's only when I'm playing games (I'm a bit of a power user).

 

[Muessig]

How long did it last when you were on 1%? It shouldn't last long at all. If you're talking long periods of time at 1% that suggests a battery calibration issue, where the phone thinks it has less battery left than it really has. Arguably resets should fix that but only if you manage to drain the battery completely.

Either way, software issues like this shouldn't be happening and a lot of the time it can be traced back to Internet Explorer trying to resolve a page in the background or having your phone on 4g with a low signal area. All very frustrating but with GDR 3 I think a lot of these problems are solved.

 

[chezm]

i can empathize since i've got the same problem...if i have 1 complaint about my L920, its the random battery drain.

 

[neo158]

No I'm not and neither is my phone

 

[uselessrobot]

I haven't had a problem in months. Then I got a game that gets the phone warm which I played for maybe 20 minutes. My phone went from a full charge to 20% in five hours.

I remain convinced that the phone running hot is directly tied to excessive battery drain. It leads me to believe that this is some kind of hardware issue. The only way it will go away is once next gen hardware shows up. The various top Lumias continue running identical SoC, so it stands to reason that these problems persist.

 

[BaritoneGuy]

I have an ATIV S and when I first got it I thought the battery life was OK but not great. GDR2 improved things a fair bit. With GDR3 the improvement is substantial. Almost into BB territory. Idle discharge rate is in the 1% range. This is with LTE, WiFi and Bluetooth all on.

 

[Ultimateone]

Wow, 2.7% percent an hour is bad? My 928 sometimes gets to 12.7%, and that's on a good day. Sometimes its 30% an hour, but that's only when I'm playing games (I'm a bit of a power user).

No I am saying my phone rocks with battery life, I just think people dont know how to setup their phones to get great life