Battery life in WP 8.1 is awful

[aldofarias82]

I own a Lumia 720 and since 8.1 my battery life lasts like a 1/3 is it just mine? I disabled lots of things like double tap to wake but it still sucks

 

[xandros9]

It was the same on my 920, but it has since settled down to something more normal, so give it a couple days

 

[aldofarias82]

I hope it does, so far i am loving 8.1 and i think its worth the battery pain. Did you get it before monday morning? (i installed it as soon as it was public)

 

[TripleHelix192]

I noticed battery draining quicker on my 8X. I removed my start screen wallpaper to see if that helps.

 

[Roach26]

Got only 20% left out of 100% in just 4 hours. The phone was idle the whole time....

 

[MDak280]

I've had bad battery life on my 925 since GDR3, so I can't really tell how 8.1 has affected my battery life. It seems the same so far. I'll give it a few more days to see if that makes a difference.

 

[AndrewL920]

Disable cortana and location service. They are battery juicers.

 

[Joe920]

Same here. On my Lumia 1020 the battery went from 100% at 7am to 5% at 5pm, and that's with only making one 20min call, a little light browsing, and playing music for 30min in the car. That is SO much worse than before the update. Hope they can fix this quickly with a small patch. Loving the update otherwise, transparent tiles looks surprisingly awesome.

Edit: look at the results of today. Ouch!

 

[regi7]

100% at 6:30a and 40% at 8:30p. My battery life is so much better. And I use my phone a lot!: Videos, instagram, news, messaging, internet, etc etc

 

[Alex Rodriguez Jr.]

I have said this on other threads. Can't be Cortana if I'm abusing her & she only ranks 19 on my usage list yet I'm experiencing issues. This is a driver issue, as I stated in those threads too, we saw this with Mango. Actually, I'd argue the pre release of Mango was worse.

 

[dorelse]

I disabled & installed Weather...the background updates were a battery hog & keep my phone pretty warm to the touch. Battery life was horrible...once I uninstalled it, its back to normal.

 

[jwpear]

Same experience here. I updated my Lumia 928 last night. When I set it on the charging plate around 9:30 PM, it had less than 20 percent charge remaining. It had switched to battery saver mode. Normally, I'd be at 60 percent or better. I easily got a day and a half on a charge before the update. I could even go a full 24 hours on a heavy use day. Admittedly, I played with the phone more today than usual, checking out WP 8.1, but this still stinks.

I also updated my Lumia 822. It sat in the house all day with wifi on. With no active use, it was at the 70 percent mark this evening. Normally, it'll go 4-5 days just sitting on my desk with wifi on and no active use.

Something about 8.1 clearly isn't optimized. It's either the OS or the apps that haven't yet been updated for it.

Battery saver was pegging the mail app as using the most energy on my 928. I synch with two mail accounts--Outlook.com and my employer's Exchange.

The entire OS just feels a little more sluggish and less optimized to me. It doesn't meet the same performance standards of past updates. I'm disappointed. I'll tolerate the app gap and other missing features as long as it does most of the things I need and the OS performs well. When it starts feeling like a second rate OS, I have to question my loyalty.

I've put off updating my 8X in case I need to fall back to WP 8 for a while.

 

[Joe920]

I wonder if scanning every email for flights etc (Cortana option) is a battery hog. I turned it off for now just for the heck of it, I'll report back if things change for the better. It wouldn't prove anything, but hey, why not try..

 

[Joe920]

The entire OS just feels a little more sluggish and less optimized to me. It doesn't meet the same performance standards of past updates.

Well it is a dev preview.. Kind of expected, I'm just happy my 1020 didn't go up in flames. I do hope they fix the battery issue though.

 

[Xpider_MX]

The entire OS just feels a little more sluggish and less optimized to me. It doesn't meet the same performance standards of past updates. I'm disappointed. I'll tolerate the app gap and other missing features as long as it does most of the things I need and the OS performs well. When it starts feeling like a second rate OS, I have to question my loyalty.
.

LOL... You know what? it is your fault. Why? because Windows Phone 8.1 dev preview IS FOR DEVELOPERS, you are not getting the firmware part, you don't have the benefits from Nokia firmeware.

It doesn't meet the performance of normal updates because it is not a normal update. With a normal update you get the correct firmware, with correct drivers and so.

At the end, you decided to install a preview sofware.

 

[rysliv]

I haven't had a problem with battery on my HTC 8x. It has always given me a about a day of use. Those standby times are worthless, my device used to be able to be in idle for days, but that was before GDR1. Now it lasts only about a day, maybe a little more. I can get two days with battery saver on. I haven't noticed any drain except for the normal battery usage by just using the device.

 

[TaichiSurface]

try to disable background apps that you don't use it last around 12 hrs for me but I kept using it so can't really blame WP8.1

 

[makoute]

Battery life has gone down on my HTC 8x, it is draining faster than before, it's also a bit sluggish imo. Maybe the hardware is just not capable for all the new features.

 

[sketchedout]

I've always had fantastic battery life on 1520 and following update it was definitely draining quicker. I had a couple of other issues though like missing the new backgrounds for start screen, wallet app not opening, not being able to copy and paste. I did a hard reset which was surprisingly quick and it now seems back to normal for me. Phone came off charge about 8.30am and it's now 15.23pm and currently still have 74%. This is after downloading maps again, emails, browsing and about half hour of calls and generally fiddling around with start screen to get it all how it was. Internet explorer is my biggest battery drain at moment but that makes sense for me as it is my biggest use

 

[Joe920]

I wonder if scanning every email for flights etc (Cortana option) is a battery hog. I turned it off for now just for the heck of it, I'll report back if things change for the better. It wouldn't prove anything, but hey, why not try..

OK, so since I turned this option off my battery life looks like before. It might be a coincidence, maybe other things were going on in the background (like XBox music updating song metadata etc), so it's not proof. I'll try turning it back on in a week or so, but for now my 1020 is behaving again.