Nexus 7 Poor Battery Life

[jkampf]

Ever since I got my nexus 7, it has had terrible battery life. At 60% brightness with GPS, Bluetooth, NFC and everything else turned off I get around 2 hours of battery life just browsing the internet. It's on 4.2.1 which I believe was supposed fixed the battery issues? If anyone has suggestions for what is wrong, I would greatly appreciate the feedback. Thank you.

 

[paul-c]

Try letting the battery run all the way down until it powers off, then charge it full. If that doesn't work, a factory reset may be in your future.

Sent from my Motorola RAZR i

 

[jkampf]

Try letting the battery run all the way down until it powers off, then charge it full. If that doesn't work, a factory reset may be in your future.

Sent from my Motorola RAZR i

I tried a factory reset twice already, as well as a full charge cycle. Do you think I have a defective unit?

 

[paul-c]

If you've done all that, and you know it's not some rogue app causing the drain, then yeah, I think you might have a bad battery. I don't get great battery life on my Nexus 7 either, but it's not as bad as what you've described.

Sent from my Motorola RAZR i

 

[Nychotxxx]

Battery life has deteriorated with the two recent os updates. I'm at 4.2.1 and i seem to charge everyday when it goes from 100% to about 28% but i never let it ho down to zero. But i do t use it constant,y. I fluctuate from ipad3 to ipad mini to n7.

 

[Lee_Bo]

I just got mine on Christmas Day and have been using it hard (Ingress) and am getting all day battery life. I say check for a rogue app.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Android Central Forums

 

[Avenger]

What firmware are you on? Do you have a screen capture of the battery usage screen to see what is using it all? I'd suggest a custom firmware and kernel.

 

[dnightangel]

I get an average of around 5 hours of screen on time on 40 percent brightness with medium usage which gets me through the day easily. I did experience bad battery issues before but they were caused by widgets and rouge apps that just drained my battery like crazy

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Android Central Forums

 

[Dude1134]

I got mine on Christmas and its battery life is pretty good. It stays cool too. Been getting over eight hours with full charge and heavy usage.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Android Central Forums

 

[jkampf]

No rogue apps or widgets. I wonder why this is happening.

 

[THHT]

Ever since I got my nexus 7, it has had terrible battery life. At 60% brightness with GPS, Bluetooth, NFC and everything else turned off I get around 2 hours of battery life just browsing the internet. It's on 4.2.1 which I believe was supposed fixed the battery issues? If anyone has suggestions for what is wrong, I would greatly appreciate the feedback. Thank you.

My usage and settings:
-25% manual brightness
-GPS off
-Bluetooth off
-WiFi is turned on and off when browsing and going offline
-1 min Display sleep

The following stats are from CONTINUOUS USAGE WITH VERY LITTLE STANDBY:
7.5 to 8 hours of battery life = No games, Firefox Beta + Flash, MX Player, Piano Perfect, Google Play, Youtube
6 to 7 hours of battery life = An hour of gaming and normal use of everything else
5 to 6 hours of battery life = Two hours of gaming and normal use of everything else

One day I played Mini Motor Racing (full 3D game) for 2.5 hours from a full charge and was at 44% by the end of it (continuous). I then watched 4 hours of videos on MX Player (throughout the day) and was at 14%, which should have been able to give me maybe about another hour of video play time. 7.5 hours total.

Gaming eats battery life more than anything else. Judging by my gaming session above, I'd only get about 4.5 hours total had I continued playing. Watching videos, on the other hand, takes very little battery life with professional reviewers getting close to 10 hours.

Browsing on the other hand can give deceptive battery usage results. It depends entirely on what you're browsing for and what kind of sites you're going on. Flash sites or sites with heavy imagery will drain the battery faster than text based sites. I would also suspect browsing drains the battery more than some apps because you're constantly reading and writing the flash memory (professional reviewers again getting about 7.5 hours).

All that said, I use mine at 25% manual brightness and not 60%. I don't see anything wrong with your battery life judging from your usage.

Edit: I'll try 60% manual brightness and see how long it lasts. I'll post back results, which probably won't be surprising.

 

[goin_nil]

Try these apps to see if there is one consuming a lot of CPU or battery.

Watchdog
https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...ails?id=com.zomut.watchdoglite&token=n-W2tQxP

GSam battery monitor
https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...ps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.bbm&token=eK9_GLcE

 

[Luke Macken]

Mine did not charge at all. Called Google an had a new one in my hands 2days later

 

[Diknak]

I have started noticing something strange since I updated to the latest firmware.

Upon looking in the battery page in the settings menu, it looks like the culprit to my problem is Android OS. Upon taping on it, the Keep Awake time was at 1hr47 minutes and the screen time was only 12 minutes.

I did some googling and it looks like people have come to the consensus that Google Now is what is causing the problem in 4.2. I have disabled most of the cards (keeping weather and traffic on) and will report back to see if that helps. People are blaming the newest card where it tracks the total distance walked/biked, which makes sense since it would always have to ping your location.

My suggestion is to disable some or all of the cards in Google Now and see if that helps your battery problems.

 

[tennvol]

1) train your battery
2) disable location sharing in Google now

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

 

[THHT]

I browsed continuously using Firefox Beta on flashless sites with 60% brightness and got about 4 hours of battery life with about 7% battery left (probably another half hour).

@jkampf:
Sounds like you do have a problem with something either draining the battery or worse, the battery is a defect. Like the others have said (and I also should have mentioned), you should try disabling most of the Google add-ons that you don't use. For me, I've disabled pretty much everything related to Google Now, Google syncing or anything else that syncs, Location Access, Google Movies/TV, and Google Music. Try that and if you still have problems, then you might actually have a hardware issue.

 

[mochaed]

I have had my N7 since August. Battery life started a downward spiral after 4.2 update. Found a fix in another forum. Go to Settings - Data usage - tap three dots in upper right of screen and select Restrict background data. You will get a Background data restricted message when you pull down the notifications. Ignore it and enjoy your extended battery life.

 

[StreetRodder]

Just something I noticed, if I charge via any wall socket, it takes a long time to charge. With my charger plugged into my APS [auxiliary power supply] it charges very fast. Just my observation.

 

[WordPainter]

Seems like great battery life to me!

 

[jdauria]

I am not a "heavy" user on my N7 but I can't kill the battery if I tried LOL. I charged it up a couple days ago, and it still has around 40-50% left.