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Wifi battery drain

Hi. I'm having a problem. The wifi is draining my battery. My battery will only last about 4 hours of screen on time.
I've already check the power option of disabling wifi when the screen is off. Wifi drains at least 40%of the charge.
I've read other forums but nobody has an answer just yet. I really like this tablet, but it makes me mad just having 4 hours of battery.
Driver problem, an app misbehaving, hardware problem?
What can I do? What should I do? How many of you are having this issue?

mencho said:
Hi. I'm having a problem. The wifi is draining my battery. My battery will only last about 4 hours of screen on time.
I've already check the power option of disabling wifi when the screen is off. Wifi drains at least 40%of the charge.
I've read other forums but nobody has an answer just yet. I really like this tablet, but it makes me mad just having 4 hours of battery.
Driver problem, an app misbehaving, hardware problem?
What can I do? What should I do? How many of you are having this issue?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Depending on your usage, it is indeed possible to drain battery 3-4 hours. I myself never had that situation but for those who played highly CPU/GPU intensive game along with WIFI had that issue. I usually had 5-6 hours on my routine use which to me seems was not much.
So couple things I believe you should look into.
1. How is your monitor brightness?
2. What applications are you running? e.g. are you downloading on background with playing some game foreground?
Those sort of basic things. To identify whether the WIFI is actual issue or not, one thing you can do is simply turn off the WIFI and do whatever you need for couple hours and see where you at in your battery. If you have 50% drained in couple hours without WIFI on, clearly WIFI is not the issue but if you suddenly get only 20% battery drain from WIFI off, it is indeed the WIFI.
If WIFI is indeed the issue and perhaps you can try Juice Defender but it will only save battery if you are not using WIFI all the time.
For detail, please refer to http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1805636.
One last thing is obvious, but battery save mode rather than balance mode gave me extra couple hours without sacrifice in my foreground application performance; however, I did notice main screen page swiping or application launch animation weren't as smooth. Almost felt like back to my old Galaxy 10.1 tablet on Honeycomb.

There is actually a bug that makes your battery overview show the percentage of wifi on time as percentage of wifi battery consumption:
-> wifi on 80% of time > shows 80% of power consumption from wifi.
How long do you have your device ?
When i first got it I also thought that the battery time was bad but now ( i have had it for about a week) i get battery drain of 10% / hr while surfing and 14-18 %/hr while streaming video over wifi and 0,5-1% / hr while standby with wifi and sync on.
I have the brightness on manual contorl and when i watch video i change the performance to eco setting.

Hi, thank you for your responses..... This is an update of what is going on.
I am already on firmware. 26, but had the problems since fw. 22
Yesterday I did a factory reset to rule out some mysterious app. The battery issue continued under wifi.
Wifi was still draining between 40 and 50% of the battery. Completely drained in about 4 hours of browsing time in balanced mode and about 40% screen brightness.
I just did another test. I played 2 movies with the wifi off. After 4 hours of screen on time the battery fell to 66%. So the tablet have enough battery juice for 12 back to back movies. That's great, I can rule out the battery.
So far I can confirm that the battery is draining extremely fast with wifi and is not a big showing erroneous battery drain.
4 hours of browsing tine is a joke for a tablet...
Any other things you think I can try?

For how long have you had it? No matter what people say, the calibration algorithms for these kinds of batteries still need several cycles of charging and discharging before they can actually read out any battery level accurately. I easily go for far longer than that on my device -- not that that fact helps you out, I know -- but I thought battery life was worse in he beginning as well. I guess it just needs to settle down a bit. Give it a week.
EIDT: Oh, and....eeehmmmmm.... do not believe the standard Android battery tool. Get yer mitts on BetterBatteryStats and get a few cycles on it, check the readouts and then report back in.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T

Thanks. I've already installed better battery stats.. While Web browsing battery drains up to 30%/h. I know is too soon to get to a conclusion. I will keep you post it.
Hope there is some firmware update that will fix this. This is Asus 5th tablet (transformer, prime, slider, tf300) I don't want a beta product!
Sorry about the whining, I know that you guys are helping me..

Battery life is really bad on this we need the motley kernel and some custom rooms soon !!!
I am running this tablet on performance and it is still very slow ccompared to my prime I hoped I can wait for the custom rooms and kernels before I sell this tablet i know i am very impatient

i have a tf700 too and have the same problem on wifi I love this tablet, i think we need to find a fix. Hope to hear from some of the smart people on this forum.

The reason for the low battery is this; Asus did not put a larger battery in Infinity compared to Prime.
Both devices have the exact same battery, but since Infinity runs at a higher clock speed and has a higher resolution screen, it drains the battery much much faster.
You can't really fix this with software. You can however lower the voltage with a custom kernel, making slightly improvement....but that'll also make the device unstable.

Just to let you guys know, i have assigned a fixed ip address for my Tf700 and the wifi drain seems to have decreased. I won't rely on the native android battery monitor (mine still says 85% battery drain by wifi). But i have noticed much less actually drain/hour when using wifi with a fixed ip address than not. YMMV.

Is it possible to turned down WIFI strength i.e. power consumption?

So as most of us already know that the WIFI when it is actively in use e.g. browsing, it drains a lot of power. Essentially, the battery consumption doubles when when actively browsing in comparison to the playing local video (~20%/hr to ~10%/hr). This does not happen on any other device I have used in the past.
Today, one forum user said interesting thing:
SmartAs$Phone said:
In fact the WiFi is so cranked up on these baby's (same as for Primes) that it uses as much or more battery than the screen, and it's a pretty hungry screen! I wondered why they kept the WiFi pushed so hard on the Infinity, was it that Asus wanted to show just how great it could be (and other than no 5 ghz. radio, it is really quite good - I get roughly 4 times the throughput I had with the Prime, and twice what the TF101 could deliver) or was it just leftover coding from the Prime?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not sure if this is true, but make sense if the latter is true. I wonder if there is anyway to turn down the power supply to the WIFI unit because I like my infinity with ANR pretty much now gone, beautiful screen, not real IO issue (for practical use), my only complain is actually battery consumption of tablet alone when actively browsing. So if this can be fixed, it would be phenomenal news for me.

I personally don't know. But anytime you have radios on, there is going to be additional battery drain. Not saying Infinity's isn't excessive.
You could try using the Power Save mode.
Unless I have the screen on, when the WiFi is turned, I can go all day This is just checking email, IMs, little web, and so forth. I do have a C8 release.

lovekeiiy said:
I personally don't know. But anytime you have radios on, there is going to be additional battery drain. Not saying Infinity's isn't excessive.
You could try using the Power Save mode.
Unless I have the screen on, when the WiFi is turned, I can go all day This is just checking email, IMs, little web, and so forth. I do have a C8 release.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's definitely true the WIFI component should drain battery; however, I think in infinity it is excessive when compared to any other tablet. And you are absolutely right that just having it on does not drain much but when actively browsing it does. The easy way to notice this is, if you watch video (local) the tablet alone can last up to 9 hours i.e. 10-12% per hour battery drain; however, as soon as you start active browsing not even streaming but simply surfing web it becomes ~20% per hour drain.
Sometimes antenna like devices can increase its signal gain based on how much power you supply to it. So the other guys post made sense to me in theory at least.

Hows your battery life?

I got my HTC One Mini yesterday and I'm getting pretty good battery life so far, how is it for you guys?
I'm using jmz's Stock Rooted Odex WWE Rom and Jmz M4 Kernel 9-04-13. I unplugged my phone around 9 AM this morning and it's now 1:45 AM and I'm at 48%.
I installed 12 apps, torrented a 315MB file using uTorrent @ about 600 kb/s, watched 23 minutes of 720p video using MX Player with hardware decoding, watched about 15 minutes of YouTube videos, went on Facebook for about 20 minutes, browsed the internet for about 5 minutes, browsed a forum using Tapatalk for about 15 minutes, made about 5 minutes of calls, sent/received about 20 texts, read a manga chapter, used it as a flashlight for about a minute, used it as a remote for XBMC for about 2 hours, flashed a kernel, and took a couple of pictures, a 30 second 1080p video, and a Zoe to test out the Camera. All of this was over Wi-Fi.
I think I could easily get 2 days out of the battery as my typical usage would be lighter. How is the battery life for you and what Rom/Kernal are you using?

Stock UK Vodafone Rom recently updated with the it's package.
Well...I am sadly unimpressed by the battery. I've had mine now for just under a month and don't get a day.
I use it to surf the BBC website (in mobile mode) over 3g and at other tines WiFi.
I make calls about 30-60mins a day and play a version of bubble breaker.
I can literally see the power drain when surfing the web. This us the single most draining activity...much worse than when I used my desire.
I have configured all power save options, disabled all non essential apps, and ensured the phone is not burning background or unnecessary apps.
Still it goes rapidly. It's a shame but I like the phone so will live with it.
2 days...yes if all you do is make calls. Anything more demanding not a chance I'm afraid. I have tried, a lot.
So it is now 1.10pm and I have 52% and at 9 am I had 100%. No video no gaming but a mix of BBC on WiFi and 3g (i have a femtocell so no burning power while looking for a signal).
Nice phone in so many ways but battery life, in call quality and control, are very poor.
All the best,
Sam

I am planning to buy HTC one mini, Wanted to get real idea of battery life, so this was helpful. Could you laso tell me if that 1GB RAM is a problem maybe once you have 60-70 apps ? I thinking of 2 years life at least so was concerned?

zopeon said:
I am planning to buy HTC one mini, Wanted to get real idea of battery life, so this was helpful. Could you laso tell me if that 1GB RAM is a problem maybe once you have 60-70 apps ? I thinking of 2 years life at least so was concerned?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For me it isn't too much of an issue, but they really should have equipped it with 2 GB of memory, 1 GB has been the standard for about 2 years. I have 42 user apps installed and most of the time I can have multiple apps open without any slow downs. Occasionally if I have multiple heavy apps running (Maps, Facebook, Pandora, Chrome ect.) it can slow down due to the lack of memory, but if I close one it speeds right back up. If you read any reviews you'll hear something along the lines of it's stupid that they only gave this phone 1GB of memory, but for most people it won't be a problem which I agree with. I'd suggest trying it out at a local store before buying it. Different people will see things differently, to some the HTC One Mini and S4 Mini will seem slow compared to the regular One and the S4, to others it will seem very fast.

ok guys please keep in mind that your mobile connection eats your power rly ****ing bad. I did a lot of tests with the mini and i'm was even able to get 5days with 25% left. Camera or wachting videos coast a lot of power as well but music is ok that does not need that much power.
Its all about your connections and how good the signal is, so if you want a longer battery life only use wifi.

The device has smaller screen size, lower resolution, half the number of cores, lower clock speed, lower powered GPU, half the RAM, no NFC or OIS. It should get *better* battery life than the full-sized one all things considered, though the smaller battery will definitely even this out somewhat. I wouldn't be surprised if under typical moderate-high usage involving CPU and screen this device should hold out similarly to the HTC One but in standby, etc it will be a bit lower.
Notebookcheck and GSMArena have done thorough battery testing, though notebookcheck doesn't test standby time and GSMArena's standby time testing method is a bit suspect.
Anandtech haven't published a review of the Mini yet but in their review of the Galaxy Note 3 you can see some battery tests they did of the HTC One Mini and it holds out pretty well considering it's not a phablet.

I bought mine two weeks ago. On the first week, my battery just last 10 hours at least and after a few days of experimentation of various settings and process monitoring, I can last 24 hours with still 20% remaining.
My daily usage can be define as quite conservative as I'm busy at work most of the day.
Here's my activities to give you an idea:
Call - at least 3 minutes a day
SMS - least 20 messages a day
browsing via HSPA / 3G - at least 1 hour a day
browsing via wifi - at least 1 hour a day
playing games - at least 30 minutes a day
reading / composing / sending emails - I set this to manual, at least 5 times a day (when I'm at home)
Frequently Used Apps:
Chrome
stock Calendar
stock Mail
Keep
stock Music Player
Cordy
Twitter
ES Task Manager
ES File Explorer
Google Play
Youtube
System Panel
Disabled Apps:
Facebook
Linkedin
SoundHound
7 Digital
Google Search
Google+
Hangouts
Kid Mode
Maps
Plurk
Hope this can help somebody to have an idea.

No matter what the phone, you tend to see battery life tests showing 8+ hours of web browsing battery life. However, real life never matches up to this expectation, with 3 or 4 hours of web browsing much more typical. This is the case with all smartphones - even a device like the Note 2 or Note 3 (albeit with higher expectations to begin with: - a Note 2/3 may tests 11+ hours web browsing but typically get 4.5+ in real-life conditions).
Unfortunately this leads many to believe that their brand new device (or its battery) is faulty. But in most cases this is not true.
I'll attempt to explain the real reason for the discrepancy.
Most importantly, the battery life tests are exclusively limited to that activity or task. For example, fully charging the smartphone, continuously web browsing for 8+ hours until the phone dies. In reality when we use our phones, the phone will be on standby, or doing other tasks, at other times. For example, 8+ hours of web browsing from a full charge is not the same as getting 8+ hours of web browsing over a 16 hour day. Those other 8 hours, even if the phone are on standby, are going to use up some of your battery, too.
The single biggest battery drain of a device is usually going to be the screen, unless you have specifically forced the screen brightness to a low (<33%) amount. At full brightness, a smartphone may burn through battery after only 3.5 hours of web browsing even if it could last 8+ hours at 40% screen brightness (the brightness control is not usually linear in terms of power draw). Review sites tend to standardise on a particular brightness level that is relatively low (the reason for this is often that allows fair comparison with devices that just can't get as bright). The bottom line is that 8+ hours of screen on time at lowish brightness might drop to half that or lower if you let auto-brightness bring up the brightness during the daylight hours or when outdoors, or if you prefer higher brightnesses.
Often, battery life tests will be done over wifi with mobile phone reception disabled entirely. This is not realistic as with a smartphone you're usually connected to a cell tower even while you're using wifi, so that voice calls and texts can still come through. Also, cellular uses a lot more energy while idle than wifi does. So even if you set the brightness really low and do nothing else with the phone, you still shouldn't be surprised that you can't get 8+ hours of web browsing if you also have the phone connected to a cell tower in the background. Some sites will conduct battery life tests over the cellular network instead of wifi, and typically these will get much lower battery life ratings (eg. 4+ hours, even with the same brightness level as for the wifi test).
Bottom line is, don't head back to the shop if you only get 3 to 4 hours screen on time during the day with web browsing. This is entirely normal for *some* usage patterns. You can improve it by:
Disable auto-brightness and set the brightness to a low-ish value, say 30%-40% of maximum. This might be able to double your screen-on time compared to full brightness.
Avoid using the phone much in direct sunlight. For the brightness to be high enough to read in direct sunlight, you'll be burning through your battery quickly, and if you've set the brightness manually to a low level as advised above, you won't be able to read it in direct sunlight.
Connect to wifi (but of course, only if you trust the wifi network to be secure and respect your privacy).
Realise that if you ever play CPU- or GPU-intensive games (most casual games shouldn't fit in this category) then a beefier battery or external battery booster may be a good investment. There's not much you can do about their battery use.
Only after considering the above should you hunt through battery usage analysers and wakelock detectors. In many cases even a misbehaving wakelock that keeps your phone partially awake all day has a low impact compared to having the screen on full brightness for just 20 or 30 minutes.

Extremely battery drain on Custom roms with Lollipop 5.1.1

Hello,
I have a problem with my Nvidia Shield K1 tablet
Running system: Lollipop 5.1.1 (downgraded from 6.0.1)
ROM: Carbon 5.1.1-UNOFFICIAL-20160809-1925
Kernel: from the above rom
I've brought this tablet as used and it works very well and smooth,
but when i just want to browse the web, watch some youtube videos or play some emulator games
i can see the battery draining very quickly, with simple web browsing and youtube my battery is draining with continuous use in like 4-6 hours (100% to 0%),
my question is is this normal?
1 time when i used some battery info apps from the playstore it once stated that my battery condition was "bad" when i had like 5% charge left, but never saw this again.
I've also tried to disable 1 core so it will run on 3 cores, down clock both cpu and gpu by a couple hundred Mhz with Kernel adiuator but somehow the settings jump up and down.
This battery drain is on marshmallow, and lollipop both on stock and custom roms, even after restoring stock rom.
Can someone say what is a normal battery duration with continuous use of the tablet? a rough estimate will do, i'm just wondering if my battery is defect or something,
also overnight it will drain like 7-8% if not used, i dont know if that's normal too.
Or can someone help me with this issue or a way to pinpoint the issue?
P.S. i've also applied multiple doze applications like Greenify and disabled most of my start up applications at boot, battery stats don't see any unusual wake locks either.
Thanks in advance for the replies and help.

First of all, it depends on the brightness of the screen. The higher the brighteness level the higher the battery usage. Second, if you play games or stream HD videos 4 to 6 hours is normal. Just browsing the web, word processing and office work should give you easily +9 hours.
Did you deactivate **Adaptive brightness** under **Display**?
Because no matter the ambient lighting, it's always too bright! Manually is the way to go.
Last but not least, is **app optimization** off? If not, do so. It only slows down the performance and drains battery.

Niii4 said:
First of all, it depends on the brightness of the screen. The higher the brighteness level the higher the battery usage. Second, if you play games or stream HD videos 4 to 6 hours is normal. Just browsing the web, word processing and office work should give you easily +9 hours.
Did you deactivate **Adaptive brightness** under **Display**?
Because no matter the ambient lighting, it's always too bright! Manually is the way to go.
Last but not least, is **app optimization** off? If not, do so. It only slows down the performance and drains battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your response, and yes i have my brightness on manual as overday i like it at around 60-70% brightness and at evening/night i use 5% with a screen filter app to darken it even more which i like for my eyes.
I play emulator games sometimes but if i do i wont get 4 to 6 hours i can get around 2 to 4 hours max, as with browsing the web and office related stuff i have never seen it getting 9+ hours, the max i would get and i tested it several times was around 6-7 hours max, do you have any idea why this is?
I haven't tried disabling "app optimization" but i will sure try to disable that option and hope for more battery life
Could it also be that my battery is worn out/kinda dead as i've bought this tablet second-hand and not new?

+60% brightness that's something. My brightness level usually won't pass the WiFi symbol at daytime and when I game. So it's something like maxi 20% to 30%. And at nighttime and dim indoor lighting it's on 0%. I've to assume that's why I get more on screen time.
Haha, I'm used to darkness.
Either way, I highly recommend a 10k powerbank to double the time.

Moreover, WiFi takes a lot more battery than the Nvidia battery stats show! Just tally up the percentages, and it'll never add up.
The other day, I was streaming HD vids, playing some games, browsing the web and after +5 hours my battery was at 5%.
Most days, I work offline and I get way more on screen time.

Shield K1 - Any way to increase low Screen On Time ?

Hello there,
I have a K1 since a couple of month, update 5.1 installed.
While I can get a pretty decent battery life, there is still one thing eating most on my battery : the screen.
Most of the time, I get 2h and a half of screen on time, no auto brightness, set to the minimum. I end up with the screen being responsible of 85 or 90% of the battery drain !
This is bugging me a lot since I travel a lot and would like to be able to watch 4 hours of videos with a full charge...
Is my screen on time normal ? Is there any tips I can use to increase it ? I'm not rooted right now but I can look into it if necessary.
Thanks for your help guys !

Norbzzz said:
Hello there,
I have a K1 since a couple of month, update 5.1 installed.
While I can get a pretty decent battery life, there is still one thing eating most on my battery : the screen.
Most of the time, I get 2h and a half of screen on time, no auto brightness, set to the minimum. I end up with the screen being responsible of 85 or 90% of the battery drain !
This is bugging me a lot since I travel a lot and would like to be able to watch 4 hours of videos with a full charge...
Is my screen on time normal ? Is there any tips I can use to increase it ? I'm not rooted right now but I can look into it if necessary.
Thanks for your help guys !
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To watch locally stored movies using MXplayer i get 5hours of movies. (10/30% screen brightness).
But yeah battery life isn't great on this device and yes the screen is always the main drainer for me too

Exactly what C4 says.
If you watch movies you don't have the brightness on 0%. What can make the difference is watching offline vs streaming! Streaming of course eats more battery.
And when you are a traveler consider a 10k powerbank to more than double your on screen time.

Well, the powerbank seems indeed to be the ultimate solution.
What bothers me is that you can tweak performance for app and stuff... and they end up taking no power at all anyway (not toking about heavy gaming of course).
Screen is always eating all the battery. I wondered if a custom kernel could make a noticable difference on this...

On any recent mobile device, when using it, the screen will be the biggest battery drainer, by far.
Only thing you can do (when using an LCD based device), is lowering the brightness. That's all.