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

ryanr509

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badbrad17

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EXACTLY. It's so stupid because I bought the phone for all of these great features but what's the point if you have to turn them all off! I feel like the phone should get the great battery life right out of the box. When you turn it on for the first time you shouldn't have to change or turn anything off. I love my Nexus 4, but just like you said, the battery sucks haha

No one is saying you can't use the features you need. But toggling things like GPS helps if you are not using it. I would highly recommend installing Juice Defender. It learns your patterns of use and also turns things off and on much better, so if you are keeping everything on it will really help manage your system.

Give it a try for a week and see if it helps.

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badbrad17

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I'm inclined to believe this is a software, not hardware problem. Many people report their Nexus 7 suddenly becoming a total power-sucking battery killer after 4.2 and I was one of them. When you use a device for several months, you have an innate sense of how long it should last and when a drastic decrease in performance comes in the wake of a software update and you see Maps gobbling a ton of power when you never even opened it, it's obvious what the culprit is. The problem LG and Google have is that the quality of the phone is being called into question by a software bug. The perception that the N4 is so power-hungry that you may lose your job if you rely on it as an alarm clock (because the thing died while you were sleeping) is setting in and that's a disaster, regardless of the cause.

What's odd is how some people are reporting great battery life with normal use and no extraordinary steps taken to conserve power while others are watching their gauges drop like rocks. As many have noted, it's insane to by the power powerful feature-packed smartphone available and then have to turn off everything to get it to last more than 12 hours. We shouldn't have to need to remember to turn this or that on or off depending on location or time of day or whatnot. We should be able to charge it and go for a reasonable amount of time with EVERYTHING RUNNING. The GPS shouldn't be sucking power unless we're doing something with it; the Phone process shouldn't be waking it up 7000 times; wifi shouldn't be showing as on constantly when I've got it set to only stay on when sleeping if it's plugged in and power optimization on. We shouldn't have to use Juice Defender and GSam to track down what's killing our phones in the night in order to spend days on the Internet looking for solutions.

A "bad battery" in the sense of a defective component is one thing; this is 99% likely to be software-related and whatever Google did to break things with 4.2 needs to be rolled back STAT!

Just wondering if you tried your scenario with GPS off and if it made a difference? Also is it possible to go back and install 4.1?

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peejay1977

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I'm having a MUCH better day today, last night I reflashed the phone with the stock ROM downloaded from Google. So instead of 4.2 out of the box with the OTA 4.2.1 update it was just 4.2.1 straight onto it.

I then installed all of my apps again, turned off anything that was auto updating in the background and basically returning the settings to what they were previously as a comparison of performance.

Then I noticed that Maps was still using alot more power than I thought it should considering I have turned off most of the Google Now stuff, I ended up turning off this setting :

batt5.png


The odd things is the setting above seems exactly the same but just worded differently but Google Maps still works and apps are able to locate me fine. This is so far today :

batt1.png
batt2.png

batt3.png
batt4.png


WIFI and location services have been turned on the whole time but bluetooth and NFC are off, brightness set to auto. Marked improvement over yesterday. Ironically though, bluetoothing those 5 pics to my PC has used 3% of battery!

EDIT - Seems I lied, NFC has been on all this time since I reflashed last night.
 
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Freshly_Snipes

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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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Zilch smart ass. I'm a frequent user of this forum.. Why would I post about it if that was the case? Props from a bunch of dorks across the country? FOH! I'm sharing what happened for me. I hate you Android conspiracy theorists. This phone is not like any other Android phone you or I have had and you're definitely not knowledgeable on it this soon. Go douche and get off mine if you don't agree sir. Kindly.

Also with the N4 when you recharge while powered on the battery stats will auto reset to zero hours. Genius! *Drops mic*

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ryanr509

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Zilch smart ass. I'm a frequent user of this forum.. Why would I post about it if that was the case? Props from a bunch of dorks across the country? FOH! I'm sharing what happened for me. I hate you Android conspiracy theorists. This phone is not like any other Android phone you or I have had and you're definitely not knowledgeable on it this soon. Go douche and get off mine if you don't agree sir. Kindly.

Also with the N4 when you recharge while powered on the battery stats will auto reset to zero hours. Genius! *Drops mic*

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Unless ur rooted and romd then I still can't believe 8 hours of screen on time sorry. When I see ppl with the Droid maxx and its 3300mah battery getting around 6 hours of screen on time wtf do u think I'm going to think when u post a screenshot of 8 hours of screen on time with a phone that has a 2100mah battery? No reason to be a douche bag about it.

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ryanr509

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Here's some screen shots of my galaxy note left on over night on wifi. This is with auto sync off but I do have flip board, Gmail, the weather widget and Facebook auto update every hour. This is after about 5.5 hours of sleep. Not sure if u can spot any major differences to see if maybe u guys have an app problem or not.

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rclifton

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Zilch smart ass. I'm a frequent user of this forum.. Why would I post about it if that was the case? Props from a bunch of dorks across the country? FOH! I'm sharing what happened for me. I hate you Android conspiracy theorists. This phone is not like any other Android phone you or I have had and you're definitely not knowledgeable on it this soon. Go douche and get off mine if you don't agree sir. Kindly.

Also with the N4 when you recharge while powered on the battery stats will auto reset to zero hours. Genius! *Drops mic*

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Android Central Forums

Actually as you can see by the screen shots provided you can in fact charge the phone without resetting the counters. I've owned one of my Nexus 4's since Nov 15th, tried different roms, disabling damn near everything, including setting brightness to zero and the best screen on time I have EVER seen was just past the 4 hour mark. Additionally there is nothing so drastically new in this phone that it renders experiences with other devices irrelevant as you suggest, and I'm confident in saying that in general 8+ hours of screen on time is pretty remarkable for most smart phones and closing in on utter BS when talking about the Nexus 4.
 

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peejay1977

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I'd have been surprised to get 8 hours of screen from a basic Nokia let alone a quad core state of the art smartphone but I can't judge other people if they say that's what they get.

This is me so far and as stated all I've done is reflash the phone with 4.2.1 and turn off that map setting.

uploadfromtaptalk1354742239537.jpg
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Hongguo An

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what do u mean turn off map setting? i see my Google maps battery usage is always in top 10 even if i never use it
thanks

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peejay1977

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what do u mean turn off map setting? i see my Google maps battery usage is always in top 10 even if i never use it
thanks

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See this screenshot :

batt5.png


I don't know how much battery effect this has but since reflashing and turning this off the battery has been noticeably better.



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darthus

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What "report from this device" does Peejay is enables apps to report your location. Disabling this does disable things like Google Latitude, but it limits apps ability to constantly use your GPS throughout the day to locate you, which is why Maps usually has a higher battery drain than other apps.

But yeah 70% after 13 hours isn't too bad, you had 13 hours plus 5 hours more estimated. 18 hours of usage is not bad for a smartphone.

Whenever anyone is having these crazy battery drain issues I think a good first step is to do a factory reset and then just install your most important apps and see how it goes just as you did, then you can notice if the battery starts to drop and what the culprit is.

Again, I don't excuse Google for this, Android could benefit from being a little more strict on background battery use or making it more transparent. We can't expect the average mainstream user to do the type of troubleshooting we're doing. They'd just return the phone and say it sucks.
 

peejay1977

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Thanks darthus it did seem like apps were using then location services, although it had reduced the maps usage in terms of battery usage I'm not convinced that alone has had such a massive effect. Currently on 17% battery, 14h 15m since charge and just over 2h 30m screen time which for a smartphone I'm more than happy with.

The nerd in me wants to experiment and find out what exactly has made such a dramatic difference.


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KwietStorm

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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.

No, my only theory is that coupled with older Nexus devices having bad battery situations after updating to 4.2, I'm saying it may be the software itself, not the Nexus 4.
 

peejay1977

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Well I've finally stuck it on charge, I've managed over 4 hours extra life since yesterday and I've really hammered it tonight trying to make it drain, either the reflash or the Map setting I turned off has done the life a world of good. If this is what I get every day then I'm a happy man :

batt6.png

batt7.png

batt8.png



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bennolen

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Got the N4 two days ago. Yesterday was the first full day and I was less than impressed with the battery life. I didn't accurately track it, and of course I played around with it a bit. I had been reading this thread and was worried I would have the bad battery life others were seeing.

So I decided not to waste time and see how long I could go on a full charge. I charged it back to full and took it off the charger at 9pm last night. I turned off auto brightness and set it to low. That's the only change I made. I wanted to see if I could get 24 hours from a typical day, so I treated it like it wasn't new, only using it when I had a use for it - answering calls, sending and receiving texts, looking at new emails and occasionally sending an email, syncing two different accounts.

So far so good. It's been on battery for 22 hours and I'm sitting at 45% left. I could easily go 24 hours on a full charge. I'm pleased.

Tomorrow I am going to turn the brightness back up or back to auto and see if I still get a satisfactory 8a to 10p day.
 
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bunique4life05

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Well I've finally stuck it on charge, I've managed over 4 hours extra life since yesterday and I've really hammered it tonight trying to make it drain, either the reflash or the Map setting I turned off has done the life a world of good. If this is what I get every day then I'm a happy man :

www.pjitsolutions.co.uk/pics/share/batt6.png
www.pjitsolutions.co.uk/pics/share/batt7.png
www.pjitsolutions.co.uk/pics/share/batt8.png


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What do mean reflash and also what did you changhe with map settings? I really interested in this device but really looking to get some good battery life out the device.


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badbrad17

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Actually as you can see by the screen shots provided you can in fact charge the phone without resetting the counters. I've owned one of my Nexus 4's since Nov 15th, tried different roms, disabling damn near everything, including setting brightness to zero and the best screen on time I have EVER seen was just past the 4 hour mark. Additionally there is nothing so drastically new in this phone that it renders experiences with other devices irrelevant as you suggest, and I'm confident in saying that in general 8+ hours of screen on time is pretty remarkable for most smart phones and closing in on utter BS when talking about the Nexus 4.

I'm going to say impossible. I will let you know when I get my phone in a week or so. I guess if you turned off everything and used it without any data or wifi you may be able to get 6 hours. But 8 just is too much.

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joshuay04

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Switch to the note 2, best battery life ever. I am a very heavy user, have been working all day with full brightness and I am still at 62%. Sold my nexus 4 for this note could not be happier.

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