I apologize for starting a new battery related thread. But my intentions are to share this new information / observations for others' benefit. I am coming from iPhone and Apple world and this is my very first Android device ever. That's probably because the flaky battery life was/is causing me so much headache. On an iPhone, i don't have to worry about my battery life day to day however on my ATT N5, every day seems to bringing new surprises with respect to battery. So here is what I did to ensure a consistent and better battery experience -
1. First and foremost I changed my GPS, bluetooth, screen brightness settings that has been discussed countless times in other threads so I won't go in details.
2. I changed my run time from Dalvik to ART but didn't see any battery boost whatsoever. On top of that, some of the apps starting crashing. Some I didn't care for but others I did. So ended up changing back to Dalvik.
3. Last week, after seeing dismal battery out of my phone (I was averaging about 2 hours screen time with 10 hours of total battery time), i decided to do a factory reset. Then I started with a clean slate for a day. No 3rd party apps. I also stopped using any 3rd party chargers. Turns out that the charger I was intermittently using had a different power output rating. Unknowingly, I had been using my wife's GS3 charger which has slightly different rating than N5 charger. I did hear from some other folks that google's customer service is recommending to use N5 charger only (I guess you can use any charger as long as the output is exactly same). At this point, i started seeing much better battery with screen on time getting to about 3.5 hours with almost 1 day 5 hours of total battery time. I wish at that time, i had saved some screen shots.
4. I started downloading the most frequently used apps at this point. For me, those are Facebook, twitter, flip book, CNN, Linkedin, netflix, Pandora to name a few. Everything still good.
5. Starting Monday of this week, my battery life starting getting really bad again. After going through several charge cycles and doing some digging around, i realized that I had installed What's App on Monday. I ended up un-installing it today and so far, it does look like that might have been the culprit.
Everybody's situation is going to be different but i know a lot of people use messaging apps like what's app, BBM and viber etc. If you are struggling with your battery life as I was, make sure that they are not the culprits of your battery drain. Also, try using N5 charger only for charging your phone.
Good luck.
1. First and foremost I changed my GPS, bluetooth, screen brightness settings that has been discussed countless times in other threads so I won't go in details.
2. I changed my run time from Dalvik to ART but didn't see any battery boost whatsoever. On top of that, some of the apps starting crashing. Some I didn't care for but others I did. So ended up changing back to Dalvik.
3. Last week, after seeing dismal battery out of my phone (I was averaging about 2 hours screen time with 10 hours of total battery time), i decided to do a factory reset. Then I started with a clean slate for a day. No 3rd party apps. I also stopped using any 3rd party chargers. Turns out that the charger I was intermittently using had a different power output rating. Unknowingly, I had been using my wife's GS3 charger which has slightly different rating than N5 charger. I did hear from some other folks that google's customer service is recommending to use N5 charger only (I guess you can use any charger as long as the output is exactly same). At this point, i started seeing much better battery with screen on time getting to about 3.5 hours with almost 1 day 5 hours of total battery time. I wish at that time, i had saved some screen shots.
4. I started downloading the most frequently used apps at this point. For me, those are Facebook, twitter, flip book, CNN, Linkedin, netflix, Pandora to name a few. Everything still good.
5. Starting Monday of this week, my battery life starting getting really bad again. After going through several charge cycles and doing some digging around, i realized that I had installed What's App on Monday. I ended up un-installing it today and so far, it does look like that might have been the culprit.
Everybody's situation is going to be different but i know a lot of people use messaging apps like what's app, BBM and viber etc. If you are struggling with your battery life as I was, make sure that they are not the culprits of your battery drain. Also, try using N5 charger only for charging your phone.
Good luck.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram