doubled my battery life!

[quh86]

hey folks,
for more than a week now im a happy owner of the yellow lumia 920, as long as no one is asking me about my battery-life though.(and already a few scratches but that is rather off-topic)
Today i decided to go real hard on my battery and tried the battery-test of the wp-bench app. result: 2hrs 18 minutes. not so great! (airplane mode, everything turned off. no background tasks running)
after that i fully charged it again and played games like "ah!wolves!" and wordament, took a few pictures, facebook and used the 9gag app. the phone lasted only 3 hours before turning itself off.
thats a real pain. also when i dont use the phone at all during a day, it loses a lot just idling.
i'd like to see those who experience a real great battery-life like 12hours+ on normal/heavy usage to post their score using the battery-tester of the wp-bench app. with everything turned off that could interfere, like i did.
so we would have a relatively unbiased comparison between our phones.
a hard-reset is no option for me at this point, because here in germany the 920 seems to be out of stock at every shop, especially the yellow one. so i cant risk to brick my phone.

Cheers

 

[rubin12]

I changed my phone for a new one due to the clicking when you press down on the sim card bit. The new phone's battery life is at least double of the original one. I used to struggle to get through a day with the first, but the latest one could probably run into a third day.

 

[socalrailroader]

Is there a way to reset just the battery stats, like on a rooted Android phone?

 

[jmseamonkey]

I changed my phone for a new one due to the clicking when you press down on the sim card bit. The new phone's battery life is at least double of the original one. I used to struggle to get through a day with the first, but the latest one could probably run into a third day.

Can you comment on your usage patterns, etc.? I'm debating doing an exchange, but I'm worried that I might end up worse off. Here's what a typical day looks like for me, and I usually end up getting about 14-16 hours before the battery is fully drained:

• 10-15 emails sent and received, set to push every 15 minute
• 10-20 WhatsApp messages sent and received
• Playing about 15 moves per day in Words with Friends and about 25 moves per day in Get High with Words
• Listening to about 30 minutes of music in my collection (through headphones)
• Watching 5-10 minutes of Vimeo videos
• Browsing the Web in Internet Explorer for about 15-20 minutes
• Reading the news in Weave for about 20-30 minutes
• Browsing Reddit using Baconit for about 20-30 minutes
• Taking a quick note here and there using OneNote
• Checking the weather in the Microsoft Weather app a few times a day
• Average of about 15 minutes of phone calls
• Screen brightness set to low; NFC off; Bluetooth off; WiFi sometimes on, sometimes off (doesn't seem to make a difference)
• Only background tasks are Weather and Weave News Reader

By my estimates, this means I'm getting about 3 hours of usage time out of the phone and the rest is idle time. Based on how I've watched the battery quickly drain while the phone is in use, I know that if I would spend more time actively using the phone, I wouldn't last nearly as long as the 14-16 hours.

I've already fully discharged and fully charged my battery multiple times at this point, and I have already done a factory reset, both of which seemed to have helped quite a bit, but I'm just not sure if I'm really getting the true potential of battery life out of this phone.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

[rubin12]

I may have been overestimating the 'running into three days' to be honest. I have quite an irregular usage pattern, so it's difficult to give you a comparison to yours, but after the first full charge, by the end of the second day, I was actively trying to discharge the battery by playing music through the speakers, and in 30 minutes of doing this, the battery dropped about 3 or 4% (which I'd class as impressive).

With my original phone, I'd take it off charge at midday, do a small amount of browsing and email checking on wifi, go to work where I'd listen to music on headphones and do some data browsing, and by the time I'd get home at 12am, I'd be into the last third of my battery, if not further. Obviously there'd be a few phone calls and texts in there too. I'd also have wifi turned off when I was away from home, whereas now I don't bother as I don't feel the need to. As an other comparison, I remember seeing the battery drop 10% just from listening to music on headphones for less than an hour.

My advice would be that if you don't feel happy with your current battery life, then try and change it for a replacement whilst you still can. From what you've told me, I'd say yours sounds to be somewhere in between my original and new one, and the one thing you say that makes me think yours isn't how it should be, is that you're only actively using it for 3 hours before it runs out (plus what is not a particularly large amount of idol time).

Edit: another couple of things, I have my email sync set to 15 minutes (enforced as I'm on Yahoo), always make sure I 'back' out of all applications so they are closed properly, have NFC turned off, have the screen brightness set to automatic, and have location services switched on.

 

[jmseamonkey]

Thanks so much for your input, rubin12. This is really helpful.

I was wondering, were you having any problems with your first phone overheating? It seems like many people having bad battery problems are also experiencing the overheating issue, but this isn't something that seems to be happening to my phone.

Also, did you have to do anything special with your new phone in order to achieve the good battery life? Did you do a factory reset or force any full discharge/recharge cycles?

Thanks!

 

[quh86]

thanks for the quick reply.
yes i also experience overheating at the top of my phone. but only with certain things that i run. for example normal browsing does nothing, but when i play "ah!wolves!" it gets pretty hot. im concerned that this might hurt my internals.
also the battery drain while idling is just insane. it drops like 10% per hour without doing anything with it. with real moderat usage i can get through a working day. 6hrs before battery saver turns on. i did a few complete discharges like 4 or 5 until now i guess but that didnt seem to fix the issue.
i have no idea about the returning policy of nokia, but i believe that when something is faulty they are going to replace it?
i still hope for a firmware update that will fix these issues.
when my shop gets the new shippment for yellow lumias in, i will try a factory reset and then see what happens. but i dont want to be waiting for a new phone forever as you can imagine.
when you are free and have time to spare, could you please run wp-bench to see how your battery performs under full stress?

 

[onemoresummer]

My battery life literally dropped 30% in 7 hours while I slept and there was nothing running in the background, no apps open, blue tooth turned off.
I've only had the phone for 24 hours so I hope it improves every charge.
I let it completely drain again today and am currently charging to 100%.

 

[HaibaneReki]

My battery life literally dropped 30% in 7 hours while I slept and there was nothing running in the background, no apps open, blue tooth turned off.
I've only had the phone for 24 hours so I hope it improves every charge.
I let it completely drain again today and am currently charging to 100%.

I usually lose under 10% over night, charge full in the afternoon/evening, make it to the next one (if I don't game heavily)

usage:
watching video/RSS (Fuse) on way to work and back - 40 minutes
RSS through the day numerous times
maybe an our or two of music
showing off to my colleagues
social - pinned several groups to home screen
facebook - Me tile and app
trying out camera - still can't believe it

I think I'd call that heavy usage

 

[WPenvy]

Thought I'd chime in here after reading through the thread first.

All of the talk of doing "complete battery drains" and recharges is complete nonsense. Lithium ion batteries do not suffer from memory effect as nickel batteries did.

See quote below.

Modern laptops and cell phones, use Lithium Ion batteries. A charging cycle is defined means a depletion of the battery and charging to 100%. Example, today you drain to 40% and charge back up. Tomorrow you drain to 60% and charge back up. Altogether, that's 1 cycle. Fear not when it comes to constantly charging your battery, the worst thing you can actually do, is let it sit dead for a prolonged period of time (days/weeks).

Also don't worry about plugging in your phone early evening and not unplugging it until late morning the next day. Your device has safeguards in place to prevent the battery from being "overcharged". The reason people used to remove batteries from laptops they always had plugged in, was heat. We don't have to worry about that. Our phones are too smart for that to be an issue.

Another thing I have noticed, is that if I have my screen brightness set to "auto", it seems to turn down lower than when it's manually set to "low". What's up with that?...

I have a 19hour work day and I routinely make it through without needing a charge. Bluetooth is on in the car for my hour commute. Then both WiFi and LTE on at work. I listen to a lot of music at least 2.5 hours, >70 texts a day, religious checking on wpcentral, 3 emails @ 1 hour, 1 365 account set to push as they come in, and heavy Facebook usage on the mobile website. The only thing in the background is Amazing Weather HD

 

[juanitoriv]

They don't have memory, but they could use conditioning now and then.

 

[beachhoppr]

As an early critic of the battery life, I have to say that it HAS gotten better over time.

 

[ttsoldier]

They don't have memory, but they could use conditioning now and then.

Condition batteries? What year are you people in? Conditioning batteries is a thing of the past.

This quote was taken from Nokia support discussions and I concur.

"It is not a good idea to drain the battery completely. Previous generations of batteries might require this, but modern batteries do not and in fact may actually lose performance faster if you do. It is perfectly fine to charge at any time and for however long you can. In general and as posted before the percentage indicator in Settings is indicative and not accurate enough to base any usage claims or conclusions on. This percentage will become more accurate over time, but will always be (somewhat) relative to recent use.



In general if you feel battery life is not as good as it should be you should contact your retailer."

 

[imZadok]

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I have noticed a marked improvement in battery life after going to 'settings', 'find my phone' and disabling both options.

 

[pishead]

hi guys, i did experience the same issue on my 920 (discharging at 1% per five minutes in totally idle state, incl. flight mode, no programs left in background, etc.) twice. Finally i figured out that in both cases, we did open Nokia Drive for a short period of time, but closed it again after use. I checked the log plotted by the battery app and found that the energy curve started dropping very quickly with a much steep slope after the Nokia Drive was opened once, and kept that discharging speed even after it was completely closed again. Seems here a serious bug in Nokia Drive leaving some invisible processes in background, keeping draining the battery. The problem can be solved by simply restarting the phone, which kills the suspicious background processes.

 

[cre8tivspirit]

I've had my phone for just about 30 days now and was one of the lucky ones that never experienced battery drain issues.....until today that is. I pulled my phone off the charger this morning at 5:45 AM and by 8:45 AM I only had 43% battery life left. I'm not sure what has changed. I haven't adjusted any of my settings, NFC is off and has been since I bought the phone, I've only checked and sent a few emails this morning along with several texts. My usage has been pretty light today by normal standards. I really don't relish the idea of doing a hard reset to my phone.

How may of you that did a hard reset saw an improvement in your battery levels and how many didn't see any change?

 

[Davidkoh]

Thought I'd chime in here after reading through the thread first.

All of the talk of doing "complete battery drains" and recharges is complete nonsense. Lithium ion batteries do not suffer from memory effect as nickel batteries did.

The OS is still not always aware of just how much juice is left in the battery (which is shown when it shuts down at 0% battery and can then be started again to be used for say Netflix for a further 3 hours) and you might need to "calibrate" it all by running it completely flat and charging it up fully. The phone shuts off when the OS thinks the battery is about to die.

 

[techiedude007]

^ ^ I'll second this. The below has got to be the *dumbest* method of closing apps, i've ever encountered:

How do I close an app properly?
Close apps by pressing the back button as many times as necessary until the start screen or app menu is displayed.


I know the Palm Pre wasn't everyone's first choice for a phone, but swiping up to close an app seems almost revolutionary now...

MS, fix this!

Techiedude

 

[juanitoriv]

I prefer this over a task manager. Instead of tasks, options, force closes and another app's UI to deal with, its just a button.. Press and hold, or just tap away..

 

[HaibaneReki]

I've had my phone for just about 30 days now and was one of the lucky ones that never experienced battery drain issues.....until today that is. I pulled my phone off the charger this morning at 5:45 AM and by 8:45 AM I only had 43% battery life left. I'm not sure what has changed. I haven't adjusted any of my settings, NFC is off and has been since I bought the phone, I've only checked and sent a few emails this morning along with several texts. My usage has been pretty light today by normal standards. I really don't relish the idea of doing a hard reset to my phone.

How may of you that did a hard reset saw an improvement in your battery levels and how many didn't see any change?

as mentioned in different thread, a simple SOFT reset killed the stuck process (probably Angry Birds Space ) for me.