[Q] Better Battery Life in Orlando - Thunderbolt General

I am visiting Orlando and have gotten much better battery life.
I am from Central NJ and work in NYC. At home in NJ I get a good 4G
signal but it keeps switching to 3G. I will lose 20% battery within an hour, and even with it on LTE only will lost battery. In NYC I get a sold 4G signal and it never switches to 3G, and there will still have to charge the phone within 4-5 hrs.
Where I am staying in NE Orlando Verizon coverage inside this house has always been poor for anyone phone. We need to go outside or the back porch for a decent call. 3G was getting no data so I switched to 4G. Even with 1 bar or no bars I had decent data. Yesterday we drove to Disney and I left the phone on CDMA+LTE so I would have data. As the day went on I was checking e-mail and also keeping an eye on battery. I had 3 bars in many places in Hollywood Studios and many time 1 or no bars. The phone stayed on 4G and I never once saw the phone change to 3G.The battery stayed all day. I made a couple of calls, texted lightly and received a lot of e-mail all day.
I had take the phone off the car charger at 10am, and at 10pm still had 45% battery left. This is far better than I have ever gotten in my home area.
Even though my usage was lighter I never would get anywhere near this in the NY/NJ area even with almost no use.
Has Verizon changed anything or has anyone else noticed a difference in other areas? Like everyone else I have been leaving my phone on 3G only to save battery.

Like the air quality, the water is purer and in turn.. so is the electricity!
Boom-tsh!
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA Premium App

Related

4G Back online - battery worse

Before 4G went out few days ago, I was getting pretty good battery life (40% - 60% remaining by bed time). Since it's been back online, my phone is only lasting about 6 or 7 hours before it starts to die.
Has anyone else noticed worse battery performance since 4G has come back online?
Thanks all.
I noticed the same thing
Same... And slower speeds.
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk
samesies....Idk what verizon did when the network went down but it was for the worse. Ever since I have had terrible battery life (did full restore, not that) and I lose data ALL the time. It's atrocious I have to reboot my phone like 7x to get data back. It will show as connected, but won't actually transfer anything.
I want this update pushed out immediately and hope that it fixes my data issue. I'm tired of not having data especially when I need it most (GPS)
Hopefully they get their network figured out so I can go back to using my phone like I did with my incredible
I'm not noticing any difference in speed or battery.
Thanks for all of the replies everyone.
Yesterday, I ran my phone using 3G only; I turned off LTE. The battery was amazing (running Tesla Coil and lean kernel).
I'm wondering if I should just leave 4G off until I really need it to download a file or something. It would be a different story if Verizon was charging additional fees for LTE.
I had the same problem a few days ago, shortly after the network came back up. I noticed that my 4G signal, which once was always at "full," would bounce between half 4G, full 4G and then down to 3G without really evening moving the phone.
I think that, despite the network coming up, it still wasn't perfect on the signal and that's what was killing people's batteries faster. I'm now getting a solid signal and have noticed my battery life returning back to the way it way before. No empirical data here, just my observation.
my phone is jumping between 4g, 3g and no data so often that its worthless for downloading or browsing the web today. Been having this issue since the outage. I assume this is killing my battery.
It's much better today! I'm guessing the network wasn't fully functional until recently.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App
I am getting amaign 4G speed again. startign today, been flaky even after they fixed it.
I wasn't sure if it was because I installed Tesla yesterday or what, but I had only 30% battery drain in 15 hours yesterday, albeit on 3G.
I've been using 4g pretty consistently since I got the phone a few days ago, and haven't noticed any real battery life issues. I wonder if you really only get issues when the phone is bouncing back and forth between 3 and 4g?

[Q] Anyone notice crazy battery drain when signal is spotty?

I'm currently out at a client site, but it's super bad reception here in the conference room they stuck us in. First of all, no 4G in colorado springs, so i disabled LTE, and hit CDMA in the network settings.
3G is near impossible inside, so i usually get 1X, and voice connection is next to impossible also.
So i noticed that from unplugging in the morning at 7:30am. at around 2pm, my battery was already down to 10%!
And i didn't even use it.
I did see from my battery usage, that Android system was ABOVE screen in power usage.
Anyone have the same issue?
I've had the same problem with EVERY phone ever, even non-smartphones have this problem. The lower the signal, the more the phone will scan for a good signal. If it has no service, it scans very frequently. If you're on a smartphone, it's even worse because then when the phone does get service, all the data apps attempt to use what little bandwidth you do have all at once. If you're in an area with poor coverage, put your phone into download mode or disable the data connection. Nothing short of putting a network extender or new tower will solve this.
Yes, but this is typical of most phones really. Searching for a signal, acquiring it, losing it, etc, uses a lot of battery. You just have to disable data. If there is wifi available, then use that, if not, just have to wait until you go outside. I have no reception in my building at work, if I leave data on, my battery is dead in a couple hours, on wifi I can go all day
Yes and my phone got very hot in my pocket at the time as well.
got_rice64 said:
I'm currently out at a client site, but it's super bad reception here in the conference room they stuck us in. First of all, no 4G in colorado springs, so i disabled LTE, and hit CDMA in the network settings.
3G is near impossible inside, so i usually get 1X, and voice connection is next to impossible also.
So i noticed that from unplugging in the morning at 7:30am. at around 2pm, my battery was already down to 10%!
And i didn't even use it.
I did see from my battery usage, that Android system was ABOVE screen in power usage.
Anyone have the same issue?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have this issue at work. I get anwhere from 10-15% battery drain an hour. I have determined that it is NOT because of the data signal though becuase I can turn that off and still get about the same excessive drain. It appears to be because of the voice signal. It varies anywhere from -85dm to -115dbm and is constantly changing. When I get outside of work environment, everthing is fine again and battery usage returns to normal. My Droid X did not have this issue.
-115db? How do you have signal at that rating? lol. Phone gets to about 1 bar when it reaches 101 for me.
I have the same issue in my office. I just barely get voice/text service. My solution is to turn off mobile data and plug my phone in to balance out the battery drain from the weak signal. I know it is bad to have my phone plugged in all of the time but it is better to be able to have sms and not have a dead phone when I am done at work.
Sent from my SCH-I510 using XDA Premium App
Samsuck said:
-115db? How do you have signal at that rating? lol. Phone gets to about 1 bar when it reaches 101 for me.
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Click to collapse
Yeah. Tell me about it. I am using Mobile Signal Widget to measure this. When It gets that bad, a little android face appears in the widget and it is crying.
YES! easily drains 10-15% an hour at a local pub that has 1 bar of signal.
It makes perfect sense... Your phone is fighting hard for that signal.
Sent from my Droid Charge running GummyFroyo 1.9.1
I drive 50+ miles to get to work and I always notice it drains a lot during my commute even when not used. I figured it was because of all the cell site swaps and searches bc I'm sure there's some spotty areas.
Sent from my SCH-I510 using XDA Premium App
Same experience. Dropped to 5% in 9 hours yesterday when I forgot to turn off data while at work. Today, I'm still at 75% after 9 hours with data off.
Juice defender solved this on my fascinate. It turned data on only once every 30 minutes. But, I can't get it to turn my data back on with this phone.
I really wish data signal aggressiveness was managed better by the operating system. It could be a real boon to the average battery life. Perhaps a smart developer could come up with some sort of "conservative" governor for 3g/4g connections. Rather than increasing power draw, it could just "sleep" until a stronger signal is detected... Imnuts? Is this even possible or just a pipedream?
Sent from my SCH-I510 using XDA App
I can't reach my dad on his cell phone while at the pentagon for obvious reasons. He has to turn his phone off during the day or it'll die in a few short hours, as a previous poster mentioned searching for a signal is a huge battery drain.
Strange. I did not have this problem with my OG Doid or Droid X in the same environment. Maybe the Moto phones simply have a better radio than the Charge.
Yeah for some reason, the samsung radio are junk. I have my Droid Charge (personal) and an Lg phone (business) and the lg blows the sammy out of the water. Now i am in 3g fringe (forget about 4g), and the sammy loses data all together while my lg still has the signal. I hate when i am trying to search for something on the charge and it says connection failed or network unavailable retry. Even when i call verizon, they all have me do a reset and stuff, and nothing works. The best answer i get is that iam in a 3g fringe area. When i tell them that my lg works and still has signal, all i get is silence or hmmmmmm. Gota love it. Yes they exchanged the phone with a new one and it still does the same thing. Forget about battery life. I actually carry 3 batteries with me and on a good day i only use 2 but usually it is 3. Before anyone says use wifi, unfortunatly we do not have free wifi where i work. anyway that should not be the answer to this problem. We are paying for a service that i can barely use.
end rant.
91point6 said:
Strange. I did not have this problem with my OG Doid or Droid X in the same environment. Maybe the Moto phones simply have a better radio than the Charge.
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Click to collapse
galaxyuser88 said:
Yeah for some reason, the samsung radio are junk. I have my Droid Charge (personal) and an Lg phone (business) and the lg blows the sammy out of the water. Now i am in 3g fringe (forget about 4g), and the sammy loses data all together while my lg still has the signal. I hate when i am trying to search for something on the charge and it says connection failed or network unavailable retry. Even when i call verizon, they all have me do a reset and stuff, and nothing works. The best answer i get is that iam in a 3g fringe area. When i tell them that my lg works and still has signal, all i get is silence or hmmmmmm. Gota love it. Yes they exchanged the phone with a new one and it still does the same thing. Forget about battery life. I actually carry 3 batteries with me and on a good day i only use 2 but usually it is 3. Before anyone says use wifi, unfortunatly we do not have free wifi where i work. anyway that should not be the answer to this problem. We are paying for a service that i can barely use.
end rant.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I went through the whole VZW customer service thing both on the phone and in person. They weren't much help but they gave me a brand new phone and it does the same thing. Then there were a lot of suggstions on different forums suggesting apps killers, turning data off, turing on 3g only data, rooting, trying different ROMs, battery clalibration, etc. None of this helps. The kind of drain I am seeing goes way beyond any benefits I would see out of any of these things. For example, I am at work now. When I left the house, it takes about 15 minutes for me to get to work. The rest of the time I have been inside my work building. I have been on battery for 2 hours & 24 minutes and I am at 76% already. Thats >10% drain per hour. When I am outside the building it is more like 3-5%. VZW customer service never suggested this as a problem. They DID suggest that 4g uses more battery but that is not the problem. I have proved that time and again by simply turning data off.
Hmm..sounds like a bad phone..I am in a fringe area at work and it definitely kills by battery faster but..it's only like 8% and hour so I still get 10 hrs a day or so...in a bad area. In a good 4 G area..I will get 24 hrs or so out of the phone.
galaxyuser88 said:
Yeah for some reason, the samsung radio are junk. I have my Droid Charge (personal) and an Lg phone (business) and the lg blows the sammy out of the water. Now i am in 3g fringe (forget about 4g), and the sammy loses data all together while my lg still has the signal. I hate when i am trying to search for something on the charge and it says connection failed or network unavailable retry. Even when i call verizon, they all have me do a reset and stuff, and nothing works. The best answer i get is that iam in a 3g fringe area. When i tell them that my lg works and still has signal, all i get is silence or hmmmmmm. Gota love it. Yes they exchanged the phone with a new one and it still does the same thing. Forget about battery life. I actually carry 3 batteries with me and on a good day i only use 2 but usually it is 3. Before anyone says use wifi, unfortunatly we do not have free wifi where i work. anyway that should not be the answer to this problem. We are paying for a service that i can barely use.
end rant.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow, that is the complete opposite of my experience. I've never had good signal with any LG phone - from flip phones to smartphones. Samsungs in my experience are middle of the road - not great, but not bad either. Motorolas usually do well, but there are certainly exceptions. HTC seems to be fairly good, but again, there are exceptions. Oh, and I did have one Audiovox phone on VZW, and it was garbage.
Haha you can whine about it in my rage thread
Sent from my Droid Charge running GummyFroyo 1.9.1

LTE in Milwaukee area.

Woke up this morning to be greeted by the 4G notification on the title bar. Yippee, so turn your radio to LTE more and enjoy.
Sent from my thunderstick
Congrats! Soon I will be able to make the drive to Milwaukee without ever dropping LTE.
Noticed mine last night!!
its been kinda spotty jumping back to 3g every so often,
but lovin the speed!!
Seeing as I work downtown, it would come on occasionally over the past month, but it was very infrequent and spotty at best (I think they were testing). Today it's been on all day, and surprisingly my battery life hasn't tanked like it did last month during testing. It's still worse than 3G, but it didn't drain in six hours like it had in the past (I still have 66 percent left with moderate usage). I am getting about 8 down and 5 up downtown - nice!
So far so good down in Racine it's been on all day for me. Now to see how fast my battery changes.
Awesome here in Brookfield and Menomonee falls has it too I guess. I'll find out after work
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA Premium App

Is Severe Battery Drain on LTE Normal?

Verizon turned 4G on in my area Tuesday and I have noticed significant battery drain since it has been on. I just did the battery calibration on my Charge Monday and with the network setting on CDMA and it lasted 27.5 hours. When 4G went live I changed the network setting to LTE auto and it lasted all of 6.5 to 7 hours with very similar usage. Is this typical? My phone has been on for an hour and 15 minutes this morning and the battery has already dropped about 10% and I haven't even used it.
Welcome to the dark side of 4G
This seems to be the pain point for those of us who must be early adopters of the latest and greatest - in this case, the significantly improved speeds offered by LTE. The initial crop of phones just don't seem to have the efficiency or larger batteries (and therefore increased thickness and weight) needed to be able to use 4G all day.
At the risk of bringing the anti-Apple fanatics down on me, this sounds like the period not so long ago when there was no 3G iPhone because it would have made the iPhone either too bulky or too short-lived.
I am guessing we will need to wait a year or two for radios and battery technology to jump ahead before the promise is fulfilled.
In the meantime, get LTE Switch on the Market and spend most of your time on 3G...
Very good point. I wont complain much because I am fortunate enough (or unfortunate) to be by a PC all day to charge it if needed. Today is better than yesterday though as I am currently at about 6.5 hours and am at 67%. Thanks for the input.
I live near LA so I get pretty good 4G coverage, perhaps that means my radio's not switching back and forth all the time... I get ~12 hours with moderate usage
tapatalked from my VZ Droid Charge
I as well live near LA and get approximatly 18-24 hours but I keep wifi on when I am at home (from 5:00PM -7:00AM). That significantly reduces the battery drain, especially at night. BUt when im out on the go on the weekends I get around 12-14 hours.
I have 4G coverage where I live, but not where I work (20 miles away). I also don't have a wireless network to use at work, so every morning and evening I'm switching wireless on and off, and turning 4G on and off.
It's worth the effort though... battery life if acceptable that way and when I have 4G coverage, it's fast!
Hmm, doesn't sound too normal..I getting better batter life on 4G LTE all day..I get around 17 hrs..sometimes 26 hrs..with light to moderate use.
Two things that I know kill the battery for sure...One Blue tooth..if I turn bluetooth on it drops faster then having the display on...almost..I will only get 8 hrs to 10 hrs with blue tooth on.
Second..if my phone starts switchng between 1 EDVO, 3G and 4G because I am in a fringe area..my battery drains very fast..I get about 7 hrs a day if that happens.
6.5 to 7 hours seems really short. I'm in 4g all day, every day, and my battery will easily last 12-14 hours with moderate use.3
What apps are you using the most?
jpog said:
Hmm, doesn't sound too normal..I getting better batter life on 4G LTE all day..I get around 17 hrs..sometimes 26 hrs..with light to moderate use.
Two things that I know kill the battery for sure...One Blue tooth..if I turn bluetooth on it drops faster then having the display on...almost..I will only get 8 hrs to 10 hrs with blue tooth on.
Second..if my phone starts switching between 1 EDVO, 3G and 4G because I am in a fringe area..my battery drains very fast..I get about 7 hrs a day if that happens.
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Click to collapse
It switched a lot yesterday so maybe that was the problem. I am hoping that they were working the bugs out and that it was just a fluke. It hasn't switched at all today and I am on track for 16-18 hours.

Lte

I just had the coolest thing happen, I woke up and turned my phone on only to find I have lte at my house now! Has this happened to anyone else in the Atlanta area?
Jealous. I wish they'd work on my area. Upstate sc
gunnyman said:
Jealous. I wish they'd work on my area. Upstate sc
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Click to collapse
Your day will come, and when it does.
You will be prepared
Sent from my HTC One
Be prepared to get worse battery life than before. LTE really chews battery life alive. I turn off mobile data when I'm not using it just to get better battery though.
im on LTE and get 24 hours easy...and id consider myself at least a moderate user.
I havent noticed bad battery life when I was using it before but its never been constant so I guess Ill find out soon haha
Ottawa - Canada
Where LTE covered pretty much everywhere. I've used LTE on my device and I get at the most 6hours of usage.
I consider myself very heavy user. Download, online music, browsing, IM+ etc... Switching LTE off and going only on 4G I get an extra 12hours worth of juice but the speed is more then what I need 4G speed here is an average of 8mpbs UP and DOWN. That translate to 800K per second in transfer rate. Just as fast as you regular high speed at home. So no there's no need for LTE personally. It just kills your battery off in no time.
I've consistently gotten over 24 hours with light usage on LTE. Obviously reception and level of usage will make a big difference. But for many people the battery life on LTE is plenty good enough to use all day, then charge when you sleep.
LTE destroys battery, but that's what 3g is for
Hail Cobra!
Shaddy-Z. said:
Be prepared to get worse battery life than before. LTE really chews battery life alive. I turn off mobile data when I'm not using it just to get better battery though.
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Click to collapse
I haven't noticed a significant drain on the battery going from HSPA+ to LTE.
I don't use wifi because of the bugs so i'm always using data.
I easily get 18+ hrs with heavy usage, including 3+ hrs screen time on LTE, so not real sure what you are expecting from the battery. It's a high-end Smartphone, use it for what its meant to be used for.
Based on some of the responses, the logic is like buying a Ferrari and only driving it 55 in the slow lane cuz you're worried about not getting good gas mileage.... Com'on people, use the damn phone!
Sent from my HTC One X using xda premium
Justjusten said:
I just had the coolest thing happen, I woke up and turned my phone on only to find I have lte at my house now! Has this happened to anyone else in the Atlanta area?
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Click to collapse
Yes, I never got a LTE signal at my house which is roughly 50 miles from Atlanta, but recently I've started getting a very good LTE signal at home.
I also don't see any of these battery drain issues everyone talks about. I'm on LTE for about 16 hours a day before I plug my phone in at night, and I always have some juice left. This has changed to be even better recently since I tend to need wifi more using AOKP and it's inconsistent mobile data. But my good battery life was consistent with stock and other Sense ROMs using only LTE.
Sent from my HTC One X using XDA
Justjusten said:
I just had the coolest thing happen, I woke up and turned my phone on only to find I have lte at my house now! Has this happened to anyone else in the Atlanta area?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lmfao, me too. I'm in hiram. I now have lte all the way from Atlanta to Paulding county. In fact, I have had constant lte since. I was sitting at the bowling alley, which I use to struggle just to get any signal, and I had two bars, lte.
Really haven't noticed much of a difference in battery drain either. Now I do use wifi at the house but still, been pretty impressed actually.
Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2
When you get throttled what are typical speeds?? Out of nowhere my speeds went from 16-24mb down and 7-11mb up to about 3-6mb down and 1-2mb up. Checked my usage (unlimited) and i've only used 200+mb so far. Whats up with that?
I suspect that the people complaining about LTE battery drain also have their brightness turned way up, like at full. I know, b/c I'm one of those people. Almost any phone is going to last you an entire day, of even heavy use, if the brightness is down to 10%. Even in the laptop world, the battery life differential going from 10% brightness to 100% screen brightness is double, real world use.

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