Gmail kills battery life

[El Squish]

I've had a Lumia 920 since launch day and recently decided to exchange it for a new one just before my warranty expired because of the dust in the front facing camera issue. I don't use the FFC very often but it was occasionally annoying when on skype and I figured I'd get a fresh battery out of the exchange so, why not. There was an unfortunate side effect though. While setting up my new phone I could no longer connect with EAS thanks to Scroogle's new policy. This makes it impossible for me to search the server for older emails and to download emails as they arrive with the native client. I also noticed my battery life was noticeably worse than my old 920. I would dump gmail if I wasn't using it for some business accounts but for now I decided to switch to MetroMail so I could search the server easily. The unexpected side effect of this is that my battery life has nearly doubled. It's even better than my old 920 now. I'm not sure what method MetroMail uses to grab emails but it seems much more efficient than whatever the native WP8 email client is doing. I'm using the trial at the moment but the battery life improvement alone is why I'm going to be buying MetroMail.

Is there a reason the native client can't do whatever MetroMail is doing to grab emails from google's servers more efficiently? Is anybody else noticing battery life improvement when they remove gmail accounts from the native client?

 

[Laura Knotek]

That's great to hear MetroMail seems to be the solution for you. That looks like a really nice app.

 

[rdubmu]

If you business apps use google apps and not gmail, then you can still use EAS. it should be set up as s.google.com as your server name.

 

[El Squish]

I just have a very small business so I'm not paying google anything for those email accounts so, I don't have the ability to use EAS. The only reason I don't change to a different email address is because I don't want my clients to have to change my email contact info.

 

[manicottiK]

I just have a very small business so I'm not paying google anything for those email accounts so, I don't have the ability to use EAS. The only reason I don't change to a different email address is because I don't want my clients to have to change my email contact info.

If you want to change but for the transition pain, you could get Outlook.com addresses now and set your existing Gmail accounts to forward. That way, all of your contacts would still be able to reach you at the addresses that they already know. Over time, they'd update their contact info and you'd age out the Gmail addresses.

 

[jgbstetson]

If you want to change but for the transition pain, you could get Outlook.com addresses now and set your existing Gmail accounts to forward. That way, all of your contacts would still be able to reach you at the addresses that they already know. Over time, they'd update their contact info and you'd age out the Gmail addresses.

I just did this today. I then proceeded to beat myself over the head for not doing it sooner.

 

[anon(123856)]

If you want to change but for the transition pain, you could get Outlook.com addresses now and set your existing Gmail accounts to forward. That way, all of your contacts would still be able to reach you at the addresses that they already know. Over time, they'd update their contact info and you'd age out the Gmail addresses.

That's really good advice because that's exactly what I did went I switched to WP8. :smile: It worked great and when I was satisfied everyone had updated their contact info I closed the Gmail account. Quite painless.

 

[El Squish]

I have considered that and it would have been my next move. The problem now is I don't want to do that because my battery life has improved so much. Even if I was using EAS with those accounts, my battery life would be worse than what it is now. The improved battery life is more important to me than using the native client. Which frustrates me a little because I don't understand why the native client isn't doing things the same way. :/

 

[anon(123856)]

I hear you on battery life.I used to have a weird sort of similar problem when I was on Android. I hated the native Gmail client and tried every single mail app in the store. Every single one of them ate my battery alive. The native Gmail client was the only one that didn't kill my battery. It's good that you have something that's working for you even though it's hard to understand why.

 

[Marconis4]

My battery life on my 8X used to be horrendous, as in down to 65% after two hours of idling. I realized that my Gmail was in a constant sync even though I had it set to 15 or 30 minutes. I changed it to manual and now I can get up to 2 days of battery life with no problems at all.

 

[Will6371]

I have just downloaded metro on trial but even though I have toast set to on it is not giving me an audible notification of new mail. I get the count on the tile but no sound. Any ideas why.