Battery life with WP 8.1

[AndrewL920]

Cortana, location service, NFC, and advertising I.D are the culprit. Just disable them. Especially cortana and location services. They are battery juicers. Based on my assumptions, they are only recommended for 3,000 - 4,000 mah battery

 

[Boothinell]

Great thread so far guys, lots of different outcomes and occurences. I've kind of had a bit of everything on here (I have an L720) but taking into account quotes from Microsoft people I can probably work something out. Basically I had Cortana enabled (I'm in UK but cheated around it just to see what it was like) but that draaaiiined the battery no end so I removed that and it turns out IE takes most of my battery despite me not using it that much.

I've not had WiFi on all day until 11pm, NFC, bluetooth, glance, double tap to wake, and the usual suspects have been off all day.

Here are some screenshots, the battery app is the main one really. I had it on charge overnight (still can't decide whether to do it or not despite threads on here...) and apparently it drained to a point very quickly then recovered, probably a glitch in the matrix. But yeah, from 8am til 5pm it appeared to average at about 7% p/h on low/moderate usage, no battery saver. This was before I found out about background tasks resetting after the update so I changed that and looked at email account etc. Didn't make tooo much of a difference but at 28% I but battery saver on and it stayed at exactly from around 5pm 11pm with little use. So that's no change in percentage in 6 hours... Had battery saver off for about an hour now and it's dipped 1% with moderate use so I think it's coming back down to planet Earth.



Also, I tried a couple of soft resets during this mad period and it seems every time I either do that or just restart the phone the battery percentage will fluctuate wildly, usually a much lower that before I reset. Very strange. But I suppose this is the cycle and these are the things to expect during a "preview" release, it may be all well and good when all desired settings are set etc. but yeah, that's just my contribution...

I look forward to hearing about even more people's experiences with this!

 

[skynet1511]

Re: windows 8.1 drain more battery

I'm jumping in with concern here as well, my battery drain has been incredibly bad, I'm charging constantly whereas before it was maybe once or twice a day with heavy usage. Under battery saver the biggest culprit for drain is, confusingly, the phone app which is not open or in use when i'm checking or even at all. And there is no way to suspend this app or change it's permissions.

Are others seeing this?

In my case there's the phone app in the list but it shows that it never used any battery. The bars are totally empty... I am sorry you are having issues with that.

 

[migueli2]

Awesome battery here with Lumia 925.
After a day or two setting all applications and settings!




Sent from my Lumia 925 using Tapatalk

 

[Rodrigo Mendes]

Even better battery life than WP8 here!! Lumia 925. Thanks Microsoft!!!

I think all these people with battery life problem need to check a thousand things before claim about. I NEVER have any problems with that in any WP device. Since here, Lumia 710, Omnia W, Lumia 820 and Lumia 925. Always getting better and better after updates!

 

[SAM 77]

Battery performance was noticeably poor after installing.
Doing a phone reset has brought it back to normal performance maybe even better because now I have more apps running in background.

More time is needed to confirm but at the moment its looking slightly better than 8.0 GDR3

 

[Spirited]

never happy with the battery life on my Lumia 920...wp8.1 is more battery killing on my phone. 10 pts gone with wifi during 7 hour sleep. Cortana doesn't actually consume battery much if u refer to battery sense. Also I think battery life issue is an industrial problem.

 

[Helder Costa1]

my battery get worse with 8.1... not much but it is. hope it gets better in the next few days..

 

[Jazmac]

Of course the battery is going to take a hit. Its beta and its loaded with debug code. Mine hasn't been as bad as some though.

 

[Rodrigo Mendes]

I don't know if anyone talk about it here, but after upgrade to 8.1, all apps in background tasks was moved to ON, include some know battery drain like Here Drive. Give a look in Battery Saver to "fix it".

 

[Rodrigo Mendes]

Of course the battery is going to take a hit. Its beta and its loaded with debug code. Mine hasn't been as bad as some though.

Make sense, but for me battery life is better in 8.1. Maybe IE11 (almost all my usage) have a better battery management.

 

[AndrewL920]

I used cortana for an hour. She was great but unfortunately, she was a battery juicer along with location service. I uninstalled her and turned off location services because cortana and location service are for smartphone with 3,000 - 4,000 mah battery.

 

[thomasdtran]

I turned everything off. I'm not sure what is draining my Lumia 822 soo much. I'm even unable to install the Facebook app. It went down 40% in 3 hours.

 

[kristalsoldier]

I also see a battery issue, however, as of now, I think the effect is marginal. Without altering any of the settings I had before the update/ upgrade and with Data Connection and Internet Sharing on, I had about 20% left at the end of a 16-hr day. Earlier, I would have about 40% left. If I adjust for slightly more usage - phone calls mainly and admiring the parallax effect ( :smile: ) - let's say I had a net of about 30% left. So, about 10% more battery expenditure than before the update. I have not hard reset the phone (L720) after the update and I don't intend to do so.

One other thing: I notice that around lunch time the phone randomly shut down and restarted all by itself. I have no idea why. It was working fine before it shut itself down and it has worked fine after it restarted.

 

[falconrap]

Everyone needs to go into Battery Saver and deactivate all of the apps that you don't want/don't need running in the background. WP8.1 resets all of your apps to being allowed to run in the background. But, having said that, the first day or two is going to be worse because 1) you're playing with all of the new features and 2) everything is setting up and updating (including Cortana). My usage was heavier for a while when I first got it on there. Today has been closer to normal, but still above average in use. I have an Icon that would normally be running around 20% by now with my current usage and without recharging. See the attached pictures. One is today, which shows WP8.1 should get a full 24 hours without recharging, which is good for this phone, and more on par with where my 822 was before it died on me. My usage before WP8.1 had worse battery life with a little less usage. The larger spanned graph shows the first day and a half with 8.1 on it, and you can see that the drain was heavier then.

This really reminds me of when people get a phone and they complain about the battery life after a day before the software has gotten a more correct feel for the battery and when they are using the phone like crazy because it's their brand new shiny toy. I would say that if your battery life doesn't improve after a couple of days, and you stop using it trying to hear every witty Cortana reply, then you might want to check and see what the deal is. Just make sure you have unneeded apps disallowed for running in the background. By the way, I always leave Bluetooth and Location on (except when I need to turn Bluetooth off for a few minutes for the kids to hear their games while I'm in the car).

 

[anon(7901790)]

I'm seeing a bit of a difference. The way WP8.1 does background app usage has changed. So as older apps take advantage of the changes, your favorite apps may be sucking up juice faster than normal. I've found that with most of the apps, you can't change their behavior of whether or not they can run in the background. Since WP8.1 is so new, many of the apps need to be updated to take advantage of the new way power management is implemented within the OS.

 

[pointclouds]

1- email is changed to "items as arrive"
2 - all background apps are "not allowed"
3- location services "disabled"
4 - many soft resets

and still my battery is draining.

even in 7 hours sleep, %40 is gone!!!!

anyone with solution???

 

[Arthur Oechsler]

no cortana
3 hours music + 3g internet explorer usage.
localization turned off
when it's not on 3g it's on wifi
every app but here maps and drive has authorization for background activity

lumia 720, I don't see any improvement nor downgrade in battery life.

xbox music SUCKS, also, i don't know how to stop it from using my 3g dataplan, i don't want your ******* artist backgrounds. already deactivated under xbox music > config, but it still used 15mb from my plan in about 3hours --'

#edit: sorry, didn't realised my system was in my native language (i'm so used to english nowadays) it reads 17hours since last recharge and 1day and 12hours left till next

 

[naeem151287]

OK, this is what I have done on my 1520.

When I installed 8.1 first I had sluggish performance and really poor battery life. Later that same day I did a hard reset and after setting up everything same as before, disabled unnecessary apps from background tasks. Now two days later, my battery is well settled and I am seeing the same battery life as before even with Cortana running. Last night I went to bed with 53% battery left and battery saver showed me 6 hours left. This morning I woke up with 48% battery left and now it's showing me 15 hours still left.

So, I believe people just to disable unnecessary apps from background tasks and need to be patient and allow the battery to settle down.

 

[NaatakCompany]

Cortana is draining all the juice like nothing! My 520 is losing 1% a minute if Cortana is active :| Had to set it to 'not allowed' in background and things have gotten better since then.