Lumia 920 battery - Your opinions

[Pete C]

I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but one thing that has always hammered phones is the automatic WiFi hotspot finder. This should always be off. Go into WiFi and hit Advanced. Uncheck everything. Only turn it back on when you are looking for a WiFi hotspot, then disable it after connecting.

 

[thekonger]

My 920 was having poor battery life (lasting less than a day with light usage) and I did as most suggested:

• Let battery drain fully and then recharged fully
• turned off NFC
• Bluetooth off
• turn off wifi when not connected (Nice free app called NetworkSwitcher that monitors networks and allows you to turn off wifi quick)
• only allow Weather to run as background task
• Set email/calendar to update every 15 minutes
• Make sure I exit tasks (you can hold the back arrow down and it will show all your active screens. Probably well known feature but I wasn't aware of it)

Finally, I did the ##3282# field test and tried to change to 3G. Couldn't get it to stick but I did see something called 'Polling Frequency' set to 3 seconds. I changed that to 5 seconds and today after 4 hours of use it still says 93% power. Hopefully it is something I did as this could mean I will be able to go a few days without needing a recharge. Or it may be a fluke and my battery will start spiraling soon.

Also, does anyone know what the 'Polling Frequency' is? I assume it is how long the phone waits before it looks for a cellular connection if it doesn't have one, but I can't find exact info on it.

 

[Ali Babba]

This battery drain bug is very odd. I disconnected my phone from the charger this morning and noticed that the battery life said only 21 hrs (no battery saver) vs normally its 1 day 10 hrs or so. I enabled battery saver and it only went up to 1 day vs 1 day 20 hrs. I've been watching my phone and in the last 30 min it dropped 5% without me doing anything. I've done a power cycle and reboot (vol down + power) 2x now and no change. Up until now, the last few days with the phone I've had 30% drain after using the phone very little after 10 hrs off the charger.

 

[CSJr1]

Definately seems like I have a defective battery. Going to exchange it this weekend.


All backgrounds off except The Weather Channel.
30 min phone call.
40 min Nokia Music (wifi)
40 min Vevo (wifi)
every 10 min or so checking battery level in settings.
3 emails polling at 30 min, 1 hour, 1 hour

 

[bauerbach]

Question is... should all of this be necessary? no background apps? that's not a reasonable expectation for a phone IMO. No NFC? I agree its a semi useless function ATM, but that may change... it should not destroy the battery by itself.

still trying a few battery cycles. but theres a hard limit on how many features Im willing to abandon. It should not be necessary.

 

[Dos101]

Question is... should all of this be necessary? no background apps? that's not a reasonable expectation for a phone IMO. No NFC? I agree its a semi useless function ATM, but that may change... it should not destroy the battery by itself.

still trying a few battery cycles. but theres a hard limit on how many features Im willing to abandon. It should not be necessary.

No it shouldn't be, which makes me suspect that it's a software related issue (popular app that's buggy, or an issue with the OS itself). There's far too many people reporting inconsistent battery drain.

 

[fiftiesdean]

I did the following, and after 6 hours of use, I'm still at 72%.

- blocked Nokia Drive+ Beta from running in the background
- turned off NFC
- Forced 2G (our building has no service. this drained my iphone as well)
- took a deep breath and relaxed (they are still returnable)

This is acceptable to me. This weekend I will test no wi-fi and using 4G only. FYI, I have 4 ActiveSync e-mail addresses getting 4-5 e-mails an hour.

 

[Mpm277]

4 hours - Two texts. 15 minutes of web browsing. 75%.

It's so freaking frustrating because I like the phone a lot. In my 14th day in exchanging jt for another one and hoping it's better.

 

[congusano]

Definately seems like I have a defective battery. Going to exchange it this weekend.

Unless you truly have a bad battery, what was the phone doing (or what was running in the background) just prior to you checking your battery? If something is running, that time will always show you have less time remaining than if you had your phone just sitting there, not doing anything for an hour

 

[thekonger]

Question is... should all of this be necessary? no background apps? that's not a reasonable expectation for a phone IMO. No NFC? I agree its a semi useless function ATM, but that may change... it should not destroy the battery by itself.

still trying a few battery cycles. but theres a hard limit on how many features Im willing to abandon. It should not be necessary.

I don't know if it's abandoning them, just setting items to what they should probably default to in the first place. Personally, I don't want NFC and BT on unless I turn it on. As for background apps, I'm not 100% certain how this affects an app. I only have Weather set to run as a BG app yet I receive all my other notifications for email, skyle, IM, etc.

I also think MS and Nokia will release updates that optimize the phone's battery even more.

 

[thekonger]

I did the following, and after 6 hours of use, I'm still at 72%.

- blocked Nokia Drive+ Beta from running in the background
- turned off NFC
- Forced 2G (our building has no service. this drained my iphone as well)
- took a deep breath and relaxed (they are still returnable)

This is acceptable to me. This weekend I will test no wi-fi and using 4G only. FYI, I have 4 ActiveSync e-mail addresses getting 4-5 e-mails an hour.

fiftiesdean, how did you force 2g? I did the field test trick and my change wouldn't stick.

 

[rockstarzzz]

4 hours
No WiFi
No data connections
No NFC
No Bluetooth
No supersensitive screen
No GPS
No calls made or received
Screen brightness to medium

Only used texts.

In 4 hours from 100% to 18%

What am I missing here?

 

[jaimeastin]

No Battery Issuies for me... WAY BETTER THAN 900!

I just dont get the battery issues and I think it is more like people having the phone misconfigured... I received myphone on Monday. I read the forums before I got my phone and noted what others were saying about the battery and such.

---Wifi settings where the hotspot finder and notifications set to off
---NFC is off (no point in using it yet)
---Bluetooth is constantly on, but I should turn it off as I only use it in the car.
---Apps in the background and live tiles, I turn almost all apps with this function off, unless I really liked/needed the functionality (WP Central is on though)
---Most importantly, push settings for my 7 different email/syncing accounts to a time interval that was cattered to their need (non are set to as they arrive)
---Finally, after I set my phone up, I used it until it completely died. I then let it fully charge over night.


My phone's current status is as follows:
Remaining Battery Life: 32%
Estimated Time Remaing: 12 hours
Time since last charge: 1 day 1 hour...
Bluetooth is on
Wifi is off


I have spend a few hours on the phone, send/read both email and texts, browed the internet and used apps, no gaming yet as I usually do not play games, taken a few pictures for work and testing, used skydrive and one note in class lastnight. By the way, My email is both personal, my personal company/business, and my corportate exchange... I have not listed to music but one time and that was using Nokia music for about 10 munites (streaming over LTE)... I have not experienced ANY overheating issues at all. I understand that maybe I did get a great device with no defects. My launch 900 had to be replaced due to the screen and such, so I know it can happen. I just dont think that all are experiecing this issue.

I personally think that people are using too many battery killing features, well more like misconfiguring these features... As the old age rule is "All because you can, does not mean that you should..." It has a lot of cool features, but too much of anything can and will kill. I am not going to charge my phone today until it dies or I have to charge it for business... So far, not only is the phone beautiful, a joy to use and hold, and a head turner, it has far exceeded my expectations. Now, I need to continue to work on my surface getting more than a 2 day battery charge like my ipad 2 did (though I use my Surface more than I did my ipad2).

Hope if helps, but if it doesn't, please do not flame me... Get a new device

 

[CSJr1]

Unless you truly have a bad battery, what was the phone doing (or what was running in the background) just prior to you checking your battery? If something is running, that time will always show you have less time remaining than if you had your phone just sitting there, not doing anything for an hour

You could be right. I checked it right after Vevo hung on me. (no music, just dim screen).
As of now it shows 60% 1 day 5 hours remaining.

 

[mparker]

Question is... should all of this be necessary? no background apps? that's not a reasonable expectation for a phone IMO. No NFC? I agree its a semi useless function ATM, but that may change... it should not destroy the battery by itself.

still trying a few battery cycles. but theres a hard limit on how many features Im willing to abandon. It should not be necessary.

No it is not reasonable. But the big offender (Nokia Drive) is just a beta version.

Also this is the first version of the new kernel. I expected it to be buggy. Remember that it was RTM'ed very late, this is usually not a good sign. I suspect that the late RTM date is also implicated in the obvious signs of haste in the WP8 rollout. Hopefully WP8 SP1 will resolve a lot of these issues, and hopefully it'll be out soon. It really should not be possible for a non-music background task to drain the battery like this, there is supposed to be a CPU quota on each background task to restrict how much battery it can use, so that even a buggy beta app like Nokia Drive can't kill the battery. Hopefully they can quickly find the bug in the kernel that is letting these tasks exceed their CPU quota without being killed off. Again, WP8 shouldn't allow a rogue process to drain the battery but clearly there is a bug in this part of the OS, which hopefully will be fixed soon.

But advice to stop all background tasks, turn off wifi and nfc and location etc are intended to isolate whether the problem is hardware or a rogue process. If you turn off everything and the battery life is still bad, then you know you need to get the phone replaced. If battery life is fine, then you can move on to finding the rogue process using elimination - hopefully there's just one app that's the culprit. For example, I've found that the Microsoft weather app drains the battery much less than Accuweather - I can get through the day with about 80% free if I'm using the MS weather app, but with Accuweather I've only got about 43% free at the end of the day. Either is acceptable, but since both give me the information I need I've switched to the MS weather app.

 

[dkp23]

I just dont get the battery issues and I think it is more like people having the phone misconfigured... I received myphone on Monday. I read the forums before I got my phone and noted what others were saying about the battery and such.

---Wifi settings where the hotspot finder and notifications set to off
---NFC is off (no point in using it yet)
---Bluetooth is constantly on, but I should turn it off as I only use it in the car.
---Apps in the background and live tiles, I turn almost all apps with this function off, unless I really liked/needed the functionality (WP Central is on though)
---Most importantly, push settings for my 7 different email/syncing accounts to a time interval that was cattered to their need (non are set to as they arrive)
---Finally, after I set my phone up, I used it until it completely died. I then let it fully charge over night.


My phone's current status is as follows:
Remaining Battery Life: 32%
Estimated Time Remaing: 12 hours
Time since last charge: 1 day 1 hour...
Bluetooth is on
Wifi is off


I have spend a few hours on the phone, send/read both email and texts, browed the internet and used apps, no gaming yet as I usually do not play games, taken a few pictures for work and testing, used skydrive and one note in class lastnight. By the way, My email is both personal, my personal company/business, and my corportate exchange... I have not listed to music but one time and that was using Nokia music for about 10 munites (streaming over LTE)... I have not experienced ANY overheating issues at all. I understand that maybe I did get a great device with no defects. My launch 900 had to be replaced due to the screen and such, so I know it can happen. I just dont think that all are experiecing this issue.

I personally think that people are using too many battery killing features, well more like misconfiguring these features... As the old age rule is "All because you can, does not mean that you should..." It has a lot of cool features, but too much of anything can and will kill. I am not going to charge my phone today until it dies or I have to charge it for business... So far, not only is the phone beautiful, a joy to use and hold, and a head turner, it has far exceeded my expectations. Now, I need to continue to work on my surface getting more than a 2 day battery charge like my ipad 2 did (though I use my Surface more than I did my ipad2).

Hope if helps, but if it doesn't, please do not flame me... Get a new device

Yet, i dont see how long you had the phone off charge.

My battery drained from 7-3pm with mostly whatsapp texting, about an hour of surfing, no calls, no regular text, no games, occasionally checking people hub, nextgen read, and no downloads. NFC is off, Btooth is off, wifi is on with all the options off, only weather running in background, drive off. I have 3 emails, 1 manual update, 1 updated every hour, another updating as they come. I believe i configured my phone rather good and it still drained.

I did my 2nd hard reset, i let my battery die twice and i believe i got my battery improved with respectable performance, the difference being uninstalling the battery level 8 app. I believe that is draining my battery.

If you go through the thread, you will see people stating they have drive off, nfc, btooth off and still get draining on standby. So the people that keep posting "turn this and that off, it will work" its not like we haven't done it, read the 15 pages of the thread, everybody has done it with mixed results.

 

[congusano]

What if the issue is a memory/cpu/process leak that is causing our batteries behaviors? I am curious if just because we "close" a window, it doesn't properly "close" it from still having some sort of process running in the background, causing unknown usage and draining the battery faster than we expect.

Hear me out: I am finding just how odd this battery is by repeating almost the same tasks each day, and my battery behaves different each day. One day I thought my battery reporting (when looking in settings, battery) was stuck, because after 3 hours, it was still showing 100% and this was after I texted a bit and checked email (yes, it was off the charger). Another day, I had nothing running in the background, just emails syncing every 15 minutes like the previous day, connected to wifi (as I almost always am) and in under an hour, the battery drained down like 20%, with me literally not even touching it.

Both days I had the same background tasks disabled, same location (my house), and I closed everything I could by clicking the "back" arrow until I was back to the main tiles.

Some days I also notice it charges faster than others.. again, this is made with the assumption that I am doing this in almost always the same conditions (emails sync every 15 minutes, nfc, bluetooth, etc off)...

Anyone with thoughts on that?

 

[gbx5]

Definately seems like I have a defective battery. Going to exchange it this weekend.


All backgrounds off except The Weather Channel.
30 min phone call.
40 min Nokia Music (wifi)
40 min Vevo (wifi)
every 10 min or so checking battery level in settings.
3 emails polling at 30 min, 1 hour, 1 hour

You are expecting way too much, this is totally normal. You are still at 65% for crying out loud.

 

[dkp23]

You are expecting way too much, this is totally normal. You are still at 65% for crying out loud.

Ya, thought same thing, i would like to be able to do that and still have 63%.

 

[mparker]

What if the issue is a memory/cpu/process leak that is causing our batteries behaviors?

I think this one of the ways the issue is triggered. The basic problem is that a process is allowed to hang around burning CPU cycles. Foreground tasks and background tasks are managed differently, but the background task in the Nokia Drive beta definitely seems to be an issue, and I have personally seen a foreground app fail to close properly and drain the battery - I was running Angry Birds Star Wars for a few minutes and the battery got hot, so I exited the app completely and the phone stayed hot and the battery kept dropping about 4%/minute until the phone shut down. WP8 wasn't released to manufacturing until a month or so before the phone's release, which is very late. I suspect that they had a heck of a time getting the bugs out, and just barely got it just stable enough to release before the development team passed out from exhaustion. Give it a month or two and they should have a service pack out that should improve things (assuming AT&T allows it).

I'm also suspecting that the NFC culprit may be car keys and credit cards with embedded NFC tags in them, causing the NFC circuits in the phone to stay active. I don't think WP8 is using the accelerometer to detect taps in order to activate the NFC circuit - when I tried the NFC tag that came with my phone, I just touched the tag to the phone and it read it.