On my Galaxy Nexus and Droid 1 before that, bluetooth and wifi were nowhere near the top of my list of battery drainers. On my Prime and now my Infinity they are the top 2 when used, is the common for all tablets? Seems ridiculous that these functions draw more power than the screen.
I think it's a bug in the software, there is no way that Wifi eats up that much battery.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T
Chances are its a bug that will have to be ironed out.
Lets use the example of a laptop. If your connected to a wifi and roaming around there is actually a setting you can change that will determine how agressively the wireless adapter searches for a new network. The more aggressive it is the more often it will search for different access points and try to connect to them. More polling = more cycles = more power used.
If the wireless adapter in the tablet searches for a network to connect to, or a stronger open network that it could connect to, say, every 3 seconds it would be a tremendous battery drain. The same thing for Bluetooth, if its searching for saved devices (say for instance, your bluetooth headphones) every three seconds it will drain your battery pretty quick.
Now if the polling rate was changed, say, to every minute, or two minutes, or five minutes, or whatever, then it would dramatically reduce the power used by the radios.
Additionally, the transmitting power used for those radios can play a big factor in battery drain. If you are three feet from the access point and the wireless adapter is transmitting at full power thats going to be a waste of battery. It could, theoretically, determine you are close to the AP and drop the transmit power down to, say, half, and reduce the power used greatly.
Im guessing that the proper balance between performance and power savings has not yet been implimented in the tablets. Either its "All or Nothing" which, in my opinion, is kind of rediculious. Look for updates from Asus and they should have this fixed hopefully sooner than later. Custom roms should also be able to tweak this. There ARE settings in android that can address this, its just a matter of will Asus give us access to them without voiding our warranties.
To further back up this idea, consider this: My SGS2 has the ability to share its 3G connection via wifi. If i use this feature my battery will drain VERY quickly, easially within the hour my battery will be dead. Why? Increased wifi / 3g traffic, more cycles used, more power going to the antennas to transmit and recieve signals at a greater frequency. Using custom firmwares its quite easy to tweak the antennas for performance or power savings.
Related
I'm just going to start a list of feature/improvement requests:
1) WiFi- the signal is much improved from the 201, but is killing the battery. I routinely see the WiFi using >50% of my battery. I noticed that even when it is on, but not connected, it still is chugging along, slurping battery. I suspect that scanning every 5 seconds is doing this, even when connected to a network. Its just Constantly scanning. On a cell phone w/ a mobile network where people are in motion, i can see this as more necessary, but not on a WiFi only tablet. Is there a way we can kill the scanning when connected and only scan if requested manually? It's nice that things pick up automatically on start up, but then it largely becomes redundant after you are connected. Some adjustable settings on that would be nice. Battery life would improve a bit i suspect.
Edit: i tried a little experiment, WiFi doesn't scan every five seconds, i counted about 30 seconds. I tested by reading the observed networks on one side of my house where i can weakly pick it up, then walked to the other side where i couldn't and counted how long it took to go away automatically. That is 2 scans a minute, 120 an hour. Tell me that doesn't affect battery life for no good reason, especially when I'm connected to my WiFi already.
More to come as i run across them.
Sorry your test is rubbish ^^
Connect your router via LAN to a computer. Goto your router log and see how often the infinity tries to talk to the router.
That would be a more realistic time
>implying Asus will listen to a lowly consumer like you or me
From where do you draw the 50% WiFi consumption, the standard Android battery app? It is flawed. Check your battery consumption in BetterBatteryStats, that works far better. Then report back in.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T
MartyHulskemper said:
From where do you draw the 50% WiFi consumption, the standard Android battery app? It is flawed. Check your battery consumption in BetterBatteryStats, that works far better. Then report back in.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Looks like Google currents was a big hog... other than that not sure what I'm looking at on that app
jrkart99 said:
Looks like Google currents was a big hog... other than that not sure what I'm looking at on that app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree, I've never been able to really understand what BetterBatteryStats is trying to tell me. I've used it to find apps that were stopping deep-sleep from working, but beyond that, I haven't really found it very useful. Very hard to interpret.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T using Tapatalk 2
Ok I'll bite.
2 Stereo Speakers
Think they heard me? Why why why can't ASUS put decent speakers on this thing. Or at least if they put one, why can't it be a speaker that someone other than my dog can hear?
Larger battery capacity.
Prime and Infinity both have the same battery size, yet Infinity runs at a higher clock speed, thus using more voltage and has a higher res screen.
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.
Hi,
I was thinking which consumes less power on a Note 10.1
Wifi or 3G?
Anyone got any info on this?
plz google it... it can affect all gadgets pertaining to ur question.
http://androidforums.com/samsung-galaxy-nexus/503684-wifi-vs-3g-battery-life-wow.html
According to wikipedia typical power usage for wifi would be 32mw and typical power usage for 3G would be 500mw.
That would make wifi about 15x more efficient.
Ofcourse there are many more variables like howmuch processing power is required to handle the connection and the distance between you and the accesspoint. But considering wifi is faster and needs less transfer time to finish sending data and considering the above I reckon you should leave wifi on to increase your battery life.
I do feel that wifi is much more battery saving than 3g too. hope this help
3G/4G is a power hog as long as its on, whether you are downloading data or not.
WiFi is MUCH more efficient.
And I'm talking at LEAST 50% more efficient.
I have realised something with all the Samsung Android's I've used over the years.
When one has been in a known area with mobile data on, regardless of wifi state, like home or work, standby battery drain is normal, 1% per 1-3 hrs. However, when one begins to travel, with mobile data on, battery idle drain becomes 1% per 10-20 minutes pretty immediately.
This is regardless of whether Wifi is On or Off (obviously disconnected in both cases).
I have ran so many tests on this with the S3, S5, N2 and N3, and all the results are the same, battery drain goes wild when one begins to travel.
I have tried turning location on/off, syncing on/off and again results are pretty much exactly the same.
It's got to be something to do with how well the phones deal with handshakes from cell tower to cell tower, but it really shouldn't eat the battery so much. The iPhone for example performs much better in this situation.
Has anyone come across this and any ideas?
I will try to explain what may is the problem in simple words. I am studying computer and electronic engineering and we had a class this semester based on phone signals.
When you stay at home your phone is connected on the phone company's antenna. To connect you need to exchange some info so i think this will consume some power. Also one you are connected the amount of data receiving and sending are the minimum possible.
When you travel your phone has to keep connect on an other antenna and keep searching for signal. Many connecting tries may fail due to bad signal and based on the phone and the company, if your phone keep change on 3G for better signal this "change" is that consumes much power.
This is probably the reason. I may be wrong because we did only some base things over the wireless communications signals.
Different phones operate different on the signal density. Good density better signal = better battery life
So currently wifi kills more battery than 3g!
its been on an hour and already accounts for 13% of todays power use.
anyone know how to fix this bug?
irzero said:
So currently wifi kills more battery than 3g!
its been on an hour and already accounts for 13% of todays power use.
anyone know how to fix this bug?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this is hard but it could be many things, even other devices on your network in fact that's where I would first look, some sharing setting or some powersaving on or off setting in your router
irzero said:
So currently wifi kills more battery than 3g!
its been on an hour and already accounts for 13% of todays power use.
anyone know how to fix this bug?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
5Ghz or 2.4Ghz?
Supposedly 5Ghz would drain more if you aren't close enough to the source!
Sent from my SM-G925F
2.4 and my edge has no problems
Sent from my SM-G928F using Tapatalk
Check for am app that's throwing lots of wakelocks or alarms when on Wi-Fi. Some apps think they have free reign to check in all they want when you're not using cell data.
@OP
Had the same issue beginning 5.1.1. Turned out keeping the phone only on 5GHz instead of both 2.4 & 5GHz wifi did the trick for me. Try it out if you also have a dual-band wifi router.
Sent from my SM-G920I using XDA Free mobile app
What's the best way to find out with out root
Sent from my SM-G928F using Tapatalk
Many Playstore apps exist to measure wifi strength & effectiveness. "Wifi Overview 360", "Network Signal Info Pro".
My Sammy S6 has a much better wifi hardware than my cheap, old phones. But my home wifi routers are the same.
Wifi transmissions are bothered by:
1) poor hardware (old, cheap phones, etc), which drains battery with weak signals.
2) radio interference rubbish between the main sender, and your wifi receiver.
3) orientation of the two aerials, in relation to each other; horizontal, angled, vertical, ... (especially if 1), 2) above are bad
4) Whether the receiver unit is facing the main unit, sideways, backwards, frontwards, etc. On poor quality hardware, this is very important.
Being very crippled myself much of my time is just lying in my (nursing) bed. My Samsung Note Pro 12.2 floats above my head, in bed. Smartphones are affected if my head gets between the unit and the main unit.
My main wifi unit is about 20 yards/ meters away, but transmitting diagonally through a thick, metal-rod reinforced, load bearing wall. So I have a hardwired ethernet cable linked to another wifi unit under my bed, getting a faster, less power-wasting signal.
I have this on my work WiFi it drains the battery really quickly even idle it is about 1% per 5mins whilst connected to WiFi. On 3/4g it is significantly less drain.
But at home I don't have the issue battery life is good even on wifi.
It'd be nice to resolve it, have had it since I got my s6 in may so following this thread closely.
I opened my own thread back then which explains my experience a bit more:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3106313