Database Info

Battery Life Claims vs. Reality

I stopped by an AT&T corporate store to get a hands on with the Captivate. The salesperson there tried to tell me that the standby time on the device was 15 days if you kept apps from running by downloading an app killer. I asked if he really meant 15 days if no radios were running. He said "nope, 15 days is pretty easy".
Really, folks... what is reality here? Is it similar to other smartphones, where a day with moderate use is reasonable?

There is no way the phone will last 15 days in standby even with a good task killer. How can the sales rep tell you this if he only had the phone in store for 2 days?

That's a very good point... but he was very sure of his claim. I pulled out the "I'm very skeptical" response and walked away. Oh well, looks like once again, truth is in the internets somewhere, not in someone who should know such things.
Another element to this is whether an upgrade to 2.2 will increase battery life. I work away from any ability to charge and really need a phone to hold up all day.

ekruse said:
That's a very good point... but he was very sure of his claim. I pulled out the "I'm very skeptical" response and walked away. Oh well, looks like once again, truth is in the internets somewhere, not in someone who should know such things.
Another element to this is whether an upgrade to 2.2 will increase battery life. I work away from any ability to charge and really need a phone to hold up all day.
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Well, my N1 holds charge for about 1 day with moderate use. As soon as I play with the GPS and google's built in nav system I get maybe 4 hours worth of usage. Another issue I have with my N1 is that my car charger cannot keep up with the drain, so even plugged into the charger the battery percentage is decreasing. Sure hope the Captivate is better in that respect.
Froyo did increase battery life a bit but it is not earth shattering. The advantage of this phone is the larger capacity battery and hopefully a less power hungry samsung processor than the qualcom snapdragon.
I am sure within the next few days we will have some folks with more concrete consumption estimates.

i don't know... while the 15 day claim is a bit much, mine was fine with heavy usage all day yesterday on the half charge that it came with from AT&T... given that, i think that it should last 2-4 days easily with only light-moderate usage.

My battery lasts me all day. It's just marginally worse than my 3GS I think... My 3GS always had extra at the end whereas my Captivate seems to run out when I'm going to bed.
So... It lasts all day. That's really all that matters to me.

My battery has not been able to make it through the day. Don't know why yet. I have my email accounts set to 30 minute sync schedule, have Wi-Fi and bluetooth off. Don't know what is going on. Still researching. Will see how it goes for a week. Might be a bad battery.

i find that dark backgrounds help. Also keep unecessary things off and dl an app killa. I had a new captivate today at 10am and with its half charge and heavy usage it lasted me till 6

by heavy usage i mean constant surfing and dling shiz. I didnt use gps wifi or play a movie. also played that free mario game for bout an hour.

After about 11.5 - 12 hours of very light browsing (maybe like 1/2 hour 3g surfing, no calls, all apps killed with task killer every once in awhile) with Bluetooth and Wifi off I am at 68% left. This is with auto brightness.
I'd say if you don't do anything you might be able to get 3-4 days out of it. According to my battery stats 78% of all my battery usage has been the screen. Keep that thing off / or low brightness and you are going in the right direction.

i bet by standby att means the phone being not used and turned off for like 4 days lol

systoxity said:
i find that dark backgrounds help. Also keep unecessary things off and dl an app killa. I had a new captivate today at 10am and with its half charge and heavy usage it lasted me till 6
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Thanks systoxity, I will try that

systoxity said:
i find that dark backgrounds help. Also keep unecessary things off and dl an app killa. I had a new captivate today at 10am and with its half charge and heavy usage it lasted me till 6
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By dark, he means a background that has a lot of black in it. This is really helpful because the Super AMOLED screen on this phone turns off power to pixels that are black, so basically that part of the screen isn't using any power. A black background is almost like turning the screen off.

magicman0 said:
By dark, he means a background that has a lot of black in it. This is really helpful because the Super AMOLED screen on this phone turns off power to pixels that are black, so basically that part of the screen isn't using any power. A black background is almost like turning the screen off.
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this, thanks for clarifying.
note: it further helps if you apply a static one.

I was able to listen to music for 6 hours at work, show off my phone (I only showed it directly to one co-worker - I had 5 other guys come to check it out after he told them about it lol!), did some light surfing, downloaded a few apps and generally fiddled around with the phone and ended up at 43% battery. Not great, but not terrible either. Screen was the big killer here. GPS and WiFi off except to test Layar.
We'll see if battery life improves, but it enough to make it through one day easily for me. Forget to charge it and it'll be flat early into the next day though. I'm a bit disappointed, considering benchmarks on the Galaxy S came up with nearly 8 hours of constant video playback. I think they had brightness at 50% and I kept setting mine to max to show off the screen and then forgetting to set it back, so that could be part of it. I was definitely expecting more though. I'm clearly not the most demanding user here, so I was hoping to potentially eek out two days of usage (just in case I forget to charge it).
One of the reasons I went with the Captivate instead of waiting for the Epic is that the form factor seems to be a bit more amenable to adding an extended battery. Hopefully we'll start to see some 2500mAh or even 3Ah batteries show up - even if it means getting a new backcover. THAT should just about do it

anosis said:
Well, my N1 holds charge for about 1 day with moderate use. As soon as I play with the GPS and google's built in nav system I get maybe 4 hours worth of usage. Another issue I have with my N1 is that my car charger cannot keep up with the drain, so even plugged into the charger the battery percentage is decreasing. Sure hope the Captivate is better in that respect.
Froyo did increase battery life a bit but it is not earth shattering. The advantage of this phone is the larger capacity battery and hopefully a less power hungry samsung processor than the qualcom snapdragon.
I am sure within the next few days we will have some folks with more concrete consumption estimates.
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Click to collapse
Also the Super AMOLED Screen sucks alot less Juice as well...
My friend has the Vibrant and has had it for about 4 days. He is a power-user like me, and he said with his task killer, he can run the phone for 2 days on a full charge. This is outstanding for a smart phone... I ordered my Captivate today, should be here on Wednesday so I'll also put this to the test!

better battery life is coming once devs hop aboard. Also, your phone will need training over the next few days so it can only get better from here for you. I also recommend just leaving brightness on auto detect. You wont have to play with it as much and forget it on super bright.
Some more tips:
idk if you guys like haptic feedback but i think its annoying as all hell. Turn it off to save an iota of battery.
Also tone responses for menu clicks? ANNOYINNGG turn that shiz off for a squirt of juice.
Lastly, unless you live by your email, turn sync off and only sync manually when ur curious about it.

I wonder about some of the widgets. I have Weather And Toggle Widget (which I prefer over Beautiful Widget), and have it set to update the weather every 30 minutes. Wonder if that's too often. The weather in Iowa can be very unpredictable and change quickly, but I'm inside all day so it doesn't really matter. I guess it's just eye-candy mostly.
I also wonder how WATW compares to BW in terms of battery consumption.
I turned haptic off (I agree, it was annoying). I turned the tones off, though I doubt that will affect battery life. I wish I could keep the tones for dialer and kill it for the keyboard.
EDIT: I keep reading about this idea that you train your battery (or device) to your usage, but I'm not sure that I understand/buy it. I could see perhaps something to do with the memory effect if these batteries are susceptible to it, but this idea of "training" it strikes me as very odd. Does Android have some kind of battery optimization algorithm that adjusts services based on your usage or something?

from what i understand, calculating battery life is like a guessing game. calibrating your device by letting it drain out and then fully charging it and draining it out again completely gives your phone an idea of just how long it can last on a single charge. Until you do a few cycles like this it will incorrectly display batter life percentage giving the user a false sense of security or panic. There may be more to it that has to do with the actual battery itself but idk the rest of the details.
and 30 min updates is a bit much lol. u should update like once a day and manually refresh if you need to know b4 u go out.

I'm getting very good battery life on my phone. As good as any iphone I've had and better than any of my windows mobile phones before that. I don't have any widgets constantly pulling down data though and only have my google account syncing contacts and calendars and an exchange account running.

Samsung Captivate on the Quest for the Greatest Battery Life!

I'd love to hear how people are finding the battery life on the Captivate, and what their usage patterns are. I don't have many apps on the phone to begin with, but on the train to work I can easily knock out a third of the battery just listening to music. While using the phone for five or ten minutes, I'll sometimes see the battery dop 2-3 percent!
For tomorrow, I'm going to try using the stock launcher instead of LauncherPro, no widgets. I got rid of the Android Central app just in case it was fetching data in the background. But my hopes aren't terribly high, I'm afraid.
I have rooted the phone, but the battery life was bad before rooting. Once rooted, I tried some apps like JuiceDefender, and there seemed to be no change.
If I continue having these problems, I may unroot and bring the phone to an AT&T store to see what they say. I've heard it mentioned that Samsung is sending out new batteries that are better than some current ones, but I don't know if that's true.
I'd love to hear any suggestions. I want to use my new phone, not worry about it all day!

I too have been getting very poor results. I have talked on the phone for less than 3 minutes, went to maybe 15 different website pages, one 3:00 youtube video, 10 minutes of GBC emulation gaming, and regular texting, and I'm at 10% with 8 hours. I've probably only used the phone for 30 minutes total today.

Smartphones always drain battery, if you want a phone that can be heavily used for like 4 or more days on one charge cycle, get a feature phone....the samsung captivate has given me the best battery time overall, against all my past smartphones.

I don't think it makes sense, though, that it should run out halfway through the day like mine is. My former devices were a feature phone and an iPod Touch. The feature phone lasted a week or so, and the iPod Touch with heavy heavy use lasted three days at least. So even if I had both pulling from the same battery source, and with light usage, shouldn't it last at least a full day?

Weird, I had wireless on almost all day, with push mail and doing tons of market downloading and I was only down to about 50% by early afternoon.
Seems about the same as my two year old HTC Touch Pro to me.

My battery is running fine too, even after streaming music from my house with subsonic, testing out a couple videos, messing with the gps, push email a bunch of app downloading, and a live wallpaper and i was still at 33% by the time I got home, even seems to be getting better.

"On the train to work..."
There's a bit of your problem, methinks. The 3G radio is burning a lot of power trying to connect to towers inside a metal box that moves to a new tower on a regular basis. Unless you need to get calls on the train, put it in Airplane mode during your commute.
Have you actually let the battery die completely yet?
My first battery burn-down, (starting with the charge on the battery as it was unboxed) I was showing zero percent battery for almost two hours before it actually shut itself off, moderate usage with WiFi on.
The next charge-up burn-down, it was showing zero percent about fifteen minutes before the end.
And the charge-up burn-down after that, it showed 0% about twenty seconds before it died.
See where I'm going here? The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.

Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.

smitty1 said:
Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.
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Yea I had one for two weeks and it was horrid. I would lose 6% just in standby time in between waking up and getting out the door to work in the morning!
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

I've had great results with the battery and I find it to be much better than my HD2. I watch quite a bit of youtube, text message a lot, and browse the web and the market on and off, not to mention all the time my wife plays solitaire, and I still have 30% battery at an uptime of 41:46. I don't use gps or live wallpapers, and I keep my display as low as possible, since it is still bright.

Bit better by the end of the day. 13 hours and 15 minutes

Croak said:
The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.
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+1
Definitely agree with the last part. I've been doing my best to kill it, but I don't want it to be dead. Been noticing the inaccuracy of the meter quite a bit, especially when it's charging, but I'm sure it'll get better over time.

Thanks for the informative replies! It hadn't occurred to me that the battery meter might be uncalibrated - I've been charging once it reached 10% or so. I'll try letting it die fully today.
One thing that seems to have helped, too, is the brightness settings. Turning OFF the "power saving" auto adjust ing brightness option allows the brightness to stay low, and a brightness control widget lets me set it lower than stock controls allow. I've seen some definite improbement from this alone!

These are Li-ion batteries, DO NOT let them die completely before charging.

Ok, so...is there a safer way to make sure the battery gets calibrated? I'm reading in a lot of places that Android phones fairly often misreport battery info unless calibrated.

The lowest I can get on battery status is 60% after a full days use. Admittedly I'm not a power user but I had my phone unplugged for 16 hrs and still had 95% I'd like to know what you have to do to get such low battery levels , start your car

All I've done today is listen to music for an hour (used 25%) and texted/browsed the web for perhaps two hours (another 5/% down.)
I read that LIons can be occasiomally discharged, since they have undercurrent protection circuits. One guide for Android phones suggested leaving the phone on until it shuts itself down, turning it on again, and then letting it shut itself down again. Then, with the phone off, charge fully. The guide said once a month or do is safe and beneficial. How does it sound?

Battery is good today. Been sending a few texts, checked email, facebook, and surfed these forums a bit. I'm at 2 hours with 98% battery left.

i hope the battery doesnt suck, i plan on getting this phone soon and want good batt life!!!

tysj said:
These are Li-ion batteries, DO NOT let them die completely before charging.
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I agree with you, however, the phone's hardware will NOT let the battery completely die.
So I wouldn't worry about that all to much.
Basically though, Li-ion batteries are 'memory' free so they can be recharged on a whim partially.
They also prefer partial charges vs deep charges.
There are questions about this that I don't have answers for such as: When the phone displays 0% or shuts off due to low battery, how LOW is the battery?
Obviously the phone battery can't be dead dead, but it is low enough for the hardware to take precautions.
Anyway Li-ions will at max last 500 charges.. If you want it more than that, You're going to have to buy a new battery anyway. =)

The Battery Life ROCKS

So, I flashed Black Dragon 4.0 last night, and I gotta say, the battery life is pretty incredible. I've used it a good bit this morning for texting, a call, and a music app, and I've barely gone 15%. The idle life is what's truly impressive. I think it dropped only 1% overnight (8 hrs).
Even WITH sense, it's still pretty good. But it's nice to have all those useless HTC and T-Mobile services/apps gone. It definitely makes a bit of difference on performance and batt life.

Is there anything broken on that ROM or is everything up and running? GPS, Camera, gallery, etc etc.

i'm on the stock batter, it's 3 here, i've used it regularly, texts, calls, internet, maps, and i'm at 76%. it's so nice having a battery that lasts

One of the advantages of having a non-user-replaceable battery is the fact that they can make them bigger and in different shapes. Apple's laptops are this way, and when they made the switch, the increase in batt life was pretty drastic.
It'll be interesting to see this thing taken apart on iFixIt or somewhere else.

Is there a way to know if the battery is done charging with the phone off? The orange LED just seems to stay on forever...

I would suggest it hasn't fully charged or there is a fault - I charge mine overnight and it's always green in the morning
Mitigation - I never switch it off: screen off, phone on.

SFP said:
I would suggest it hasn't fully charged or there is a fault - I charge mine overnight and it's always green in the morning
Mitigation - I never switch it off: screen off, phone on.
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Literally 5 minutes after I posted that, it went green. First time it's had a proper full charge, when I tried to charge it while on the battery meter just fluctuated up and down all over the place! Gonna let it run down and charge it again before I get worried that there's something wrong.

I got mine from T-Mo yesterday on my way to school and i must say the battery life on this phone is crazy good. After my second charge cycle, i really think this phone was design for raw power and most of all great battery life. I'm also enjoying the beauty this piece of equipment. . Right now i have the screen on auto-brightness, gmail, yahooo, hotmail, facebook, dropbox and weather on auto sync. I'll say no more results in the pictures below.

cyberchuck9000 said:
Is there a way to know if the battery is done charging with the phone off? The orange LED just seems to stay on forever...
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yup, def turns green after its full

NYC1992 said:
I got mine from T-Mo yesterday on my way to school and i must say the battery life on this phone is crazy good. After my second charge cycle, i really think this phone was design for raw power and most of all great battery life. I'm also enjoying the beauty this piece of equipment. . Right now i have the screen on auto-brightness, gmail, yahooo, hotmail, facebook, dropbox and weather on auto sync. I'll say no more results in the pictures below.
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Not sure which phone you've been using but the stats that you've posted aren't impressive in the least... pretty bad if u ask me.

viper_79 said:
Not sure which phone you've been using but the stats that you've posted aren't impressive in the least... pretty bad if u ask me.
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I'd tend to agree with this. I'm sure you meant well with the pictures, but my Nexus S beats this and the battery in it is old. I don't think that was a great metric right there. My real world use has been drastically different.
I was going to post a pic, but my ROM crashed or something (no biggie, it's expected with new ROMs) and my battery usage got reset. I took it off the charger ~10 hrs ago and have used it for quite a bit of twitter, text, calls, web, and fiddling around, and I'm just down to 73%. The stand-by life is what will truly impress you, at least from what I've seen.

The screenshots seem very impressive to me. I have an HTC Amaze with the 1900 mah Anker battery and I'll get around 2 hours of on screen time. And the One S is getting almost four!? If anyone is getting better then that I would love to see screenies of it. Only screen on time though as I could get very high numbers as well by not using my phone. Can't wait till my One S gets here!

Love this phone...S4 ftw

Yesterday I got.
12 hours and 50 min with 2 hours and 40 minutes screen time and I still had 41% left.

Off topic: didn't want to make a new thread, and I've searched but nothing found.
I'm really considering this phone but when the battery reaches the end of its life how much will a replacement battery be likely to cost fitted?
I know I'll probably have a new phone by this time but I keep all my electronic devices well looked after and don't sell them so just curious as it seems like a pretty deep task.

let's talk battery..

so as it may be known, i came from an iPhone 4S and traded that for an HTC One X, i've had it for a little over a week and i really like it a lot BUT (you knew that was coming i think..) the battery is below par, i get about 3, on a real good day 4 hours of usage from a full charge. i only auto sync mail, screen is on 25% (also tried auto for a few days), when at home it's connected to WiFi, data off and when i go out the other way around, GPS and Bluetooth are off at all times. the main thing i do on my device is Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Instagram, + some light browsing the Internet. i understand the screen and processor take quite some battery but it's not cool to only be able to use the device about 3-4 hours before running empty. emailed the guy i traded with and he said he got about 7hrs, which would be awesome after dealing with 3-4 ;}
i am using Nova Launcher Prime, but prior to that when i ran Sense the battery was about the same. may just revert to stock to see how that will affect the battery, even though i will miss my widgets and setup. i also emailed HTC and was considering going to AT&T but since i traded the device i doubt they'll be much help.
what do you guys get... and what if anything did you do to improve it ?
thanks.

How much screen on time? 4 hours is nuts. I easily got 24 hours on stock, with light usage, maybe even a day and a half. The 2.2X versions firmwares seem to get better battery life. Just this morning I had just under 50% battery left after 24 hours, with 1 hour screen on time.
If screen brightness in on "Auto" turn that off, and set it to something like 40-50%. That should save you some, but doesn't account the type of battery drain you are talking about.
Might be some runaway processes. Or any possibility you are in a fringe LTE area?

on screen time is what i was reporting, round about 4 hours -which yea is pretty horrible i'd say. i even have the screen brightness lower; 25%. checked the processes and for what i know nothing out of the ordinary, but i'm a novice Android user so.. prior to yesterday i only used 4G when out, so at home i stayed on WiFi.
battery stats now:
- 76%
- 5h 8m 54s on battery
- screen on 59m 28s

Screen on time of 4 hours very normal, and its good for a smartphone. Everyone uses their phone differently, of course. But 4 hours of screen time gets most people through a day, and charge overnight. What type of screen on time did you get with the iPhone?

roeiboot said:
on screen time is what i was reporting, round about 4 hours -which yea is pretty horrible i'd say. i even have the screen brightness lower; 25%. checked the processes and for what i know nothing out of the ordinary, but i'm a novice Android user so.. prior to yesterday i only used 4G when out, so at home i stayed on WiFi.
battery stats now:
- 76%
- 5h 8m 54s on battery
- screen on 59m 28s
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Click to collapse
Your stats are very normal for this phone model. The One XL screen is gigantic, but isn't AMOLED and as such uses much more battery life to power than some other Android devices. I get ~3 hours of screen on time in a days use of battery, and that is about 10-15 hours away from a charger. From what I can gather of your usage, if you are looking to extend your battery life, the only thing to do is leave the screen off more.
Do you flash custom ROMs? If so, try a custom kernel that allows you to change the CPU governor and clock speeds. The processor in the One XL maxes out at 1.5GHz by default, but you can underclock it to 1.2GHz with no noticeable detriment to performance. Also you can set the minimum frequency to an even lower clock speed, which allows the phone to use even less power when idling. Finally, make sure that the CPU governor is set to Ondemand. Powersave actually doesn't save as much power as you would think!

my favorite part was when he compared a tiny 3.5" screen to a 4.7" screen and expected the same battery life, even though it is roughly the same

Firstly, 4 hours screen on time isn't bad at all. I'm sorry your only reference is an iPhone.
To get 6+ hours of onscreen time with this phone like I and many others get you will need to do two things. Firstly, flash a custom ROM. CleanROM 4.5 is a good one that's as close to stock as you're gonna get. The second thing you need to do is turn off auto brightness. Leave the brightness set at 35% - 40%. This will improve battery life immensely. And no, 40% brightness is not dim.
Happy flashing!

10-12 hours up
5hrs 15mins screen on
Everything synced
Sent from my HTC One X

redpoint73 said:
Screen on time of 4 hours very normal, and its good for a smartphone. Everyone uses their phone differently, of course. But 4 hours of screen time gets most people through a day, and charge overnight. What type of screen on time did you get with the iPhone?
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Click to collapse
with my iPhone (GPS on always, WiFi always, screen on about 70-80%) i got an average of 6 hours with peaks of 7. 4 hours with the HTC One X is on a good day.

i did not flash a ROM since i can not unlock the phone (yet). where i compared, referred to the iPhone is based upon the previous owner who said he usually got 6-7 hours on screen per day. it's uncool that people not live by the rule if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say nothing... i'm only trying to get some help here (luckily most members are helpful... i'll try and ignore the others) and my other reference would be a BB Storm, which lasted very long, but the device wasn't very exciting
i'm following the thread where rooting is discussed but i believe there's little progress. AT&T is also not pushing Sense 4.1 (yet, mine has 4.0) and ICS 4.0.4.
just spoke with HTC and they agree it's too short and are willing to exchange battery... downside i would be w/o a phone for 7-10 business days. might swing by AT&T and discuss, "issue" is i was not the original buyer.. he (HTC rep) stated they might give you a loaner (i doubt it..) we shall see.
thanks to those with positive feedback.

so far..
click here for today's results --16% left.. slightly over 3hr on screen time.

roeiboot said:
just spoke with HTC and they agree it's too short and are willing to exchange battery...
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It really depends on how you use your phone, and not all screen-on time is the same. 4 Hours is screen time is pretty good, and pretty on par with what other users on here have observed. The phone is new to you, so I bet you are using it like crazy. If that use includes a lot of internet, playing video, or games, its going to use more battery than some other activities. I don't know if a replacment is going to make you any happier.
You also have to consider, aside from a much larger screen, its also much higher resolution than the iPhone. Pushing all those pixels by the GPU takes power. The CPU is also much faster than the iPhone (and just about any other smartphone except the Galaxy S3), again using more power. Screen time may be less, but its doing so much more in that time.

4 hours, if I made would be somewhat acceptable, yesterday I had a little more then 3. I do not play game, I manly do social media & a little surfing..
Sent from my HTC One X using XDA Premium HD app

my battery would last over 24hrs until the OTA 2.20 update now im lucky to get 12hrs out of it. Did they change something in the update?

leighton1245 said:
my battery would last over 24hrs until the OTA 2.20 update now im lucky to get 12hrs out of it. Did they change something in the update?
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The 2.20 OTA has an new radio. So its possible that the new radio happens to result in worse reception (and therefore battery life) than the previous one. Newer radios do not always get better results for all people, as its very geographically dependent.

redpoint73 said:
The 2.20 OTA has an new radio. So its possible that the new radio happens to result in worse reception (and therefore battery life) than the previous one. Newer radios do not always get better results for all people, as its very geographically dependent.
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Click to collapse
Thank you for the reply and yes the radio looked like it was a new one and in PA i dont get that great of service everywhere.

Yeah, 4 hours of screen on time is normal so I definitely don't think you have any sort of defect. Signal strength also has a lot of impact on battery life. Keep brightness as low as possible while still being comfortable to your eyes (battery life isn't worth putting extra strain on your eyes). I use an app called display brightness that allows you to change brightness by swiping across the statusbar. I keep mine at the lowest level and just swipe a bit to increase it when I need it and then swipe it back down when I'm done. A custom rom could help some. If nothing else, root so that you can use something like better battery stats to give you more info on what's happening behind the scenes so you can make some adjustments. Although I'm not one to push using this, you might want to install something like juice defender to see if it helps. Verify you don't have some app running in the background unnecessarily chewing up cpu use. Note though that just because an app is running in the background doesn't mean you should kill it. As long as it's not doing anything, it's better for it to be running than to have to load it up (especially if it's an app you use frequently). A couple of other things to verify, don't use push notifications / syncing (I keep background syncing off a manually sync (well, I use Tasker to sync things at different times of the day)). If you can, use wifi. If wifi isn't available, turn it off. Also make sure wifi notifications are off and that you aren't using 'best wifi performance' (both under wifi advanced settings).
I'm sure there are some others I missed but hopefully these help and at least give you a starting place. No matter what though, enjoy your device and don't obsess too much with the battery. Once you've gotten over the 'new toy' syndrome, you should get a days use out of it. I pretty much take mine off charge in the morning and put it on charge before going to bed with around 30‰ left. Sometimes more, sometimes less. 3-4 hours average of screen on time, 30-60 minutes of calling.
Sent from my One X

^^^^Thanks for the tip on that brightness app. Very impressed.
Sent from my HTC One X using XDA Premium HD. In between Force Clo...

Vendetta-NY said:
^^^^Thanks for the tip on that brightness app. Very impressed.
Sent from my HTC One X using XDA Premium HD. In between Force Clo...
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Np. Been using it since early on and it continues to improve. One of those handy must have apps.
Sent from my One X

update.
went to the AT&T Device Center (did not know it existed until the regular AT&T store told me about it...) they played with my phone and concluded that the battery was draining too fast while using it, so w/o discussion they exchanged it.
got a follow up question since AT&T did not know, with the iPhones i would let them drain all the way down at least and then fully recharge and leave it on the charger for an extra 2 hours after it being 100%, i *think* that helped condition the battery.. anything you guys can suggest anything for me to to now that i have a new device to maybe improve/condition the battery ?
thanks.

[Q] Awful battery life - just me?

I got my Nexus 5 on Monday and have been pretty happy with it so far. Today was the first day I actually had to be away from WiFi for the day and the battery life has stunned me with how poor it has been. I haven't seen battery drop so fast since I had my Desire HD. I took it off charge about 9am and at just after 8pm as I type this I'm down to 10% with under 2 hours screen on time. 100% to 10% in around 10 hours with less than 2 hours screen use.
Has anyone else had this poor battery life? I'm going to let it run down completely, install GSam and see if it happens again but from what I've read on a few reviews (The Verge was the main one) this seems to be almost normal. I would be unhappy with battery life this bad after two years, not two days.

Dyonas said:
I got my Nexus 5 on Monday and have been pretty happy with it so far. Today was the first day I actually had to be away from WiFi for the day and the battery life has stunned me with how poor it has been. I haven't seen battery drop so fast since I had my Desire HD. I took it off charge about 9am and at just after 8pm as I type this I'm down to 10% with under 2 hours screen on time. 100% to 10% in around 10 hours with less than 2 hours screen use.
Has anyone else had this poor battery life? I'm going to let it run down completely, install GSam and see if it happens again but from what I've read on a few reviews (The Verge was the main one) this seems to be almost normal. I would be unhappy with battery life this bad after two years, not two days.
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The good battery apps like BBS are broken on KitKat.
But your battery life is not normal. Mine is quite good, about what I would expect. For reference, my GS3 would use 0.2-0.4% per hour while idling during the night. I can't get real numbers or monitor wakelocks on this phone yet. But so far, seems at least somewhat similar to that.
Use Greenify.

Dyonas said:
I got my Nexus 5 on Monday and have been pretty happy with it so far. Today was the first day I actually had to be away from WiFi for the day and the battery life has stunned me with how poor it has been. I haven't seen battery drop so fast since I had my Desire HD. I took it off charge about 9am and at just after 8pm as I type this I'm down to 10% with under 2 hours screen on time. 100% to 10% in around 10 hours with less than 2 hours screen use.
Has anyone else had this poor battery life? I'm going to let it run down completely, install GSam and see if it happens again but from what I've read on a few reviews (The Verge was the main one) this seems to be almost normal. I would be unhappy with battery life this bad after two years, not two days.
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Click to collapse
We can't really answer about your phone without knowing your usage habits. I mean, what you posted doesnt seem bad, especially if you're in a crappy signal area or play games.

my battery has been around 20% better than on the N4
Sent from my Nexus 5 using xda app-developers app

Coming from an iPhone 4, I am shocked by how much faster Android is sipping on the juice.On my iPhone, I would probably be around 70% 7 hours into the day, my N5 is at 50%.

47% after 11 hrs for me

thfreedumb said:
We can't really answer about your phone without knowing your usage habits. I mean, what you posted doesnt seem bad, especially if you're in a crappy signal area or play games.
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A brief summary of my brief usage. I haven't played any games at all since I got the phone and the only usage has been social network apps and very light browsing of around <20 minutes. Oh and I made a call that lasted around 15 seconds. Everything else is stock setup. I have unlocked the bootloader but I did that prior to setting it up due to it wiping everything in the process.
Basically I've used it as much as I'd use my Nexus 4 and that wouldn't see so much as a 30% drain by now. The only thing that I am looking at as a possible cause is that the phone defaults to wanting 4G only. I'm not on a 4G plan or in a 4G area but even with that Mobile Standby is only showing 4% battery use. Suffice to say I switched that to 3G when I saw it just before posting. As I said, I'm going to drain it completely then charge to full and watch it very closely but I wanted to get thoughts while I waited.
I have contacted Google to see if there are any known issues that have popped up but the response I got just suggests turning off practically everything! Why would I opt for a powerful phone just to turn off sync, location services and anything that makes it a smartphone? The baffling one to me is suggesting I switch to AIRPLANE mode if I'm not near WiFi! I didn't buy a WiFi only tablet, I bought a phone!
"If you know you won’t be near a mobile or Wi-Fi network for a while, switch to Airplane mode"

I have been very pleasantly surprised with the battery life with my Nexus 5, I have noticed however that Google Location service likes to use battery power, more importantly - GPS - way too much..
However, I leave it on and even still it easily lasts me a day of use, with around 30-40% left depending on how much I use it.
What are your highest apps in the battery use screen?
Try turning off Google location services.

I am really pleased with battery life. Around 30-40 % left at end of day.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

Just you.all stock and battery life is way better than galaxy s4.

LaurenceGough said:
I have been very pleasantly surprised with the battery life with my Nexus 5, I have noticed however that Google Location service likes to use battery power, more importantly - GPS - way too much..
However, I leave it on and even still it easily lasts me a day of use, with around 30-40% left depending on how much I use it.
What are your highest apps in the battery use screen?
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Click to collapse
I saw similar with the Nexus 4 but refused to switch off location services and it seems ok. I've attached screenshots just taken. It seems I was a little off with my browsing estimate which shows 36 minutes in Chrome but still hardly astronomical.

OK so far the general opinion seems to be that it's just me. That helps me eliminate the phone and / or battery just being awful so thanks guys.

I'm at near 11 hours and am at 69%.. with an hour screen time. Not great but it easily gets me through the day. By the time I plug it in tonight it will probably have 20-30% and 3 maybe 4 hours of OST. That's more than enough for me
I should mention I have location off.. and only turn it on if I'm going to use the GPS
I also have Google Now off I don't need those flash cards to tell me how long it's going to take me to get home.. it's useful sometimes but I rarely look at em.
I'm pleased with my battery so far.. for the super heavy user they definitely wouldn't get a day.. but for me I'll get it easily.

its been pretty terrible for me with identical setups as other devices.
it has me seriously contemplating going back to my htc one. overall i do love the phone tho so hopefully I get a better idea when betterbatterystats is updated.
Few things with battery thats annoying me is google services kill this phone worse than any other ive owned. Even with google now disabled and location disabled. Also my daily drive to work I always use waze w/ screen on. With my other phones (htc one / n4 / iphone 5) i generally lose between 10-15% battery. On this phone im easily losing 25%.
I have access to charging so not a huge deal for now. Its a new os update so maybe it will get ironed out.

garyHal said:
Coming from an iPhone 4, I am shocked by how much faster Android is sipping on the juice.On my iPhone, I would probably be around 70% 7 hours into the day, my N5 is at 50%.
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you are forgetting you are having a full HD and quad core phone now.

Ahh you got that google services bug eh.. that will kill any battery

Despite not wanting to I did a factory reset and installed a handful of apps, nothing that should cause issues anyway. When I got to Twitter though just after installing I noticed two warning notifications crop up that I remember just dismissing without thinking last time.
com.google.android.gsf.login
com.google.android.calendar
Both state they need installation of Google Play Services. I've ignored them for now so it'll be interesting to see if they have anything to do with it. I know the screen is going to be using more battery than I'm used to when it's on and notice that in battery use it's just everything else.
Friday will be the ultimate test of sorts. I've disabled WiFi, I'm charging it up and have disabled a few location things I don't care about. If it goes down hard again then it's going back.

thegtfusion said:
you are forgetting you are having a full HD and quad core phone now.
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And a MUCH larger battery

My battery life over the last 3 days on the N5 has been equal to and a little bit better than my GS4 I've had since launch. Very pleased

Dyonas said:
OK so far the general opinion seems to be that it's just me. That helps me eliminate the phone and / or battery just being awful so thanks guys.
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I don't think what you're getting is that out of the ordinary. Between screen time and cell reception (the largest contributors to battery life) you could easily be seeing 'normal' battery life.
Don't expect more than 3.5 hrs of screen time, especially if you have reception issues when not on WIFI. And I'm talking 'normal' computer/dev/IT guy usage (e.g. using the phone as it's intended aka using google now, using one or two emails with push sync, using music services occasionally and sparingly during a day, NOT running in airplane mode, not disabling a crapload of smartphone features).