Android battery life

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Originally Posted By: supton

Just found how to turn off the gps. I had it on high accuracy mode this whole time. Doah! A lot changed since Android 4.
But when you turn off Location services, that should automatically shut off GPS, no?
 
Originally Posted By: jeepman3071
Do you plug it in overnight? That can kill the battery life.

Not with today's LiIon batteries. They love a full or near full charge. And when they are full the charger MUST stop charging or the battery can go BOOM. You can leave it plugged in for an hour or a week, the battery won't be the wiser.

The wife has a 2012 Macbook that she leaves plugged in 100% of the time. IIRC the battery has like 20 cycles on it. Still will run the 3-4 hours as if it were new.

My old Galaxy S5 is our "home phone" - plugged in 24x7 for weeks at a time. When I take it off the charger for a trip (nice taking it with us sometimes as a beater phone), the battery still lasts as if it were new.

That being said, why worry about the battery life? Just plug it in every night and be done with it. I put my phone on charge next to my bed as I use it for music at night. It gets plugged in and done. If not the bed, put a charger near where you put it every night. Problem solved.
 
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Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: supton

Just found how to turn off the gps. I had it on high accuracy mode this whole time. Doah! A lot changed since Android 4.
But when you turn off Location services, that should automatically shut off GPS, no?


I do believe so. That's why I tried that, yesterday. Today, since I found the submenu, I'll try having location on but with gps off.

Been off the charger for 2 or 3 hours, down to 96%. Promising sign.
 
I charge my phone when I'm sleeping to full every day, you can't expect these to last more than from morning to night with all the power they have.

I have a car charger, a spare wall charger and a battery pack in case I need it.
 
I don't like leaving my phone on charger, overnight. I leave mine in my pants pocket. Any emergency arises in the middle of the night, I can grab my pants and run out the door. Wallet, phone, keys, all in my pants. Old habit, from living in the dorm in college (well, didn't have a cell back then but you get the idea) (it was sometimes a weekly occurrence).
 
Do you need bluetooth and WiFi on all the time? Both are heavy power loads.

Where, exactly, are you? To be more specific, how close to a tower are you, and do you travel in areas where cell coverage is spotty? The further you are from a tower, the more power your cellular transmitter/receiver will draw. Worst case is if your home is far from the nearest tower, or is constantly switching between weak tower signals ... that will kill a battery faster than you can imagine, because you spend so much time there.

What are your battery charging habits? Charging the phone when it still has a decent amount of charge will reduce the battery capacity. Try to avoid charging until the battery has little charge remaining, and charge it to 100% whenever you do charge it.

With smartphones there are who knows how many potential parasites as far as apps go. They all are fighting each other for the attention of your CPU and battery. You need to systematically go through the phone and be ruthless ... if it doesn't need access, don't allow access. Some apps are going to want to be "on" 24/7.

If you stream music you are going to have a large battery drain.
 
Anytime my phone acts weird at all, I clear the cache...amazing how such a little thing solves so many problems. I actually try to remember to clear it 2-3 times a week.

As mentioned above, Li-ion has no issues with battery memory like earlier technologies. Charge it whenever you want with no worries...I keep my phone charging at work and while I'm sleeping, and two years later it will still hold a charge for a long time when I really need it (like when travelling). I designed a Li-ion charging IC some time ago and got pretty familiar with the technology...actually knew the guy who got blamed for Apple's burning batteries way back when.
 
Don't need BT on all the time, just when driving. WiFi is likewise, only need when I turn the phone on. Cell coverage tends to be awful wherever I am though.

Down to 89% now, with no real usage, since charging was stopped around 10. It's predicting 1day 16hr of battery left. Much better. No streaming music. I use the phone mostly to check email when not in office, quick game of Suduko here and there. Look at a couple of quick stories in the morning while eating breakfast.

As I said, I've been charging the phone once/day, bringing it up from around 50%. A sudden 50% increase in battery usage--halfing of battery life--was easily noticed.
 
Originally Posted By: Johnny2Bad
Charging the phone when it still has a decent amount of charge will reduce the battery capacity. Try to avoid charging until the battery has little charge remaining, and charge it to 100% whenever you do charge it.

Based on what I've read about Lithium-based battery technologies, that is not longer true.
 
Could be an app draining it. Sometimes some apps can drain them. Remove one at a time per day and see if battery life improves. Also see how often you have the phone to sync email. Set it to check for new emails less often.
 
We had a bug with exchange syncing email too much, draining batteries.

Add and remove the exchange account and lessen how often it pushes mail.

I'm not an apple snob at all, hate their computers, but the iphone is a seriously good phone. Works great, excellent battery life and I use mine non stop.
 
Once I rooted my phone and got rid of the bloatware and installed Greenify my battery life has improved on my LG V10.

Greenify allows you to see what apps still run in the background and you can choose to stop running them when the app is not in use.
 
low signal eats batteries alive.

Mine can go over 5% an hour while dozing if the signal is low.
 
I've had a Moto G4 for 6 months. Awesome battery life (I can go a few days between charges if the phone is idle). Just screenshotted the battery usage:



I leave WiFi and cell on all the time. Bluetooth is always off. I'm usually near a WiFi. I leave WiFi scanning on all the time, too (uses more power). The cell side shuts off automatically if there's a good WiFi signal.
 
42% this morning, so back to what it was. I guess ES file manager was the culprit (only real change I made). Cell standby was still high, 17%, and it says no coverage for 11%, which is reasonable. Forget what it was when I went to bed, high 80's I think, so overnight drain is pretty hard. Might just have to get into the habit of disabling cell at times.

Outlook seems to sync only when I am in Outlook. I didn't set it to be that way, but that's how it works.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Time to find another file manager app.

I'm currently testing X-plore File Manager. Has FTP and LAN support.
 
Hmm, I'll keep it in mind. I tried ES, which was fine; but I hit a snag in what I wanted out of my mobile devices, once I realized file permissions were a bit more locked than I anticipated. Once I realized that apps in internal memory couldn't (easily) hit files on external I kinda lost interest.
 
Originally Posted By: supton
Once I realized that apps in internal memory couldn't (easily) hit files on external I kinda lost interest.

Can you give some examples?

My current phone does not have external memory card slot, but my Android tablet does, and I haven't run into any issues accessing files on that memory card.
 
It was last weekend, so I forget now. But I plugged the phone into my laptop, and dropped a text file onto external memory. I could read/write that from the computer. But the notepad app on the phone wouldn't save to the location--it could open it though. I then put a text file (from the computer) to internal, and that's when it got weird. The notepad app could open, edit, save. But when I would try to open the edited file from my PC, it would show an earlier version of the file. Worse, it would not save to the internal memory.

I realize now that Android limits write access, and it makes sense; but it didn't play well with what I wanted (edit files on SD card, and be able to remove card in case the phone gets bricked). Maybe later on I'll see if the app can be moved to SD card, I'd think so, since a text editor ought to be pretty primitive, all things considered.
 
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