Lumia 920 battery - Your opinions

[Scott Swann]

Lumia Battery Isse and Nokia Drive+

After reading the messages here in the forum I found out my battery drain issue on the lumia. After a full charge I left phone off the charger for 10 hours and did nothing else and it had only 20% left in 10 hours. I disabled Nokia Drive+ beta background tasks and now after 10 hours of nothing I still have 96% charge. Much better. This has been consistent for several days now. Once nokia completes the Drive + hopefully it will be ok.

Scott

 

[irvin792]

Just dropped 10% browsing the forums since my last post

 

[tumaykilinc]

I haven't read all the posts here but Could the reason be with LTE?

I have got this phone yesterday in Turkey, and we don't have LTE here yet.
Battery life has been amazing so far.

I can't give exact usage stats but here is what i did today:
- I sent and received 80-100 text messages.
- Made 10 phone calls, about 1-2 minutes each.
- Wireless and Bluetooth has been on, though i didn't browse much. Downloaded 2 games from the market.
- 15-20 Minutes of gaming (Traffic Race 3D).
- 20-30 Minutes of messing with the camera
- 20 Minutes of MP3 playing.

40% remains, it's been 12 hours since my last charge.


Here is what i don't have
- No Nokia Drive running in background.
- No LTE connection, we don't have it.
- No Data-plan 3G usage, i had been at home whole day, didn't need it, used wi-fi instead.
- No heating issue as mentioned in other threads, it gets warm sometimes but, not getting hot.

 

[andrelamont]

Count me in


BACKGROUND
I have a cyan 900 on AT&T using LTE so this was my reference point

I have read through all 17 pages of this thread and tried one fix after another including reboots (installing no apps ) and battery drainage.

One thing I have noticed (and I am not changing cuz my 900 had no issues ) is the location icon shows up every now and then. The location setting is "all or nothing" I visited the new Nokia HERE website and it prompted me for location privileges!!

Go figure
A website can access the location API on WP8?

Will keep trying to find out what the problem but wanted to throw mine into the big bowl...my 900 lasted longer than my 920 so that's why I believe something is wrong.

 

[anon(5348413)]

My battery drained in 5 hrs today. I attribute it to the radios. It was in a parking garage with 1 bar of signal. I usually put it in airplane mode and it does well but I forgot today. Went out at lunch and it was almost totally dead.

 

[Mpm277]

So from what I'm seeing, turn off every neat feature of the phone, have the screen set to the lowest brightness, and simply don't use the phone very much and battery life will be almost as good as a normal phone. Got it.

 

[joeynox]

I've already chronicled mu battery issues in the thread I made earlier but I've been trying to keep track of what is making the the battery drain. I've done everyone has said except for the factory reset thing . On my hone when I make a call after 3 minutes it starts to heat up and I can drop 20% in 8 minutes on the phone but it will say I have 1 day left. Also when I open IE and check out some web sites it also gets warm and warmer over time and the battery drops faster. But I had the phone streaming Netflix last night for 2 hours and it never got warm and I only lost 18%. I played angry birds for 5 minutes and it didn't get warm and the battery dropped about 17%. So its a completely random thing and I don't know why I typed this. But I can tell you I'm very frustrated with the battery issue ,not bring able to use features on the phone that were part of the advertising, because att reps are clueless "my feature phone battery can last a week, yeah and those smart phones you should always fully charge them for 1hr and 30 minutes" because the 2 Nokia reps I spoke to were clueless " it has a large screen you shouldn't expect good battery life "

 

[joeynox]

In the time that it took me to type that my phone went from 85% to 66% and has 3 hrs left

 

[BlobDude]

Definitely looks like there's a calibration issue or some such with some of these. I'm trying to run my battery down now, and I noticed battery saver was on when it hit 20%, so I turned it off, about a half hour, forty-five minutes ago. Now, it's at 22%.

 

[joeynox]

Also the back of the phone above the lens gets hot whenever I take a picture. 1 picture brought the phone from cool to warm and a following picture it got warmer . This phone is very strange

 

[oldpueblo]

So from what I'm seeing, turn off every neat feature of the phone, have the screen set to the lowest brightness, and simply don't use the phone very much and battery life will be almost as good as a normal phone. Got it.

No, as has been stated there are people using their phone fully just fine without compromise. What's happening though is a lot of battery saving tips being thrown around that are getting mixed in with those trying to diagnose a potential actual battery issue (OS or app or feature related). Some people claiming battery issues may not be having any actual issue and in fact just need a perception shift because they're coming from a vastly different device/OS and need to know how to manage battery life properly with a new OS. There is an issue here, but due to the randomness it could easily just be everyone installing the same popular app that's causing it. That's likely not it but my point is that it's all over the place so still too early to nail it down exactly. If we had 20 people hard reset their phones and install no apps and then report back in a few days, that would be a great baseline to figure it out.

 

[LazyLemming]

So from what I'm seeing, turn off every neat feature of the phone, have the screen set to the lowest brightness, and simply don't use the phone very much and battery life will be almost as good as a normal phone. Got it.

Or you can actually read the threads and notice multiple solutions before you post crap like this. Many people have found easy one time solutions that gives spectacular battery life without sacrificing ANY features. Those solutions have been reposted time and time again.

Personally I really do think it's a combination of calibration and app issues. Draining the battery completely and charging to full has been necessary on many android phones and even a recommended solution for the Iphone's battery problems.

Yes consistently draining a Li-ion to empty IS bad for it. Doing it once or even twice isn't going hurt it. If it was that easy to bugger one of these batteries, they would have so many repairs as to put them out of business.

 

[irvin792]

My phone gets extremely hot, I just did a hard reset and when it was loading all my apps from backup it got hotter than comfortable, and im really not exaggerating

 

[Mpm277]

I have tried all the suggested tips. If I need a reality check from switching to a different OS then it's a no brainer. I love the 920, but if this is "just how it is with this device/OS" then I'll have to go to something that can get me thru an entire day with moderate use of the phone. I don't think that's asking for too much. My two year old iPhone 4 currently has twice as good battery life. I hope Nokia fixes this before my time runs out to return it.

 

[pjs37]

I haven't read all the posts here but Could the reason be with LTE?

I have got this phone yesterday in Turkey, and we don't have LTE here yet.
Battery life has been amazing so far.

I can't give exact usage stats but here is what i did today:
- I sent and received 80-100 text messages.
- Made 10 phone calls, about 1-2 minutes each.
- Wireless and Bluetooth has been on, though i didn't browse much. Downloaded 2 games from the market.
- 15-20 Minutes of gaming (Traffic Race 3D).
- 20-30 Minutes of messing with the camera
- 20 Minutes of MP3 playing.

40% remains, it's been 12 hours since my last charge.


Here is what i don't have
- No Nokia Drive running in background.
- No LTE connection, we don't have it.
- No Data-plan 3G usage, i had been at home whole day, didn't need it, used wi-fi instead.
- No heating issue as mentioned in other threads, it gets warm sometimes but, not getting hot.

Well we have LTE in our area but my Lumia 920 isn't running on it at the moment (an ATT problem I need to correct) and I still have issues so i don't think that's the case but it is a good guess as LTE has been known to cause battery issues historically.

 

[vlad0]

Yes consistently draining a Li-ion to empty IS bad for it. Doing it once or even twice isn't going hurt it. If it was that easy to bugger one of these batteries, they would have so many repairs as to put them out of business.

Yes.. they loose capacity over time if you keep draining to "zero"

Here is a good paper on it:

http://www.che.sc.edu/faculty/popov/drbnp/website/Publications_PDFs/Web33.pdf

"A typical chart from industry studies, in this case from the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia (PDF link). The amount of theory behind the topic and the number of variables are somewhat very scary, but you can take from the chart above that as the number of battery charge cycles goes up, the voltage, capacity and performance all decrease dramatically - starting at 1800mAh, the tested battery was down to 1350mAh after (roughly) a year of simulated use."

So keep it plugged in at all times if you have to, but don't drain it out every day... that is if you are actually keeping the phone, since the battery is sealed there is no way for an easy replacement. And.. even if you are exchanging it, I don't know if Nokia replaces the batteries when they refurbish the phones.. so, someone else might end up with your tortured battery.

 

[gndmpnk]

Well here is my experience with my Lumia 920's battery life.

Got it on last Friday for the AT&T launch.
The battery barely lasted 2 hours by the time it fully died.
When it was finally fully charged it was already pretty late at night, So I set the phone aside and went to bed. When I woke up it only had 23% left... Was not feeling too good at this point.

Throughout the weekend I still had abysmal results barely 9 hours. It was at this point I decided to do some research and found this thread and saw everyone's recommendations.
I honestly tho at this point felt kinda cheated that I had to turn off certain live tiles and certain updates just to get any form of decent battery life. I also did see that the phone needs to be cycled a few times for the battery to work properly. So Monday night I completely drained the battery, let it sit for a couple minutes, then plugged it in over night and went to sleep.
I woke up at 7 and unplugged the phone. I had decided to keep a little journal of the % and what I had done for the day just in case it did not get better I could take some proof to AT&T.

Lucky all the tips everyone gave on the site had worked. I blocked all background task and I normally keep all other things turned off ie. NFC, bluetooth, location sharing. By the time I was done with work i was still at 60% with moderate use, which is not the greatest, but sure as **** beats what I was getting during the weekend. I did a simulated stress test that night to see how the battery would hold up with 1 hour of constant use and it had drained 30%. Not as good as I had hoped.
Did the same thing on that night drained it completely and let it sit all night.

This time on I decided to turn on certain features, Check email every 30 mins, allow Facebook to run in background, lock screen got updates from Facebook. Unplugged the phone at 7am, and with some low/moderate use all day until about 2am without a charge.
I'm quite happy with the results, so I dont think I'll be taking it back to AT&T.

Today I did another stress test and did 1 hour of video streaming on wireless at it only drained the battery by 20%, so the battery is improving.

So anybody reading this if you are having poor battery life, you will just need to completely cycle the battery a few times. Yes we shouldn't have to do that but still as long as the end result is what we want then I honestly cant complain about it. I was worried at one point because I really do love the phone, but now I can say that I'm happy with the phone's performance.

 

[Ron Paul]

Yesterday I managed to get my Nokia Lumia 920 to run with moderate use for 15 hours. This included at least 5 hours of music playback, 1 hour of gaming, 30 minutes of calling and a few hours surfing and texting. The rest being standby. Then I messed up and let my phone die (fully discharge and turn off) last night.

This morning I had a full charge. The phone had lost 5% while on standby for less than one hour. I grew concerned. The phone ended up only lasting 5 hours on the charge with light use. I just restarted the phone and am charging it back to full for another test run.

Tune in tomorrow to hear of my outcome!

 

[LazyLemming]

Not sure if you're agreeing with me or not..

But if you read the study you'll notice a few things, significant degradation does not occur until 300 discharges.

secondly, it does not correlate to ONLY discharges to zero. You'll notice right near the top they discuss the issue of depth of discharge (basically how far you discharge it) While a complete discharge does have a larger affect on the battery, the wear shown by the study takes place even with partial charge/discharge cycles.

A complete discharge WILL create more wear and tear on your battery, it only has a significant or noticeable effect if done continuously. A single full discharge is not going to have a notable effect on your battery.

 

[leonbelize]

NFC & Super Sensitive Touch

I turned those two (NFC and Sensitive Touch) off and i'm at 50% after 9 hours of moderate-heavy use. BIG DIFFERENCE.