-------Nexus 4 Battery Life (Horrible, Major drainage!)-------

[darthus]

Yeah Dirk, that's pretty bad. Can you post the details of Gmail? Your screentime wasn't very high, and your App Usage was 71% which is pretty dang high. Gmail was significantly higher than everything else, so I'm wondering what's going on there. Looks like Google Services and Maps have dropped down to more reasonable levels. You do have 4.5 hours of held awake time, which is also high. Are you on Wifi for the most of the day or on Phone? I see 9 hours of phone use vs 1 hour of wifi. Which if the phone is sucking down data for most of the day with bad signal, could be part of the culprit. With the new wifi efficiency settings, the phone has super slow drain for me no matter what I'm doing as long as I'm on wifi.

Just as reference, your average battery life is 11 hours, mine in GSam is 16.5.

 

[DirkBelig]

I'm beginning to wonder if the case of the wildly divergent amounts of use different people are getting is due to wildly divergent levels in battery quality. My GS2 started having terrible battery life - getting about 5-6 hours when it used to get 10-12 hours (Trudge's crap data network often kept it starving for connection) - and I couldn't spot what was draining it. Since rechargeable batteries eventually wear out, I suspected it was getting tired even though it was only a year old. (The Dell laptops at my work are warrantied for 3 years, but the batteries are only for one year.) I bought an Anker battery from Amazon for $10 and I was back in business.

Now due to the sealed nature of the N4, we can't swap out batteries and that makes me wonder if some are higher capacity than others. To analogize with cars, perhaps our problem isn't that some are getting better mileage than others but some have bigger gas tanks. If your car gets 20 mpg, but you only have a 10 gallon tank, you'll go half as far as someone with a 20 gallon tank. We're supposed to have 2100 mAh batteries, but what guarantees they're actually that large? I'm not saying LG is putting smaller cells in - all it takes is one guy with a screwdriver to set off a class action lawsuit - but what if they got some dodgy units from their supplier. It happens with Dells a LOT - the Optiplex 790s we've been deploying at my work have power supplies dropping like flies; the GX270 was prone to capacitors that burst - so it's not outside the realm of possibility.

I just went for a quick half-hour walk using My Tracks and it sucked down 12% of the battery in the 40 minutes which is crazy, even for an app which is constantly polling the GPS. I've loaded Battery Monitor Widget to see what it reports for capacity.

 

[DirkBelig]

Yeah Dirk, that's pretty bad. Can you post the details of Gmail? Your screentime wasn't very high, and your App Usage was 71% which is pretty dang high. Gmail was significantly higher than everything else, so I'm wondering what's going on there. Looks like Google Services and Maps have dropped down to more reasonable levels. You do have 4.5 hours of held awake time, which is also high. Are you on Wifi for the most of the day or on Phone? I see 9 hours of phone use vs 1 hour of wifi. Which if the phone is sucking down data for most of the day with bad signal, could be part of the culprit. With the new wifi efficiency settings, the phone has super slow drain for me no matter what I'm doing as long as I'm on wifi.

Just as reference, your average battery life is 11 hours, mine in GSam is 16.5.

I already charged it up, so I can't give the specifics. I was just getting home and dinner was on and I wanted to snap a couple of screens to post before it died.

At work there is no open wi-fi, but I've got 3-4 bars; Trudge gave me 1-2 at best and data speeds 1/50th of what AT&T is delivering. At home, the other night when it bled out 90% in 8 hours while I slept, it was on wi-fi and I had full bars. I noticed after that the setting to be on while sleeping was set to Always instead of Only When Plugged In, so I fixed that. Wi-Fi Optimization is on.

Tonight I'm going to see what happens without putting it into Airplane mode. Last night it only lost 2%, so that's a given. I want to see what it does without a home screen time/weather widget, just the stock digital clock widget. It will be about 6 hours between unplugging and when I get up and my GS2 usually lost 15% or so in that amount of time. I'm on wi-fi at my g/f's place and 4 bars phone signal. Stay tuned.

 

[DirkBelig]

Here are the overnight results:

Something's waking it up, firing up the wi-fi, and killing the battery. As if that wasn't bad enough, I used the Navigation to get to work in the hopes that stupid Google Now would think of adding a work commute card to the deck, and look at what a half-hour of nav use did:

Yep. 30% of the battery guzzled in a half-hour. This. Is. Nuts. I am getting so disillusioned by my phone.

 

[peejay1977]

I too am unable to pinpoint whats going on, my device is rooted, but I have no active widgets, no active wallpaper, sync is turned off as soon as I leave the house but WIFI is left on (for location accuracy), minimal use during the day, 1 short phone call (under 2 mins) and very light email/web usage NOTHING else.

I have also turned off all the Google Now stuff and changed every app that I can think of so that it doesn't do updates every hour or whatever in the hope it might sort it out.





I really do love my phone, but I can't go on like this.

 

[ryanr509]

I too am unable to pinpoint whats going on, my device is rooted, but I have no active widgets, no active wallpaper, sync is turned off as soon as I leave the house but WIFI is left on (for location accuracy), minimal use during the day, 1 short phone call (under 2 mins) and very light email/web usage NOTHING else.

I have also turned off all the Google Now stuff and changed every app that I can think of so that it doesn't do updates every hour or whatever in the hope it might sort it out.

View attachment 49470
View attachment 49471


I really do love my phone, but I can't go on like this.

If your signal is always 0-1 bar like in those pics then that will eat your battery fast.

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[ryanr509]

Here are the overnight results:
View attachment 49459 View attachment 49458View attachment 49454 View attachment 49455 View attachment 49456 View attachment 49457
Something's waking it up, firing up the wi-fi, and killing the battery. As if that wasn't bad enough, I used the Navigation to get to work in the hopes that stupid Google Now would think of adding a work commute card to the deck, and look at what a half-hour of nav use did:
View attachment 49453
Yep. 30% of the battery guzzled in a half-hour. This. Is. Nuts. I am getting so disillusioned by my phone.

Ya u definitely have some wake lock issues there and that is your problem. Also its best if u have the wifi set to never sleep because that means even when the screen is off that it is still connected to wifi. And wifi is better on battery than 3g or 4g

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[ryanr509]

I have a galaxy note but tonight I will charge to 100% and leave off the charger when I go to sleep and see what gsam and the battery drain look like when I wake up. It might give some info

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[KwietStorm]

With all the theories, suspicions, hypotheses, pictures and other crap, has a single person contacted Google about any of it? Or is it just look at this oh but look at this hey look at that! Has anyone linked any of this to 4.2? Is anyone going a step further than obsessing over the surface value of the battery drain?

 

[DirkBelig]

I'm going to call Google tonight and request a replacement tonight. I am at 22% battery after only 6:36 with 1:31 screen on time, wi-fi off, static wallpaper. Based on my drive in, I am certain that using nav on the way home will flatten the battery. Every day I get less and less and less time. It's a lemon. Boo. The microphone is very muddy as well.

 

[austriak]

I too am unable to pinpoint whats going on, my device is rooted, but I have no active widgets, no active wallpaper, sync is turned off as soon as I leave the house but WIFI is left on (for location accuracy), minimal use during the day, 1 short phone call (under 2 mins) and very light email/web usage NOTHING else.

I have also turned off all the Google Now stuff and changed every app that I can think of so that it doesn't do updates every hour or whatever in the hope it might sort it out.

View attachment 49470
View attachment 49471


I really do love my phone, but I can't go on like this.

Wifi is not going to give you any location accuracy unless it is connected. All you are doing is burning battery by having your wifi constantly look for a network.

 

[peejay1977]

Having WiFi on DOES improve location accuracy I was reading about it earlier as like you I was adamant it couldn't unless connected but it uses an ever evolving database of router Mac addresses to help with location. On my iPhone it regularly would fail to find me if WiFi was off, with it on bang first time.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

 

[peejay1977]

I've just unrooted my phone, relocked the boot loader and reflashed with the full 4.2.1 image. So far updates from the Play Store actually auto install which they didn't previously but nothing else noticed as yet. Thought it was worth a try at least.



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[gone down south]

Wifi is not going to give you any location accuracy unless it is connected. All you are doing is burning battery by having your wifi constantly look for a network.

Google has a scary big database of wifi networks that they pick up while doing passes with the Street View camera.
Basically they can pinpoint your location to within feet in a lot of places just by seeing what wifi networks are in range.

 

[darthus]

Hey Dirk, I think Ryanr has an excellent point. in your overnight results you have over 6 hours of phone radio usage, but only 2 hours of wifi. I'm assuming you have wifi at your house? So it must be using cell radio when it's slept...

Oh I just read your post, why would you turn wifi off overnight? Wifi is ridiculously more power efficient than the cell radio. Especially in 4.2. Go into Wifi in settings, three dots, then advanced and make sure Wifi optimzation is on. Please do the overnight test again with Wifi on, I suspect you will see night and day differences.

Also, whatever you did right before you took the first overnight screenshot drained the battery like crazy. It had 12 hours left average, but only 2 hours left based on your usage in the last 12 mins.

Lastly, there is definitely something wrong with some of your apps. If anything, before sending it back I would do a factory reset. Your Google services app has 1288 times waking the device over 6 hours, mine has 113 over 11 hours.

And wtf... your clock app took 10% of your battery? Mine is zero percent, there is something definitely wrong there, but you didn't post details on the clock process so I can't guess.

Peejay: It said you were at 40% after 7 hours of use... that's not too crazy. Though it is a bit odd that you had 35% screen drain with only 1 hour of screentime. That to me suggests that your brightness is too high. If you click brightness it will give you a detailed view of what general brightness settings were used. Just a reference, I have auto brightness turned on and mine is 95% dark (and it is totally viewable).

Kwietstorm Is your theory that everyone with bad battery life has a busted phone? What will Google do if you call them aside from send you a new one? Seems logical to try to diagnose and fix the problem yourself first, especially since by using tools like Gsam we have a whole bunch more info about what's going on with the phone than they do.

 

[darthus]

Here're some of my battery screens from today for comparison. Notice that Services and Clock are not even on the radar. Note that this included a 30 min phone call and I didn't charge the phone all day.

 

[peejay1977]

Peejay: It said you were at 40% after 7 hours of use... that's not too crazy. Though it is a bit odd that you had 35% screen drain with only 1 hour of screentime. That to me suggests that your brightness is too high. If you click brightness it will give you a detailed view of what general brightness settings were used. Just a reference, I have auto brightness turned on and mine is 95% dark (and it is totally viewable).

I have it on auto brightness, I can have it set all the way down as far as it'll go but in bright light I can't see it, if I whack up the brightness then it seems too bright when indoors.

Maps seems to be taking up ALOT of power even though it's not open and I have most of the Google Now stuff turned off.

 

[Freshly_Snipes]

Well here's what I got right now and I'm BEYOND a heavy user. No NFC, Bluetooth, GPS, Location Tracking inside maps... All syncing is on and wifi is on. Screen at 10%






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[ryanr509]

Well here's what I got right now and I'm BEYOND a heavy user. No NFC, Bluetooth, GPS, Location Tracking inside maps... All syncing is on and wifi is on. Screen at 10%
View attachment 49628
View attachment 49629




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So how many times did u have to charge it 40 or 50% to get 8 hours of screen on time?

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[peejay1977]

Slightly better today :

In fairness though I have very little screen time, I really can't work out how some people get 8 hours worth of screen time.