- Sep 6, 2012
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While battery life for me has been decent at best, I've always been confused by those who have boasted about exceptional battery life. Just for clarification I'm using the unlocked RM-937 Lumia 1520 (Hong Kong variant) on the Rogers network in Toronto, Canada. For me, battery has been marginally better than my 920. This led to do some testing and troubleshooting and I've spent the last 5 days trying to eliminate some possibilities. So far, on average I'm seeing a drop of anywhere between 5-10% in battery drop per hour while in my pocket (not using my 1520). My personal settings and discussion can be found on my previous thread: http://forums.windowscentral.com/no...-if-im-having-battery-issues.html#post2263536
So I made a breakthrough...
Last night I went to see The Hobbit and with my phone in my pocket not being touched I dropped 14%! Last night I went to bed with my battery at 62%. I accidentally left my phone off the charger. I woke up this morning pissed expecting my battery to be on battery saver but through some miracle of God it did NOT move a single percentage. Don't ask me how this was possible but the only way I can make sense of it was that I was connected to Wi-fi at home. I only received one email over night and a couple live tiles updated. This led me to immediately believe that the reason I'm not seeing stellar battery life (though it is still very good) is because of LTE.
So I did a second test. Normally on my short trek to work or home from work I drop about 7% just on my 20-30 min walk without use. This baffles me. Today I manually dropped the connection down from max speed of 4G aka LTE to 3G. I made my trip to work this morning, took it out of my pocket to check the battery and guess what? It did not move a single percent! So in conclusion, my battery eating culprit is LTE.
Now.. I'm not sure if this is only going to cause Canadians who purchased unlocked 1520's issues because Rogers actually operates on the 2600mhz LTE Max band which supposedly can deliver us LTE "speeds of up to 150mbps". And to my understanding AT&T users with unlocked 1520's do not get LTE on these devices. So it seems like this LTE band is causing some battery drain. Sadly, the only solution is to manually adjust my data connection speeds based on use but that's pretty annoying. And I doubt a fix for this is going to address this issue. That's too bad.
EDIT: Someone on another forum just mentioned something someone else here said. And this is exactly what the issue is... When you have low receive signal strength your phone transmits at a higher power to make sure it gets a signal back to the tower. Since Canadians are only able to achieve partial LTE coverage due to only having the 2600mhz band on my phone for LTW and not the AWS (1700/2100Mhz) band it seems to make sense my phone drains when using LTE. You guys in the US won't encounter this issue. But some people using the unlocked model like myself will have this issue.
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So I made a breakthrough...
Last night I went to see The Hobbit and with my phone in my pocket not being touched I dropped 14%! Last night I went to bed with my battery at 62%. I accidentally left my phone off the charger. I woke up this morning pissed expecting my battery to be on battery saver but through some miracle of God it did NOT move a single percentage. Don't ask me how this was possible but the only way I can make sense of it was that I was connected to Wi-fi at home. I only received one email over night and a couple live tiles updated. This led me to immediately believe that the reason I'm not seeing stellar battery life (though it is still very good) is because of LTE.
So I did a second test. Normally on my short trek to work or home from work I drop about 7% just on my 20-30 min walk without use. This baffles me. Today I manually dropped the connection down from max speed of 4G aka LTE to 3G. I made my trip to work this morning, took it out of my pocket to check the battery and guess what? It did not move a single percent! So in conclusion, my battery eating culprit is LTE.
Now.. I'm not sure if this is only going to cause Canadians who purchased unlocked 1520's issues because Rogers actually operates on the 2600mhz LTE Max band which supposedly can deliver us LTE "speeds of up to 150mbps". And to my understanding AT&T users with unlocked 1520's do not get LTE on these devices. So it seems like this LTE band is causing some battery drain. Sadly, the only solution is to manually adjust my data connection speeds based on use but that's pretty annoying. And I doubt a fix for this is going to address this issue. That's too bad.
EDIT: Someone on another forum just mentioned something someone else here said. And this is exactly what the issue is... When you have low receive signal strength your phone transmits at a higher power to make sure it gets a signal back to the tower. Since Canadians are only able to achieve partial LTE coverage due to only having the 2600mhz band on my phone for LTW and not the AWS (1700/2100Mhz) band it seems to make sense my phone drains when using LTE. You guys in the US won't encounter this issue. But some people using the unlocked model like myself will have this issue.
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