[Samtheman7]

Hey all,
I have had the S3 for about 4 months now, and while it is an awesome phone, I was just wondering whether or not I have something wrong with my battery. On an average day, I can get around 1.5 hours of screen time on a charge, with Data, GPS, Sync, and Bluetooth off. Brightness around 1/5. In addition, I have power saving mode on, and JuiceDefender Ultimate running. I also clear the app cache as often as possible. So, any tips on how to get better battery? Or do you think it's just defective? I'm just tired of hearing about people getting 4 hours of screen time on a charge when mine discharges 15 percent with 51 seconds of screen time. Either way, it's far better than the iPhone I came from.
Thanks!

[pcprik]

That sounds pretty unusual to me. It depends on what you have running and how fast they update. Go through with a fine tooth comb and turn things off you don't use. Google Now, NFC and all S-Beam stuff. Do you use WiFi a lot?

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2

[NickLippert]

That is a lot lower than it should be. My girlfriend was having the same problem with hers, we switched and now both batteries are doing fine both phones. That isn't exactly a fix but it is all I have.

[Sashreek]

Thats unusual disable Google now if you are not using it, it is a big battery hog before I used to get 3 - 4 hrs of screen time and after disabling it, I am now getting 5 - 6 hrs of screen time and also I keep my brightness at the minimum when I am indoors.


Sent from my Galaxy S3 using Tapatalk 2

[Samtheman7]

At the end of the day today I'll upload a screenshot with battery stats.
Don't get me wrong, the phone is awesome, it's just tough to nurse the battery all day long.

[meyerweb]

Hey all,
I have had the S3 for about 4 months now, and while it is an awesome phone, I was just wondering whether or not I have something wrong with my battery. On an average day, I can get around 1.5 hours of screen time on a charge, with Data, GPS, Sync, and Bluetooth off. Brightness around 1/5. In addition, I have power saving mode on, and JuiceDefender Ultimate running. I also clear the app cache as often as possible. So, any tips on how to get better battery? Or do you think it's just defective? I'm just tired of hearing about people getting 4 hours of screen time on a charge when mine discharges 15 percent with 51 seconds of screen time. Either way, it's far better than the iPhone I came from.
Thanks!

First, clearing the app cache doesn't help, and probably hurts. Memory is constantly refreshed whether it's "used" or not. If the app you want to access is in the cache, the OS can access it instantly. If it's not, the OS has to copy it from ROM into the cache, which slows things down and uses more energy. I haven't used Juice Defender, but most people seem to feel these battery programs, in general, make things worse.

Are you in a very weak signal area? That can certainly chew through battery.

Have you looked at the battery stats in settings? That could give us a clue as to what's eating the battery.

[makaroni]

Is juice defender like a task manager type of app?

My GS3 sleeps in the bed and I make my girlfriend sleep on the couch

[Uncle Reemus]

My juice defender was great for about 2 days, yesterday I got 6 hours on a full charge and today I uninstalled JD and with heavy use I still have 51%... great to start but took a severe nosedive

Sent from my GT-P3113 using Android Central Forums

[Samtheman7]

Anyone know how to put screenshots up on here? Sorry, first time using screenshots on the forum. Got about 1.5 hours of screen with about 30 percent left today. Not horrible.

[makaroni]

Anyone know how to put screenshots up on here? Sorry, first time using screenshots on the forum. Got about 1.5 hours of screen with about 30 percent left today. Not horrible.

When you're replying to a thread tap the icon that looks like a camera to add a pic from your gallery and just follow the rest.

My GS3 sleeps in the bed and I make my girlfriend sleep on the couch

[funkylogik]

Defective phone or battery defo I can be online for 5-6hrs after a full charge

quadcore 1gb GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

[funkylogik]

My juice defender was great for about 2 days, yesterday I got 6 hours on a full charge and today I uninstalled JD and with heavy use I still have 51%... great to start but took a severe nosedive

Sent from my GT-P3113 using Android Central Forums

JD only does what u can quickly get into the habit of doin manualy without having an app wasting resources imo

quadcore 1gb GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

[V J]

That is unusually poor battery. I just got my 4G Galaxy S3 about 2 weeks ago and right out of the box I charged it to full, followed by a full discharge which lasted about roughly 7.5 hours of almost pure screen time on full brightness (set to auto-adjust). My discharge rate on standby was about 1.5%-2% per hour but decreased to less than 1% per hour after the second discharge.

I did try juice defender and other task killer apps early on and didn't notice any increase in battery life. From what I've read most people would advice against using any sort of task killing app claiming to help preserve battery life.

If you haven't tried yet, let your battery discharge completely after a full charge. Do it a couple of times for the next few days and then roughly once a month after that, at the very least it will help minimize your idle discharge. I would also get rid of Juice Defender and any other "bloatware" that may be running background services on your phone.

Also if you go into Settings > Battery you will see a populated list of apps that are using up your battery the most, take note of their percentages and see if there's anything that comes close to the Screen for battery usage, typically during heavy use the Screen should be 50-60% of total battery usage if not more. If your screen is less than 50% of total battery usage and you are still running out of battery in less than 2 hours, and there are no other visible apps causing heavy batter drain then you most definitely have either a defective battery or a severely discalibrated battery, the latter is something that a few full charge/discharge cycles will fix. A defective battery on the other hand is a different story.

[funkylogik]

That is unusually poor battery. I just got my 4G Galaxy S3 about 2 weeks ago and right out of the box I charged it to full, followed by a full discharge which lasted about roughly 7.5 hours of almost pure screen time on full brightness (set to auto-adjust). My discharge rate on standby was about 1.5%-2% per hour but decreased to less than 1% per hour after the second discharge.

I did try juice defender and other task killer apps early on and didn't notice any increase in battery life. From what I've read most people would advice against using any sort of task killing app claiming to help preserve battery life.

If you haven't tried yet, let your battery discharge completely after a full charge. Do it a couple of times for the next few days and then roughly once a month after that, at the very least it will help minimize your idle discharge. I would also get rid of Juice Defender and any other "bloatware" that may be running background services on your phone.

Also if you go into Settings > Battery you will see a populated list of apps that are using up your battery the most, take note of their percentages and see if there's anything that comes close to the Screen for battery usage, typically during heavy use the Screen should be 50-60% of total battery usage if not more. If your screen is less than 50% of total battery usage and you are still running out of battery in less than 2 hours, and there are no other visible apps causing heavy batter drain then you most definitely have either a defective battery or a severely discalibrated battery, the latter is something that a few full charge/discharge cycles will fix. A defective battery on the other hand is a different story.

Good advice bro but i think with this gen' of Li-Ion batterys, all off that full charge/discharge makes no difference compared to the old ni-cad batterys that had a "memory"
Doesnt stop my dad from doing it with every new phone though lol.
Another option to look into is battery calibration but i doubt its that.
I think the phone or battery are dodgy tbh

quadcore 1gb GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

[meyerweb]

I wouldn't fully discharge an Li battery more than once. Li batteries do not like being fully discharged, and doing so will decrease battery life. Now it's possible that Samsung has calibrated the battery to account for that, and the phone will shut off before the charge gets too low, but I don't know that.

[V J]

Also keep in mind that it also depends on what you do with your screen time. From my experience for example, some games are graphically intensive like Wild Blood (utilizing the unreal engine) will greatly tax the cpu/gpu of the phone in addition to the screen's battery consumption so your battery won't last more than a couple of hours playing a game like that. Conversely, I've been able to watch a full-length movie (almost 3 hours) and only lost roughly 20% battery.

And I somewhat disagree about full discharging. It's been said many times that Lithium-based batteries are not meant to be fully discharged on a -regular- basis because in practice it does tend to affect the battery's estimated lifetime (ie it might start failing after 6 years instead of 8 or so). While this is true, it's also commonly advised by device manufacturers to let smartphones undergo a full charge/discharge cycle every now and then to keep the battery properly calibrated. Even Apple officially advises iphone/ipad users to do a full charge/discharge once a month.

I personally experience better battery performance after a couple of discharges. I'm not worried about the minimal effect on the battery lifetime as I'd have upgraded over to a new phone model well before the battery even starts showing any signs of failure, if any, during its lifetime.

[funkylogik]

Also rememer that white uses the most power, pure black uses none (on an LED screen)

quadcore 1gb GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

[meyerweb]

And I somewhat disagree about full discharging. It's been said many times that Lithium-based batteries are not meant to be fully discharged on a -regular- basis because in practice it does tend to affect the battery's estimated lifetime (ie it might start failing after 6 years instead of 8 or so). While this is true, it's also commonly advised by device manufacturers to let smartphones undergo a full charge/discharge cycle every now and then to keep the battery properly calibrated. Even Apple officially advises iphone/ipad users to do a full charge/discharge once a month.

Please point me to these device manufacturers recommendations. I've never seen one. The instructions that came with my GS3 certainly don't say anything about it. And good luck getting anywhere near 6 to 8 years of useful life out of a phone battery. In my experience, they start showing significantly shorter useful life on a charge after a couple of years. That may not matter if you buy a new phone everytime your contract is up, but not everyone wants to do that.

[funkylogik]

I cant afford to do that lol il just get a new battery and hack the bejesus outa my s3 so it keeps up with the crowd.
Batt should last 5-600 full discharges though (a 20% charge/discharge counts as 1/5th of a charge/discharge
as far as i know

quadcore 1gb GS3, Neat Rom by Salesale. Paisley, Scotland, Western Europe :beer:

[Samtheman7]

Alright, here are yesterday's screen shots. Battery was actually better than normal, but still pretty horrible. I shouldn't burn 70 percent of the battery with only 1.5 hours of screen time. It's not even like I'm playing really graphic intensive games. Nothing beyond like, Temple Run 2. (not even need for speed.)
PS: This post took 6 percent of my battery to complete. Awesome.

[V J]

@Samtheman7, if I'm not mistaken, "Android System" is usually the lump sum of all your background processes running behind the scenes (or most of them). Things like sync services, mail exchanges and widgets. Do you have anything like those that are maybe continuously retrieving data or syncing in the background. The worst culprits would be weather widgets that are constantly using GPS to determine your current location and retrieve weather information on the go. You can check what sort of processes you have in the background by doing this:

1. Long-press the home button and click on the pie chart icon.
2 Click the "RAM" tab and press "Clear memory".
3 Press the "back" capacitive button back to your homescreen again and long press the home button again.
4. Press the trash bin icon this time, then the back button and wait a few seconds. Now only your default processes should be running, as in the ones set to start-up when your phone boots up, and ones that are set to start back up when killed.
5. From your homescreen go into Settings > Applications manager > swipe left to "Running" and you will see a list of background services active. Have a look and see if you can see any that may be causing the battery drain, if not take screenshots of the list.


@meyerweb

"Use iPhone Regularly

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down)."

That's the only one I could find with a quick google search but I've read a few other similar notes from different sources. It's not a widely advertised practice but it's definitely advised if you're suffering from inconsistent battery life. If your battery performs to expectations though I wouldn't worry about trying to recalibrate it using this method. Honestly though, I've never had batteries fail on me because I tend to upgrade my phone at least once every year or 2. But my partner's phone battery lasted roughly 4-5 years before an abrupt failure, it wasn't a gradual loss of charge capacity and that remains my only experience of battery failure.

But like I said, the minimal impact on the battery's operational lifetime is inconsequential since most of the time you'd have upgraded your device before the battery starts showing signs of failure. But if you're absolutely set on using your device for years to come, and you have no issues with the battery performance, then you don't have to bother with discharge cycles. Otherwise, fully discharging it and letting the battery calibrate is an easier option than having to replace it.

[MrDoh]

Please point me to these device manufacturers recommendations. I've never seen one. The instructions that came with my GS3 certainly don't say anything about it. And good luck getting anywhere near 6 to 8 years of useful life out of a phone battery. In my experience, they start showing significantly shorter useful life on a charge after a couple of years. That may not matter if you buy a new phone everytime your contract is up, but not everyone wants to do that.

Yes, you're 100% correct...I keep seeing these recommedations to completely discharge your battery to "recalibrate" it or something like that. When you read about how Li-ion batteries really work, and recommendations from real experts on making your Li-ion battery last, they all say NOT to discharge your battery to anywhere near empty. Doing that shortens the battery's life, adds a lot more wear quickly. Like you, I'm not sure where on the battery discharge curve the phone is designed to cut off and stop working, but I hope that it would be well before full discharge, since I hear about lots of people "running out of charge". As a result, in the years that I've had Li-ion batteries in my phone I've never let the charge get really low, and have had no problems with those batteries. In fact, the battery in the iPhone 4 that I passed onto my wife is still going strong after 2 years, seems to be in about the same place as when I first got the phone. These myths all stem from the old NiCad and NiMH batteries where if you didn't discharge them completely occasionally, they would have shorter and shorter charge/discharge cycles and would be useless before too long. This is definitely not true of Li-ion batteries.

[MrDoh]

@meyerweb

"Use iPhone Regularly

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down)."

That's the only one I could find with a quick google search but I've read a few other similar notes from different sources. It's not a widely advertised practice but it's definitely advised if you're suffering from inconsistent battery life. If your battery performs to expectations though I wouldn't worry about trying to recalibrate it using this method. Honestly though, I've never had batteries fail on me because I tend to upgrade my phone at least once every year or 2. But my partner's phone battery lasted roughly 4-5 years before an abrupt failure, it wasn't a gradual loss of charge capacity and that remains my only experience of battery failure.

But like I said, the minimal impact on the battery's operational lifetime is inconsequential since most of the time you'd have upgraded your device before the battery starts showing signs of failure. But if you're absolutely set on using your device for years to come, and you have no issues with the battery performance, then you don't have to bother with discharge cycles. Otherwise, fully discharging it and letting the battery calibrate is an easier option than having to replace it.

I think that the quote above from Apple needs to be updated, it really isn't supported anywhere else, nor even elsewhere on their own site. If you go here:



you'll see a much different story, complete with how the "battery cycle" can be composed of smaller discharges. I'd go further from what I've read to add that not only can the full discharge cycle per month be composed of incremental discharges, but it should be if you don't want to add extra wear to your battery with a full discharge.

Another reference worth a look is:



and there are many others as well.

[V J]

Yes, you're 100% correct...I keep seeing these recommedations to completely discharge your battery to "recalibrate" it or something like that. When you read about how Li-ion batteries really work, and recommendations from real experts on making your Li-ion battery last, they all say NOT to discharge your battery to anywhere near empty. Doing that shortens the battery's life, adds a lot more wear quickly. Like you, I'm not sure where on the battery discharge curve the phone is designed to cut off and stop working, but I hope that it would be well before full discharge, since I hear about lots of people "running out of charge". As a result, in the years that I've had Li-ion batteries in my phone I've never let the charge get really low, and have had no problems with those batteries. In fact, the battery in the iPhone 4 that I passed onto my wife is still going strong after 2 years, seems to be in about the same place as when I first got the phone. These myths all stem from the old NiCad and NiMH batteries where if you didn't discharge them completely occasionally, they would have shorter and shorter charge/discharge cycles and would be useless before too long. This is definitely not true of Li-ion batteries.

Well ok, let's not derail the topic here. Whether or not the advised procedure of fully discharging the battery affects the expected lifetime is not in question because it does. Plain and simple. Batteries can only do a few thousand charging cycles before they die. And this is almost completely irrelevant to the OP.

He is having battery performance issues and since I've seen more than a few sources advising a full discharge to calibrate the battery, a practice that in my experience works in most cases, I relayed the information to him. While it may have some minor impact on the expected lifetime duration of his current battery, really what does he have to lose? His battery is under-performing severely right now so why not try a possible solution if he's facing having to purchase a new battery to replace a possibly defective one anyway.

The OP came here for some advice, and I'm trying to offer possible solutions. If you're gonna try and explain why he shouldn't do it in his current situation then at the very least offer a counter-solution. Otherwise you're just implying that my advice is worthless and that he should do nothing and just put up with his average of 1.5 hours of screen time on a full charge, which isn't really helping anybody.

[Samtheman7]

Guys, AT&T lets you upgrade after 18 months on contract. No chance I'm keeping this thing over 24 months. Battery life 5 years from now isn't an issue.