Database Info

25 min cost 27% battery

I unplugged the phone and got onto the bus. I read news with Captivate. Nothing fancy, just NY Times, Fox News etc. I got off the bus later, I only have 73% battery.
Yes, I just started my day and it's only 70% of battery.
#FAIL.

There are a few simple things you can do to increase battery life. Turn the screen brightness down and use a solid black background as a wallpaper. The screen uses the majority of the batter. so dimming the screen helps, when using a black background the amoled display does not light up black pixels so there is power drain.
I've been running on the same charge since 4pm yesterday. I've streamed music through pandora for about an hour while exercising, browsed the xda forums using the XDA App for 30 mins, made a few calls, browsed Facebook for 30 mins, surfed the web for a couple of hours before bed. Its now 10AM and I'm sitting at 36%. Not to bad really! The phone functions exactly the same at 36% as compared to 100%.

I wonder why everyone says to use a solid black background? Do most people use their phones primarily by staring at the home screen? I'm never at my home screen more than perhaps five seconds while switching apps
I've had pretty poor battery life as well, even after discharging, recharging, and deleting batterystats.bin. There are small tips here and there, like black background and screen brightness, but even following them all, my phone lasts me barely ten hours, and most of that time it's idle. For instance, I listened to local must (no streaming) with the screen off for about an hour and lost 10% of my battery life. What's up with that?

TimF said:
I've streamed music through pandora for about an hour while exercising, browsed the xda forums using the XDA App for 30 mins, made a few calls, browsed Facebook for 30 mins, surfed the web for a couple of hours before bed. Its now 10AM and I'm sitting at 36%.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am also shocked and confused by how people can use their phone so heavily.
I already killed those unnecessary processes (e.g., all AT&T crap). I have a static wallpaper. I have screen brightness at 60%. And all I have been doing is just reading news and surfing the web. It literally cost me 1% of battery for every 1 min of use. It's just ridiculous.

You are probably on your home screen a lot more than you realize.
Anyway it's a smartphone, they all eat through battery time. you will never get superb battery life unless you crowbar a 3000mah battery into your device.
edit:
set the screen on its lowest brightness setting, the only time I've had to increase the brightness is when I am outside in the sun.
if you are on a bus, if you are not using wifi, turn off the radio.

TimF said:
Anyway it's a smartphone, they all eat through battery time. you will never get superb battery life unless you crowbar a 3000mah battery into your device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You just said your phone is at 36% eighteen hours after charging! Compared to the 0% I'm at ten hours after charging...I'm not looking for superb battery life at all, just somewhat decent. I'm actually bringing a backup feature phone with me to college this semester in case I can't resolve this issue, because I will need to use my phone both in the morning and at night some days

TimF said:
edit:
set the screen on its lowest brightness setting, the only time I've had to increase the brightness is when I am outside in the sun.
if you are on a bus, if you are not using wifi, turn off the radio.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have Wifi, BT always off. And I don't listen to Pandora.
I think the key is you have the lowest brightness on your phone. It is going to save you a lot of battery 'cause half of the battery is for the screen.
But I just couldn't stand it. I wish I can set to 100% all the time. It looks so much better.

The phone radio is a huge consumer of battery - especially in weak signal areas. The bars are not that accurate either. that coupled with 3rd party apps that don't always behave nice, can equal rapid battery drain.
Putting the plain in Airplane mode is good way to see what battery life is like without the Cell radio always doing its thing. It is not a fix, but it can show that the battery/phone are not broken. There probably can be improvements and tweaks made by samsung, but I don't think the phones are defective.

mwxiao said:
I think the key is you have the lowest brightness on your phone. It is going to save you a lot of battery 'cause half of the battery is for the screen.
But I just couldn't stand it. I wish I can set to 100% all the time. It looks so much better.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is what you would call a trade-off I like the bright screen also but I like having longer battery life more.
The screen is still pretty bright on it lowest setting and you gt used to the lower brightness after a while.
magicdanw said:
You just said your phone is at 36% eighteen hours after charging! Compared to the 0% I'm at ten hours after charging...I'm not looking for superb battery life at all, just somewhat decent. I'm actually bringing a backup feature phone with me to college this semester in case I can't resolve this issue, because I will need to use my phone both in the morning and at night some days
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
how are you using your phone? What apps are you running, are you using any emulators.

There's an app called Spare Parts, which will show you what is using your battery when the screen is off. Open it up and choose "Partial Wake Usage" from the drop down to see.
My Captivate appeared to drain battery very quickly, but with moderate to decent usage throughout a day I was trying to kill the battery it lasted me over 13 hours. I think it's a matter of the battery reporting taking a good while to calibrate properly.

I've had an issue twice now with absurd battery usage. Both times I charged the phone to full and disconnected it; after doing that the phone would lose 10% charge every hour sitting completely idle! Using the phone during that time drained it even faster. Both times powering the phone completely off and back on resolved the issue.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

magicdanw said:
I wonder why everyone says to use a solid black background? Do most people use their phones primarily by staring at the home screen? I'm never at my home screen more than perhaps five seconds while switching apps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In AMOLED, black pixels dont use power. This is different from LCD where even black pixels still use power.

Have you guys tried fully charging, then fully discharing then repeating this step 3 more times? It helps with the battery life tremendously.

You gotta do a factory reset. Many people as well as myself had the same issue. For me, a side effect was also that the att start up swoosh was stupidly loud.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

I only did the discharge thing once, last week, and today I am going on a 21 hours with 28% left.

2g app
I was told there is a 2g / 3g application. Has anyone tried this? Apparently it puts the phone in 2g when no data connection is needed and then updates to 3g when a data process is required...

i'm on day two of not charging mine... and i'm at 25%...
i unplugged it from a full charge yesterday (monday) morning before i left for work and today (29 hours later) i'm at 25%... this is with advanced task killer auto killing tasks when screen is off as well as being aggressive about it. i've been listening to music from my sd card, browsing facebook and taking some pictures (and uploading them to fb). i guess i'm either super lucky not to have any problems with GPS or the battery, or i'm a very light user.

I dunno what happened to the main battery thread?
I just got a new phone two days ago because of the restart issue. This one has the same battery issue. Drains 2-4%/hour just being idle. I have nothing beyond launcher pro and google voice installed. Everything is on lockdown in terms of batt usage. The only thing I haven't done is turn off the cell antenna.
I've tried the tricks I knew: factory reset, calibration trick. These didn't help at all. My last phone just needed a factory reset and it was all good. Now I'm sad again :-( will it just improve itself when the phone "learns" the battery or something? I wish I could teach it

Several things you can do.
1) Use WiFi if you can use it, it uses less power. If you don't have somewhere to use WiFi, leave it off.
2) Same goes for BT- leave it off if possible.
3) Use this to get rooted and remove all the ATT crap that sucks battery life. Applying the lag fix also means you spend less time with the screen on, so that can also help you out.
4) Use Auto Brightness
5) Disabling haptic feedback and the tapping sounds (I find it more annoying regardless)
6) Use a static black wallpaper- or something really dark. IMO it looks great black and plus the AMOLED... Black doesn't use power.
7) Use Advanced Task Killer. I have mine on Aggressive and Moderate security every half hour. This will make sure hung apps, etc get killed and apps you haven't ran. Make sure you whitelist the apps that run your widgets and such though.
That's the best things to do to.
Edit- above all, remember this is a SMART phone, not a feature phone like the iPhone is. The simple fact this full blown SMART phone can even begin to rival just a feature phone like the iPhone speaks volumes to how much more efficient it is than what you think it is.

starwolf256 said:
I've had an issue twice now with absurd battery usage. Both times I charged the phone to full and disconnected it; after doing that the phone would lose 10% charge every hour sitting completely idle! Using the phone during that time drained it even faster. Both times powering the phone completely off and back on resolved the issue.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I too have had issues with battery life but quickly realized what had been causing the issues, twice it had been snesoid not closing down all the way after use, and this combined with an app that was hurting battery life (word feud), I realized what my problem was.
I leave the brightness jacked all the way down. I believe the lowest it goes on the stock rom is like 15%, but there are ways to go lower than that.
I've not used my phone much the past two days since charging it, and i'm currently down to 35%, but most of my battery use is cell standby, with display being 3rd or so on the list.
You can always use a program like tasker to make the phone go into airport mode between certain hours of the day (IE: while you're sleeping) to help conserve the battery life.
There are also tons of other good tips in this thread.
And trust me, the phone can last; i've managed 3days on one charge

Quick battery drain & constant data being sent since 1.78 OTA

Hi,
I've got an HTC One S since a few weeks (got it with the 1.57 FW I think). It's a stock one, not from a carrier. No branding.
The battery life was great, 2 to 3 days with normal use.
But yesterday evening I proceeded to the OTA update and since then, trouble began
Battery life is much, much lower. After 12 hours standing on my desk in the office, I got 10% remaining!
Anytime I switch the screen ON, I see there is some data being sent (or received) because the "arrows" are full. If I check in system panel lite, there's always 1 or 2 kb/s of traffic.
Also, the phone is a bit warm, quite often.
Has anyone else noticed this? That's rather annoying :/

Could be faulty? I have the same phone with no carrier or branding and not had any problems at all.

Like faulty hardware? Seems unlikely to me since it worked well with 1.57. Also, sending data isn't hardware related

Here are some details.
In Mobile usage, just for today (less than 24h)
"Media" has used 13MB of background data
"Android OS" has used 5MB, also background
Android OS gives no more details. Media is told to include "Download manager" "DRM protected content storage" "Media storage" and "Downloads"
This sounds like a lot of background data :/

Try an app called Badass Battery monitor. It should tell you what's eating your battery.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.bbm
Sent from my rooted and debloated T Mobile HTC One S

I have to say, this phone, at least mines, seems to have a pretty bi polar battery. It's got a case of ADHD.
For example, just the other day, I had the phone fully charged when I awoke at 9am, after playing Temple Run, surfing the web, using GPS, streaming and listening to music, playing more Temple Run, fiddling around with the OS, checking emails, sending texts, talking on the phone a bit, downloading apps, with about 25-30% brightness, I ended up with 18% battery remaining after a good 11 hours of very heavy use. I was quite pleased, considering the inordinate amount of usage I had with the phone all day.
(BTW, I use Juice Defender, which has helped tons in reducing battery drainage for almost every phone I've owned in the past 3 months, including the One S)
Yesterday, I had the phone charged at 100% when I awoke at 9am, with a little bit of use, by 12am, I had 63% remaining, same brightness, but with much much less use then the day prior. By the time 3pm hit, I was at about 30%, and by 5pm, it was drained to 18%, mostly on standby. By my estimation, that's 8 hours of usage, same brightness levels as the day before, using Juice Defender, but with much much less fiddling around with pretty much everything on the device.
I went ahead and disabled Juice Defender today to see if it would make a difference, and the battery actually got a bit worse, so I went ahead and re-enabled it and it immediately improved.
So I'm a bit perplexed, I haven't gotten any official updates, still running on the original stock build, but ultimately, I guess this is what is too be expected with an early build. Hopefully future updates WILL fix these issues and not hinder them more. Granted it's still much better then my HTC Amaze and Galaxy Nexus, which drained 4% the moment I took them off charger.

Thanks for your input, I'll check again today how the phone goes.
I played with all the settings and menus yesterday, and found something strange. In the "downloads" app, there was a "system update" download. That's quite normal since I downloaded and applied the OTA the day before. But it was referred as "ongoing", like it was still downloading a part of the OTA zip file AFTER I applied it (and rebooted a couple of times)
In phone settings, about, updates, it was also written "ongoing"
Now this is over (I don't know why and how) and the network usage seems back to normal. I'll try today to see how the battery drain is
Anyway, it's s strange the phone was still downloading the update zip file after having applied it. AND that it was downloading it on the 3G at a very lowered bitrate (like background) while I downloaded it on the wifi the day before
Anyway...

The battery life of my One S seems to have declined as well since the update. Before the update my battery lasted 2 days easily with moderate usage. Now I have 20-30% left at the end of the day from a full charge since 9am. This is with very light usage (mostly on standby from 9 to 5).
I did turn on best wifi performance recently so I just to turned that off to see if it helps but I really doubt that.

Hello guys, I have same problem, but my phone wasting energy on "phone radio" process, just look at screens below. I tried using stock Rom with last update, trickdroid, and now it happend on leedroid v.2 . Btw I changed 4 micro sim cards with several providers, but no result. I really need help with this issue, because my battery draining very very
fast...
Thank you
Sent from my HTC VLE_U using XDA

I had a similar problem a few days ago, using Lee´s ROM.
I noticed that the drain had something to do with autosync. As soon as I turned off autosync (leaving mobile internet on) drainage went back to normal.
I still don´t know what caused this since I only had the google account, weather and dropbox installed.
Anyway, after doing a fresh install, the problems seem to have gone.
Of course I can´t be completely certain of it until some more days of testing/usage.

I also noticed quite a few problems since the latest OTA update.
Not only does the battery drain fast, the phone also feels extremely hot when browsing on 3G.
The phone does cool down pretty quickly when turning off 3G but it feels like I burned my hands
Here are a few screenshots.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52039330/2012-05-10_13-46-08.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52039330/2012-05-10_13-51-52.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52039330/2012-05-10_13-59-10.png
I also experienced weird things when connected to EDGE (2.75G).
3G (HSPA) coverage on BASE (KPN) sucks in Belgium
Look at the video below for more details.
Has anyone else experienced this yet?
http://youtu.be/3g8FLpWDAYM
I also contacted HTC about this issue and they recommended a hard reset.
Unfortunately this doesn't help at all, I still get these weird glitches

mattionline, can you get a logcat when the phone's doing this weird stuff? It looks like the Home button is being pressed repeatedly and if logcat confirms it then it's probably a hardware problem.

keinengel said:
mattionline, can you get a logcat when the phone's doing this weird stuff? It looks like the Home button is being pressed repeatedly and if logcat confirms it then it's probably a hardware problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you need root to make a logcat ? My phone is not rooted and I'm not planning to do it. How can this be a hardware problem ? I never had this problem before. I'm sure that it's a software bug.

Bricolo_fr said:
Here are some details.
In Mobile usage, just for today (less than 24h)
"Media" has used 13MB of background data
"Android OS" has used 5MB, also background
Android OS gives no more details. Media is told to include "Download manager" "DRM protected content storage" "Media storage" and "Downloads"
This sounds like a lot of background data :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just fixed someone else phone that had the exact same symptoms. In the end I narrowed down the problem to one of his weather apps.
He had a live wallpaper that reflected the current weather, weather on his lock screen and a beautiful widgets weather thing. I never did figure out exactly which one it was I just turned off all there and told him he was crazy.
I don't know if it's something "weather" related for you but it maybe it will help.

mattionline said:
Do you need root to make a logcat ? My phone is not rooted and I'm not planning to do it. How can this be a hardware problem ? I never had this problem before. I'm sure that it's a software bug.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you don't need root, just enable usb debugging in development options and connect the phone to your pc. You need to have the android sdk installed.

Sup guys , some of you don't seem to realize that there are many reasons why your battery drains, what you might think is, "quickly". A few tips to keep minimal battery out put...1 keep brightness down, the screen itself sucks juice probably the most. 2 check your apps, some apps send and receive data and/or are kept running in the background. You might have to enable/disable setting on shove apps. 3 widgets, widgets like battery meters, CPU meters, things like this constantly refresh to keep real time info. That also eats up alot of juice . 4 Turn off WiFi or any other thing like that when your not using it. WiFi continually sucks nice. Lastly, invest in some app that will help you close apps. Basically, tweek everything you might think that the os can run without. The less your CPU has to do, the more juce you save.
Sent from my HTC VLE_U using XDA

dc211 said:
[...]I just turned off all there and told him he was crazy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This made me lol hard.
Best advice ever.
But yeah, on the 1.0 version of Leedroid I had quite some drain, too.
When I turned off autosync it went back to normale. I only had my google account, dropbox (with syncing off) and the weather thingy set up and never figured out which one was resposible.
After installing Lee´s 2.0 ROM everything is fine.
I suppose there really is something wrong with the autosync and maybe with the weather stuff in particular.

My problem didn't go away with stopping auto sync, even without it, I had a constant data flow
Anyway, I rebooted the phone twice and the issue was gone.
It happened again a few days later, after the phone did shut down because of low battery. I put it on charger and turned it on, then, I noticed the 3G arrows were always on. After I unplugged it from the charger the battery went down in 10 hours. After a reboot, problem gone...
Since then, nothing...

And please note than when the problem is here, it's media and android os using a lot of data

I have been having one S problems too - I am on my second phone after the first one became reliably unresponsive every time I turned on mobile data. More relevant to this discussion, my battery died shockingly last night. Normally it drains at a few percent an hour when I am not using it (i.e. when asleep!) but I woke this morning to find it totally dead - that is 30% plus gone in 5 hours without it being in use.

Am I the only one with poor battery life?

I can't get through half the day.

could you be more specific as to what you do on your phone? is your phone the international version or the USA T-mobile version.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using xda premium

Tmobile, stock everything and I had the battery issue on my first HOS. I just got my replacement and Im running the same apps, same calls, same eveything as the first phone but i get a significant more battery life. The battery on the replacement HOS lasted me the entire day, but I still carry a charger around just incase.

Superbattery?
My TMo One S battery life recently went through the roof for some reason. I can only attribute it to one of the following or perhaps luck:
I've been charging it at end of day regardless of charge but I finally let the charge get below 25% -- I think it got to 15%. Then I powered it down and let it charge 12 hours overnight.
I disabled all Facebook related apps.
Other than that I can't recall anything I did recently that might account for my new super battery. But I'm at 1d 4h 25m on battery -- most of that on WiFi granted -- and still have 42% juice. I'll take it!

I always have my charger because I'm a twitter whore. I recommend disabling any bloat ware or duplicate app like Facebook For HTC or Twitter For HTC. And make sure you change settings for each app you use and don't use.
Sent from the (problematic?) One S.

Anyone use Juicedefender? My battery is excellent but if it can be improved then even better..

I'm using my phone very much, with Facebook and games and such, and I still get through the day without hesitate! I think it's wonderful

my battery life was poor on stock rom aswell. went trough a day only. had to charge every day. but now with noble v3 rom and being tiny bit more careful with use i have battery for 2 days

Battery life on this phone is better than most and I give it that. The only problem I have is the quick drop from 100% to 92% in a hour from little to light usage.
Sent from my HTC VLE_U using XDA

I'm on stock Tmo US and have been getting amazing battery life. I took it off the charger when I left for work at 7:30am and I'm at 75% at 8:50pm.
That's with quite a bit of texting, pics taken at work, and 45 minutes of web browsing while I was on lunch. Granted, I don't do Facebook, so that may help.
This is the first phone I've been lazy about rooting because it's worked so well so far.

ptweasel said:
I'm on stock Tmo US and have been getting amazing battery life. I took it off the charger when I left for work at 7:30am and I'm at 75% at 8:50pm.
That's with quite a bit of texting, pics taken at work, and 45 minutes of web browsing while I was on lunch. Granted, I don't do Facebook, so that may help.
This is the first phone I've been lazy about rooting because it's worked so well so far.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I get decent battery life as well, but how do you manage only a 25% drop with over 12 hours of on time whic included a bunch of texting which keeps the screen on while u text and 45 min of browsing. Seems too good

I just got my One S less than a week ago. Love ICS. Battery life has been about 10 to 12 hours with medium amount of use. Facebook is disabled. I'm using active sync to sync to my exchange server and push frequency. (that continually goes out but that's for a different thread I guess).
I charge over night as I've done with my Dinc2, original Dinc, and all flavors of blackberry.
Last night I used a digital clock app while it was charging and in the morning at 8:30 where I unplugged, it had 100%. It's now just past 11 in the morning and with email, one short phone call and some light surfing, I'm already down to 62%.
I have noticed the phone is hot which means it's working hard to do something.
I have WiFi off and GPS off as well as location services. Should I return it for a new handset? Should I just go back to Verizon and get an iPhone?? Ugh.

ptweasel said:
I'm on stock Tmo US and have been getting amazing battery life. I took it off the charger when I left for work at 7:30am and I'm at 75% at 8:50pm.
That's with quite a bit of texting, pics taken at work, and 45 minutes of web browsing while I was on lunch. Granted, I don't do Facebook, so that may help.
This is the first phone I've been lazy about rooting because it's worked so well so far.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What's your "screen on" time? Have you changed any connectivity settings, that may have increased your battery life a lot?

If the phone is hot then something is running in the background you should probably figure out what that is and disable it before you do anything. Now with exchange servers set up on your phone they do tend to eat some battery. That's universal though. Sounds like to do have a rogue app though. As for me this past Monday I took the phone off the charger at 430am and didn't have to return it to the charger til 11pm mostly because I was going to bed. I watched netflix, text, phone calls, Web surfed.... Love this device.
Posted with my HTC One S (US)

mikea3000 said:
I get decent battery life as well, but how do you manage only a 25% drop with over 12 hours of on time whic included a bunch of texting which keeps the screen on while u text and 45 min of browsing. Seems too good
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To you and the other person that asked, I think it really has to do with cell signal strength.
I posted those numbers after coming home from work where I have awesome cell coverage.
Today I've been home all day, and even though I'm on WiFi all day, my cell signal is horrible here. WiFi or not, it's still searching for a signal constantly so I've lost 30% in 6 hours with moderate use.
Now, as I said before, I don't use facebook or friendstream, but I think a lot of it is the radio constantly searching for a better signal.

I also think that either bad signal or just 3G takes a lot of battery.
I switched to 2G only just as an experiment, where I get a good signal almost constantly. This extended my battery life quite a lot. Where I usually had 10-20% left after a full day, I had 50% left with only 2G. I have also been using WiFi where available.
Can this be a software bug since there is such a big difference? I've noticed before that phone calls suck a lot of juice...

cawith said:
I also think that either bad signal or just 3G takes a lot of battery.
I switched to 2G only just as an experiment, where I get a good signal almost constantly. This extended my battery life quite a lot. Where I usually had 10-20% left after a full day, I had 50% left with only 2G. I have also been using WiFi where available.
Can this be a software bug since there is such a big difference? I've noticed before that phone calls suck a lot of juice...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
2G is known to use much less battery life in every phone you check it.
Take a look at GSMarena on phone specifications in the bottom and you'll see the great difference.
BTW, looking on the battery test GSMArena did for the One S, it's quite in good place for the 3G calling and Video playback but uses a lot of battery on WEB browsing, see here
Might be that we the ones with low battery are more surfing than the others...

I get about 24 hours.
2 hour screen use. No FB or twitter, only gmail sync
Some text, 5mins of calls, <2% no signal
When idle i get battery drain of <10mA using:
http://www.3c71.com
Battery Monitor Widget. Logging current consumption is the only way to get to the bottom of the problem.
I'm talking with the author to get the kinks worked out of the One S logging.
*but* for some reasons something is keeping the phone awake at times. current drain is then 70-80mA constant. Not been able to find the culprit, but a reboot helps.
Hopefully this was useful.

I had the same issue-downloaded 2x battery from the market and it is much better. ( I have syncing with twitter, fb, gmail, mobile life all enabled)
I could barely get through the day. Seems the phone does a lot when syncing etc and this stops that, or at least limits it to the interval of your choice. every 10 I believe with the free version.
Try it-I am sure it will help. (I also turn the brightness down as I am mostly indoors-and put it on auto outside-but that is just me)

kickstarter said:
I had the same issue-downloaded 2x battery from the market and it is much better. ( I have syncing with twitter, fb, gmail, mobile life all enabled)
I could barely get through the day. Seems the phone does a lot when syncing etc and this stops that, or at least limits it to the interval of your choice. every 10 I believe with the free version.
Try it-I am sure it will help. (I also turn the brightness down as I am mostly indoors-and put it on auto outside-but that is just me)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually, due to the fact that every time I check the usage of battery screen is in top place (with Auto brightness all the time) and the fact I'm syncing with FB, Gmail, Exchange server and more, I guess the best thing to do is to lower Screen brightness...

Is The Nexus 5 Battery THAT Bad? Or Am I Unlucky?

When I first got my Nexus 5, I got about 3.5 hours of SOT. This is with airplane mode 24/7. Note, I still have my phone in airplane mode 24/7. I upgraded to Lollipop 5.0 but before that I was getting bad battery. 5.0 I get about 2.5 hours. Now with 5.1 I got 2 hours. Barely.
I have used the troubleshooting battery life thread and searched around, tried custom ROMs, kernels, everything. Not a thing helps. BBS and Wake lock Detector show absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.
I've had my phone a little over a year now, and its just deteriorated. Is it just my phone? Bad battery perhaps? Or is everyone getting this awful battery?
I know what everyone is going to say to, it depends on usage. And it does, but to an extent. I'm a light user, I'd say. Greenify installed, I use Kik sometimes, little camera here and there and messenger to talk to people. That's literally it. If I have the phone sit there and do nothing I get good battery, well, better. But it seems switching apps or touching it at all hurts battery. I've tried App Ops, and location is off and sync. Literally every piece of advice I have tried.
So just a general question, how is everyone's battery holding up? It is really that bad? Or am I just unlucky. Nexus 6 has better battery and bigger screen but average battery. Which is sad. I think its software and bad battery related.

You definitely have a problem there the nexus 5 should last you much more than that even on lollipop

PhyscoAssassinx said:
You definitely have a problem there the nexus 5 should last you much more than that even on lollipop
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's what I'm thinking. It used to be such a good phone, nothing is draining battery and nothing out of the ordinary is draining... :/ I think it is just a bad, used up battery.

Well you did look into replacing it with a G2 battery, you'll lose QI charging but have a bigger battery

It's not just you. In fact I'm very close to just going back to kitkat. I get no wakelocks, my phone shows as in deep sleep and just today my phone came off charge at 11am and was dead by around 5pm with half hour screen on time. That's just ridiculous! It was showing as deep sleep the entire time.
I've tried everything. I'm 80% sure lollipop is the problem because I know a lot of people with the same issues. Anything Google related I've turned off and I still can't shake this battery drain

If you're using airplane mode then you should get more, I get above 4 hours with adaptive brightness and a signal.
Sounds like a bad battery or something isn't right software wise
Feel free to posts stats and stuff, maybe have a look at what the times are for your cpu frequencies

JonesL said:
If you're using airplane mode then you should get more, I get above 4 hours with adaptive brightness and a signal.
Sounds like a bad battery or something isn't right software wise
Feel free to posts stats and stuff, maybe have a look at what the times are for your cpu frequencies
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I may post those stats, because I'd like to know. Me and so many others are getting lousy battery but you get this amazing battery. I'm starting to believe 80% of Nexus 5's just got awful stock factory batteries...
dan-fish said:
It's not just you. In fact I'm very close to just going back to kitkat. I get no wakelocks, my phone shows as in deep sleep and just today my phone came off charge at 11am and was dead by around 5pm with half hour screen on time. That's just ridiculous! It was showing as deep sleep the entire time.
I've tried everything. I'm 80% sure lollipop is the problem because I know a lot of people with the same issues. Anything Google related I've turned off and I still can't shake this battery drain
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you decide to go back, please let me know if things improve. I'm with you in that, me, you, and others are getting just awful battery. I don't understand it, deep sleep and nothing is causing any drain... But like the guy above, he is getting 4 hours with a signal? It has to be maybe we have bad batteries... It is just awful.

Definitely something wrong. I've got a launch week device putting it at almost 18 months old. I leave absolutely everything turned on, even have Google Fit tracking steps, Facebook app, and a couple games. I have also overheated the battery several times during bootloops. Just today I finished out a charge cycle with just over 3 and a half hours SOT, including 2 hours Bluetooth music, and just under an hour of wired headphone music using ViPER4Android with a couple options known to drain more battery.
I'd look into Better Battery Stats for some hidden kernel wakelocks.

AndrasLOHF said:
Definitely something wrong. I've got a launch week device putting it at almost 18 months old. I leave absolutely everything turned on, even have Google Fit tracking steps, Facebook app, and a couple games. I have also overheated the battery several times during bootloops. Just today I finished out a charge cycle with just over 3 and a half hours SOT, including 2 hours Bluetooth music, and just under an hour of wired headphone music using ViPER4Android with a couple options known to drain more battery.
I'd look into Better Battery Stats for some hidden kernel wakelocks.
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Click to collapse
I've tried literally everything and nothing is showing up. Nothing... Bluetooth music to my stereo drains batter horribly. 1 song per percent. Maybe I as well as others have bad batteries and you're just lucky... Are you on 5.1? It literally makes no sense...

I came from a Galaxy S3. The Nexus 5 battery isn't that great, but your description sounds like you're unlucky. I went from Kitkat to Lollipop on the N5 and the battery life was definitely better. Perhaps try the Elemental X kernel?

snappycg1996 said:
I've tried literally everything and nothing is showing up. Nothing... Bluetooth music to my stereo drains batter horribly. 1 song per percent. Maybe I as well as others have bad batteries and you're just lucky... Are you on 5.1? It literally makes no sense...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm running CM12(5.0.2).

The only thing keeping me from trying to replace my battery is that there are occasional days right after a reboot where everything work as is should. (I.E., 3-4 Hr SoT, Bluetooth streaming 30min or so, 16-24hr total time). After that first day it goes to **** and I get maybe 1-2 hrs SoT and 12-16hrs total time. I'm just waiting on 5.1.1 at this point. In the mean time, it just lives on a wireless charger if I can access one at home or work easily.

If I'm a baseline (I'm probably not) then you certainly seem to have a problem.
I do seem to get marginally worse battery life on Lollipop, but still nothing to complain about - considering. Generally I get 3.5+ SOT over a 14+hour day (from 85% as I almost never let it run lower than 15-10%). That's with every service turned on (including precise location & always listening), and I normally listen to at least 2-3 hours of podcasts (accelated playback + skip silences, both processor-heavy) and some Tune-In radio & Play Music. Playback is usually a split between BT & the phone's internal speaker. My normal usage is almost all on Wi-Fi. 3G can be disappointing & will sometimes eat through my battery significantly faster.

dan-fish said:
It's not just you. In fact I'm very close to just going back to kitkat. I get no wakelocks, my phone shows as in deep sleep and just today my phone came off charge at 11am and was dead by around 5pm with half hour screen on time. That's just ridiculous! It was showing as deep sleep the entire time.
I've tried everything. I'm 80% sure lollipop is the problem because I know a lot of people with the same issues. Anything Google related I've turned off and I still can't shake this battery drain
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To be honest kit Kat is the nexus 5s Prime os I doubt it's going to get better than that

You guys have to remember the jump from JellyBean to KitKat was nowhere near as expansive as the jump from KitKat to Lollipop and Google spent a year refining KitKat to 4.4.4. We're less than half a year into Lollipop. Yes, Lollipop should be in a much better state than what it is but obviously Google fell short of that mark.

my N5 also over 1 year, light usage but even with 2hrs SOT I still have at least 40% battery
p.s. wifi and bluetooth is always on

NotFromMountainView said:
If I'm a baseline (I'm probably not) then you certainly seem to have a problem.
I do seem to get marginally worse battery life on Lollipop, but still nothing to complain about - considering. Generally I get 3.5+ SOT over a 14+hour day (from 85% as I almost never let it run lower than 15-10%). That's with every service turned on (including precise location & always listening), and I normally listen to at least 2-3 hours of podcasts (accelated playback + skip silences, both processor-heavy) and some Tune-In radio & Play Music. Playback is usually a split between BT & the phone's internal speaker. My normal usage is almost all on Wi-Fi. 3G can be disappointing & will sometimes eat through my battery significantly faster.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
DummyPLUG said:
my N5 also over 1 year, light usage but even with 2hrs SOT I still have at least 40% battery
p.s. wifi and bluetooth is always on
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Okay you guys (and hopefully others) take a look at this battery. I did play Clash of Clans somewhat today and got den m decent battery but yeah. Any thoughts? Bluetooth streaming to my stereo still used 2 percent in 10 minutes. I'm adding more to a new post. I think I may have a bad battery still because even though it said 98 it went to 99 for a brief minute. I see messenger and Line during battery some, and cause wake issues but FB is greenified. Messenger isn't... Also the other apps like Google Calendar, and the Google App itself cause battery drain, and it shows Android OS in battery under screen.

More screenshots hopefully adding

Phone is hating me

snappycg1996 said:
Okay you guys (and hopefully others) take a look at this battery. I did play Clash of Clans somewhat today and got den m decent battery but yeah. Any thoughts? Bluetooth streaming to my stereo still used 2 percent in 10 minutes. I'm adding more to a new post. I think I may have a bad battery still because even though it said 98 it went to 99 for a brief minute. I see messenger and Line during battery some, and cause wake issues but FB is greenified. Messenger isn't... Also the other apps like Google Calendar, and the Google App itself cause battery drain, and it shows Android OS in battery under screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I do suck at math, but 2% per 10 minutes of bt streaming doesn't really sound that awful. That seems to work out to 8+ hrs of active usage. Most of my battery drain on streaming audio comes from the apps themselves - Most of my listening is of podcasts where I'm playing at 1.5x speed +skip silence which are both processor-heavy. TuneIn is pretty battery-hungry (and annoyingly buggy!) as well. Play Music seems a bit easier on my battery, but I'm mostly listening to the non-music apps & I probably don't do much better than 2% per 10(ish) minutes a lot of the time.
It's fairly common to see your battery level jump up or down a point or two once in a while. Others can better explain this technically, but I gather it's just refining the estimate of where you are at the moment.
*Edit* Looking at your screenshots, I don't see the app that you're streaming on. ?

Nexus 5 battery drain - new battery, new ROM, still persists

My beloved red Nexus 5 starts acting up... the battery drains extremely fast. Some weeks ago, I could barely make it to 2pm without having to recharge after unplugging. So I got a new battery (directly from LG, so definitely a genuine part) which improved the situation, but didn't completely solve the problem. Additionally, I flashed a CM 13 CAF ROM (using myfluxi's kernel) onto the N5 - I enjoy it so far, but there was actually no further change converning battery life.
Right now, the phone is at 10% after being unplugged in the morning at 9am. Wifi, bluetooth, GPS and mobile data were constantly on, cell signal was mostly perfect, wifi was connected for about 3h, bluetooth was always connected to my Moto 360. Screen on-time is about 2h and I listened to music using GPM for about 2h. The battery settings do not indicate any app using up too much battery power - it shows the display at 15%, cell standby at 10% and then several apps.
What do you think - a Nexus 5 with a new battery should make it through a day, shouldn't it?
I remember my first Nexus 5, back in the days with a G watch, making it through a day without any problem with 15-20% left when I plugged it in before going to bed... because of that, I start to think if there might be a bad electronics part, like the display backlight or something on the mainboard, using up too much power without being noticed by the OS. Is that possible?
Thank you very much for your advice!
iYassin

Read and post in the battery life troubleshooting thread stickied to the top of this forum, it will help logically determine what is using your battery.
You have a lot running at once, so difficult at the moment to solve your issue. It's better to turn things on/off one by one to make logical conclusions whether it has any noticeable effect.
The best logical way to conclude if it is a hardware problem is to go fully sock no additional apps no root etc, see if it 'drains' by itself
If not hardware, then 99% of the time it is a bad app(s) keeping your phone awake

This is likely not the case, but have you checked the CPU settings? I've only encountered such a drain while using performance governor together with overclocking.

Same here
I have the same problem and I have been banging my head about it, I don't really use my phone for anything much else than a phone and I kept having at least 3 days of using it with no problems.
Now the phone barely lasts 2 days and even switches off in the middle of the night...

Stormspik3 said:
I have the same problem and I have been banging my head about it, I don't really use my phone for anything much else than a phone and I kept having at least 3 days of using it with no problems.
Now the phone barely lasts 2 days and even switches off in the middle of the night...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In the OP's case, his drain is likely caused by having GPS on all the time. That will absolutely devour battery life, so he could save himself some grief by turning it off until he than your phone turns off occasionally. First guess would be the power button going bad; that is generally the reason for needs it.
For you, who knows? You've not given any information, otherthat type of behavior

SteveMurphy said:
In the OP's case, his drain is likely caused by having GPS on all the time. That will absolutely devour battery life, so he could save himself some grief by turning it off until he than your phone turns off occasionally. First guess would be the power button going bad; that is generally the reason for needs it.
For you, who knows? You've not given any information, other that type of behaviour
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Click to collapse
Yes, sorry about that I was a bit annoyed at the phone. I found and fixed the problem. Go to settings > apps > disable google fit > click yes when it gives you some notifications about how you'll lose data or stuff like that > and click force stop at the end for good measure.
I am in my second day now of battery life at 59% with a looooooooot of talking today , I mean more than usual so it is definitely a fix for me. Hope it helps
Take care gents
Regards
Nik

Again same problem
Hi all,
Unfortunately I have better battery life but I am again losing a lot of battery.
I have a screenshot but I am unable to upload it sorry about that.
I use my phone mainly for calls roughly about 15 mins per day at the most in total ( not a lot at all I know) and I also have my bluetooth on at all times cause I have LG G Watch.
thing is that I have never had problems with the battery before. When I say before back in the day I still had my LG G Watch ( I have it for about 6-7 months) . Problem with the battery started roughly around 1 month.
Location is off, wi-fi is on on very rare occasions throughout the day when I need to check my e-mail and mobile data is the same. Navigation is used only if needed.
The real problem is that before I knew what was draining my batter now I have 79% of battery usage and I have 5 apps listed that drained each 1%
Android System 1%
Phone Idle 1%
Screen 1%
Google play services 1%
Android OS 1%
Where are the other 15 % ??
It is weird I really took pride in that phone and his battery life, I know that it is mainly because I don't use it as a regular used do i.e. gaming, facebook etc, but I still want to charge less than 1 time per 2 days or less
Thanks in advance
Regards
Nik

Stormspik3 said:
Hi all,
Unfortunately I have better battery life but I am again losing a lot of battery.
I have a screenshot but I am unable to upload it sorry about that.
I use my phone mainly for calls roughly about 15 mins per day at the most in total ( not a lot at all I know) and I also have my bluetooth on at all times cause I have LG G Watch.
thing is that I have never had problems with the battery before. When I say before back in the day I still had my LG G Watch ( I have it for about 6-7 months) . Problem with the battery started roughly around 1 month.
Location is off, wi-fi is on on very rare occasions throughout the day when I need to check my e-mail and mobile data is the same. Navigation is used only if needed.
The real problem is that before I knew what was draining my batter now I have 79% of battery usage and I have 5 apps listed that drained each 1%
Android System 1%
Phone Idle 1%
Screen 1%
Google play services 1%
Android OS 1%
Where are the other 15 % ??
It is weird I really took pride in that phone and his battery life, I know that it is mainly because I don't use it as a regular used do i.e. gaming, facebook etc, but I still want to charge less than 1 time per 2 days or less
Thanks in advance
Regards
Nik
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As stated above, read and post in the battery life troubleshooting thread stickied to the top of Q&A.
They will help logically diagnose what is using your battery.