I've noticed that when I leave my phone idle at work, it will drain about 2% an hour even though my signal is stronger (usually around -95 dB). At home, I have a fairly weak LTE signal (usually -100 to -105), but my device will not drain nearly as quickly when idle.
I've been sitting at my desk for the last 3 hours, with maybe 2 or 3 minutes of SoT and it's gone from 90% down to 84%. At home, I'd see about 1-2% drop in the same amount of time.
Are there any engineers out there who would know why this thing would happen? Is it because the phone is switching back and forth between different towers?
This didn't happen with my G3 as the behaviour and battery drain was consistent amongst the two locations.
Do you use wifi when at home and not at work?
flu13 said:
Do you use wifi when at home and not at work?
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I'm an idiot. This is probably it. I'll leave wifi off tonight to make sure.
Though, this now leads me to another question - Is the S6 really that bad when on LTE? As I mentioned in my prior post, my G3 did not drain this much and I didn't use wifi at work with that one either.
Related
Hi I tried looking for a similar thread but couldn't find one. So I was curious if my g2x battery use is normal. When I look it up my battery use is mostly consumed by cell stand by. I'm not running 4g I'm using 2g. Is this normal?
KSauce86 said:
Hi I tried looking for a similar thread but couldn't find one. So I was curious if my g2x battery use is normal. When I look it up my battery use is mostly consumed by cell stand by. I'm not running 4g I'm using 2g. Is this normal?
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It is normal. If you click on it and your time without a signal is high then you may have a poor signal or another issue. Searching for signal will kill the battery pretty quick.
I clicked on it and I don't get any indication of time without signal. All it says its time on 2h 43m 50s. Could it be the battery it self? I've left the phone mostly idling this whole time and its already down to 86% . I've tried all the tips like only use 2g, lowest display, and juice defender. In like 6 hours I'm down to like almost 55 percent.
Normal idle drain for me is between 2% and 4% an hour. In areas with weak reception such as my office, the drain can be much higher due to the radio switching between 2g and 4g looking for a strong signal. I have gotten into the habbit of switching to 2g only at the office. You might try it for a day as a test to see if it helps. I know it is not a great solution, but it is what it is.
Interesting observation, perhaps the coding Guru's can take into account. I noticed that at home where I seem to have perfect 4g signal, my battery lasts nearly 20+ hours and seems great.
My wife, who works at a hospital also noticed that at work she barely gets 6 hours and has to swap batteries constantly. Her phone also seems to always been warm and the battery info reports the same data that it always does(Blaming the screen). She's been complaining to me for a while, threatening to want to go back to the iphones and I've been trying to look for a solution.
So fast forward some time, I notice that when I go to an area with spotty service(an Office in Delaware that I occasionally visit), I'm lucky to get 6 hours of life on my phone. It also was exhibiting the same luke warming heating that my wife had been complaining about. I disabled data and got it to straggle by, but then I also experimented with wifi.
The wifi in that office is super strong and when I connected to wifi with my phone instead of having it constantly search for Edge/3G/LTE, it would just sit on wifi and never bother searching for signal.
This boosted the life from the 6 hours to 14 hours. I also recommended the same to my wife and she went from 6 hours to 18 hours(Better Wifi signal and no 4 hour train ride with spotty signal searching)
So, perhaps the radio logic is way too aggressive on these phones and if there was a way to make them just calm down and not look for 5 minutes if it doesn't find signal, perhaps they wouldn't burn themselves out.
Is there a way to reduce the radio aggressiveness? Cause quite frankly, if I don't have signal the second I walk out of the subway, I could really care less. Polling every 5 minutes is totally fine by me and it would be even better if it was configurable.
Anyways, perhaps others who are suffering with terrible battery life could experiment and see if enabling wifi extends their battery longetivity.
Cheers!
Er...I think everyone knows that WiFi increases your battery life substantially. However, user defined polling times might not be a bad idea.
Sent from my Droid Charge running Humble 1.4
I know wifi increases battery life, and and on the flipside if you don't have a strong wifi signal it will keep trying to find one... But my question is how much drain?
I drove to work in Queens from central new jersey (about an hour and a half and the battery drained about 60% with the wifi switched on. Is this the fault or do I have another problem?
Running latest humble fe
Sent from my SCH-I510 using XDA Premium App
I want to say that it drained purely because it was trying to find any signal, even if Wifi was off, I'd be willing to wager that it would have still lost that much battery life on the drive in.
All this still makes me think that if the devs could find the logic that controls the radio probing and allow it to be set based upon configurable options, our battery lives would be tremendously better.
superslow said:
I want to say that it drained purely because it was trying to find any signal, even if Wifi was off, I'd be willing to wager that it would have still lost that much battery life on the drive in.
All this still makes me think that if the devs could find the logic that controls the radio probing and allow it to be set based upon configurable options, our battery lives would be tremendously better.
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So it is reasonable to assume the wifi search drained it that much? I I doubt it was general lte/data searching -new york is pretty covered
Sent from my SCH-I510 using XDA Premium App
Anyone else noticed this? In areas of med to low LTE signal (-109 dBm), there are times when something locks up inside the radio and Signal Strength under Status will never change again no matter where I move the phone. During this funky mode, the battery is dropping rapidly during idle... Maybe 10% per hour. Something is wrong. During this same time android battery history shows yellow medium signal and voice calls work fine. There is also no runaway process cpu ussage or awake time. The only thing wrong and drawing too much juice is radio. If I toggle airplane mode or toggle wifi off/on the problem is solved for a while. I have VRALF2 firmware.
same problems here
Scrappy1 said:
Anyone else noticed this? In areas of med to low LTE signal (-109 dBm), there are times when something locks up inside the radio and Signal Strength under Status will never change again no matter where I move the phone. During this funky mode, the battery is dropping rapidly during idle... Maybe 10% per hour. Something is wrong. During this same time android battery history shows yellow medium signal and voice calls work fine. There is also no runaway process cpu ussage or awake time. The only thing wrong and drawing too much juice is radio. If I toggle airplane mode or toggle wifi off/on the problem is solved for a while. I have VRALF2 firmware.
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I have the same problem. Have went through many sim cards and factory resets. After 5 phone I finally have one that holds the signal a little better and does not go into this "funky mode". With the previous 4 (white 32gig) verizon phone I would burn through a battery in 6 hours at work. It would start with a drop in signal strengh at around -93 or so. Nothing would fix it. I finally got a blue 32gig and it seems to hold the signal to around -99. I don't know if I got a better batch of phones. But it seems to help me get through a day at work.
Scrappy1 said:
Anyone else noticed this? In areas of med to low LTE signal (-109 dBm), there are times when something locks up inside the radio and Signal Strength under Status will never change again no matter where I move the phone. During this funky mode, the battery is dropping rapidly during idle... Maybe 10% per hour. Something is wrong. During this same time android battery history shows yellow medium signal and voice calls work fine. There is also no runaway process cpu ussage or awake time. The only thing wrong and drawing too much juice is radio. If I toggle airplane mode or toggle wifi off/on the problem is solved for a while. I have VRALF2 firmware.
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Click to collapse
That's not normal. Where I work I get 3g primarily but also 4g in the front of the building.....in the far back I get 1x. I have had my phone totally drop data for a while (like the radio sleeps or something) but never had the radio stick between 4g and 3g. I also live right on the edge of a 4g/3g line and my dbm right now is 111 on 4g LTE......If this was normal I would have had the situation your having since my signal is basically identical to yours. I would return it or at the very least contact Samsung. I'm sure Samsung will tell you to send it in for repair.
I have very weak signal at my house also. S3 switches from LTE to 3G and 1X and sometimes loosing signal completely downstairs but upstairs usually I get solid LTE with around -99dBm and ~10Mbps transfers. During this network jumping my battery drains very fast also but I never had my radio constantly locked at one frequency or signal strength. And I can directly compare signal reception to my wife's Fascinate and S3 loses this competition badly. Fascinate never completely lost signal at our house and it rarely jumps to 1X.
I did a factory reset yesterday and so far so good... I''ll update as time goes on.
As far as signal strength goes in general,my wife's Droid Charge always pulls in a few more LTE dBm's than my GS3. Based on general public feedback, GS3 is below average on signal and radio issues. It's too bad because the rest of the phone is above average.
It's been 2 days after the factory reset and no problems with battery drain or radio lock up.
The only app that I could maybe try and blame is Elixir 2's create widget feature for signal strength. This always returned bogus values and may have embedded itself at an unholy level. Simply uninstalling elixir 2 didn't fix it.
If anyone still cares... I found my radio lockup and battery drain issues returned only after I reinstalled Better Battery Stats. I again removed it and will see if I stay good.
Will the phone have a longer battery life if the cell modem is set to 3g vs lte?
Sent from my Nexus 5 using xda app-developers app
Bump
Sent from my Nexus 5 using xda app-developers app
Yes, in my experience with the S4 it's a pretty big difference UNLESS you get a very strong LTE signal. I'm on tmobile and now have the N5 and use the 3G setting which is HSPA/+ Plenty fast for me for what I do. When I want some extra speed I'll kick on the LTE
Does anyone have a more detailed answer for this? I just got this phone yesterday so I haven't been able to find out myself yet, just with 5hour battery life from 100% to 4% on what will only be half of its normal day I'm looking for anything to help right now till I get a battery case. This phone is one of only two to have a LTE radio that is supposed to use 30% less power than usual so I'm wondering if that makes it as efficient if not more than 3G for idle in your pocket to light stuff like FlipBoard.
it would depend on the quality of the data connection. im in brooklyn nyc, and use lte on my nexus 5 exclusively, used to use it on my nexus 4 as well. with 3g(hspa+), on both my n5 and n4, i average about 4-4.5 hours screen on time. when using lte, i average about 5-6 hours screen on time on both my nexus 5 and 4. after noticing this difference, i use exclusively lte on both my devices, as i average an hour more screen on time when using exclusively lte.
herqulees said:
Does anyone have a more detailed answer for this? I just got this phone yesterday so I haven't been able to find out myself yet, just with 5hour battery life from 100% to 4% on what will only be half of its normal day I'm looking for anything to help right now till I get a battery case. This phone is one of only two to have a LTE radio that is supposed to use 30% less power than usual so I'm wondering if that makes it as efficient if not more than 3G for idle in your pocket to light stuff like FlipBoard.
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Serious battery drain can have many reasons. One is having LTE on, syncing on(if you just booted it up, and input your Google account and let all your apps sync and download, its gonna drain your battery fast the first time), having locations on and wifi enabled. If you are in an area with poor reception, your phone will drain more trying to find connection.
Sent from a potato
simms22 said:
it would depend on the quality of the data connection. im in brooklyn nyc, and use lte on my nexus 5 exclusively, used to use it on my nexus 4 as well. with 3g(hspa+), on both my n5 and n4, i average about 4-4.5 hours screen on time. when using lte, i average about 5-6 hours screen on time on both my nexus 5 and 4. after noticing this difference, i use exclusively lte on both my devices, as i average an hour more screen on time when using exclusively lte.
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Thanks for the information. That's what I was wondering but I couldn't find anyone that had already tested this with these new radios. If I get the time this weekend maybe I'll do my own test in detail to compare LTE to 3G. Am thinking of using a TV episode on Netflix and see which makes the battery drop faster over the 30 or so minutes.
Slightly off topic, does anyone's WiFi show as always on in the battery monitor even if its been off? Still trying to figure out my battery drain issue, if it even is an issue with just me, I bought this phone knowing it had a small battery.
herqulees said:
Thanks for the information. That's what I was wondering but I couldn't find anyone that had already tested this with these new radios. If I get the time this weekend maybe I'll do my own test in detail to compare LTE to 3G. Am thinking of using a TV episode on Netflix and see which makes the battery drop faster over the 30 or so minutes.
Slightly off topic, does anyone's WiFi show as always on in the battery monitor even if its been off? Still trying to figure out my battery drain issue, if it even is an issue with just me, I bought this phone knowing it had a small battery.
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go to the main phone settings, wifi, 3 dots on the bottom right, advanced, then disable scanning always available..
ill be interested in seeing your results
simms22 said:
go to the main phone settings, wifi, 3 dots on the bottom right, advanced, then disable scanning always available..
ill be interested in seeing your results
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Seems that's a whole other debate on weather leaving that on or turning it off helps battery life. Apparently if you turn it off then apps that want your location will turn the GPS on and waste battery (looking at you Facebook...), but if you leave it on the phone just tells the app your location from WiFi networks around you.
One thing I didn't think about is I had added my work WiFi yesterday but it wouldn't connect to it, wouldn't tell me why but I'm assuming it's because of bad signal as I'm a valet outside and the WiFi is from a bar across the street so I forgot about it but WiFi was left on with that network saved, my Nexus 7 can connect to it on most days and any laptop has no issues but with this being a phone I guess it doesn't have a big enough antenna. So I'm wondering if now that I deleted that WiFi network, and I always have my phone set to not notify me of public networks, if my battery won't die so fast today.
And now I'm just rambling but I just looked at my screenshot I took yesterday of battery use before plugging in at 4% and WiFi isn't even being shown on top six things that used the battery, lowest one being shown is a Chrome process using 3%.
EDIT: Well off to work now with my phone 100% charged, will have screen 100% (am outside in the sun), BT off, WiFi on (disconnected, no saved networks nearby, open network notifications off, always on during sleep, scanning always available, avoid poor connections, and WiFi optimization), LTE on/connected, NFC off. So lets see how things go. It will have tons of screen on time as all I do at work is read through FlipBoard, then if I run out of things on there I move to FB. Lets see how this goes...
http://www.qualcomm.com/media/docum...envelope-tracking-technology-3g4g-lte-devices
Nexus 5 has it and its doing its job saving battery
Sorry for digging up such an old thread, but with LTE my Nexus 6P, it switches between HSPA and 3G. When turned to 3G, nothing changes. Would that mean I would save battery?
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
Hey guys
I've had this phoen a few weeks, and battery life has been great. Idles well, whether on wifi or 4g....phone idles very well, 2 to 4% per hour.
I recently had my desk moved to an area where cell coverage is BAD. Even on wifi, you can see t he icon go from 3g to 1x, back n forth. signal is weak...but enough to make calls and txt. This is KILLING my battery. I lose 8 to 12% an hour during idling.
Is this normal for phones in dead areas? ANy suggestions?
Thanks
docluv01 said:
Hey guys
I've had this phoen a few weeks, and battery life has been great. Idles well, whether on wifi or 4g....phone idles very well, 2 to 4% per hour.
I recently had my desk moved to an area where cell coverage is BAD. Even on wifi, you can see t he icon go from 3g to 1x, back n forth. signal is weak...but enough to make calls and txt. This is KILLING my battery. I lose 8 to 12% an hour during idling.
Is this normal for phones in dead areas? ANy suggestions?
Thanks
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Click to collapse
Yes, that sounds normal for the conditions you described. Being in an area where the radio is constantly losing signal and having to reconnect is a very large drain on the battery.
Not much you can do unless you get a signal booster installed.
wishfull thinking i geuss, haha
Previous phones, I would just change the network to just 1x. this usually helped...
Thanks!!!
Not to dig up an old thread....but this is gettign worse...
If I get a network extender (provided I can get it to get GPS), will this prevent the phone from constantly looking? or will the phone still search...
Thanks!