Samsung Galaxy Note 4 - Battery very bad | How to debug or file a bug ?

[suaroman]

I've seen many posts on this subject, but wanted to say a few things about my Note 4

Model: Samsung-SM-N910A
OS: Android 5.0.1

I've had this phone for about 1.5 years. Since day 1, the battery life is one of the worst I've ever seen for a phone. I've replaced the phone and have purchased numerous batteries. They are all the same. I don't use facebook, instagram, play games, etc... I do surf the web , check email and on the phone constantly. For about 1.5 years the battery life on this phone has been absolutely horrible. It was so bad I would challenge anybody that had to show me their battery lasts more than 4 or 5 hours and not in the red. I've seen some of the posts indicating how great the battery is, but frankly never really believed any of them. I had multiple Note 4 phone and from the factory with stock apps all exhibited very poor battery life. I've removed all the AT&T bloatware and had minimal configuration. I recently upgraded to 5.0.1 Lollipop because I've heard you might get better battery life. This was not the case. It was the same ... or worse.

I just recently used Battery Doctor and the report clearly showed two components consuming much of the battery.

- Contacts Storage
- User Dictionary

As a test i fully charged my phone around 10:30PM, unplugged the charger and simply left it alone. Didn't use it again until around 5am. At 5am, the phone had about 49% battery life available with no use and sure enough at the top of the list are these two android components.

Next test. I disabled both of these components (Contacts Storage and User Dictionary). Charged the phone. With normal use for me (surfing web , checking emails, sending emails, IM's, taking pics and forwarding,etc...) I was able to get over 24 hours of use out of it before recharging. Drastic improvement.

My questions:
-------------------
- Contacts Storage aggressive use of the system is clearly be a bug. What the heck is it doing ? Is there a way to profile and look at the stacks? Keep in mind the phone does this on factory setup too.

- Is there a way to file a bug with the Android team so some of the developers could take a look ? (AT&T is useless... )

If Contacts Storage consumption of power and resources was fixed this truly would be the best phone ever.
(Unfortunately, by disabling Contacts Storage , I'm unable to make outbound phone calls without re enabling it.)

Thank you

 

[PublicImageLtd]

That's really weird. I have 5.0.1
100% at 10am. Watched horse racing live, had some bets, watched a video, music. I'm on 72% at 19.09. Hope you get it sorted. Rapidly. Maybe try a new original battery.
Good luck.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[muzzy996]

Very odd for contacts to be causing issues. Contacts doesn't even show up on my list of battery consumption it's ranked so low (and I've got my battery stats hacked so I can currently see the top 30 or so consumers of battery). My gut reaction to your discovery is that perhaps there's an item in your contacts and dictionary that's corrupted or perhaps synchronization of contacts is an issue.

I really don't know how your contacts are stored, personally I use Gmail contacts and so if it were me I would be to repeat the overnight test in airplane mode but with both features enabled. If the test works out well then you've isolated it to an issue with synchronization. Next step would be clearing data for both and then letting the data get resynced from the cloud (again assuming its synced with your Gmail or Samsung account).

Good luck!

 

[suaroman]

Problem Finally Solved! * (posting in case anybody else runs into this)

To recap:

- Note 4 battery life has been terrible since I've had the phone (> 1.5 years)
- Tried new phones
- Tried brand new batteries (many)
- Battery Doctor showed Contacts Storage app (and dictionary) was consuming all of the battery even when phone was not in use.
- Disabling Contacts Storage allowed the phone to work properly (about 1 1/2 days) between charge as opposed to charging 3 times a day.
- This was not a viable solution as disabling Contact Storage did not allow my phone to make outbound calls. I could receive call though.

Solution:
--------------
- Logged into gmail from my computer.
- Went to Contacts in upper left hand corner and selected.
- After doing so, it presented some errors indicated I had 2 duplicate contacts. It offered me a choice to delete each one or to merge them. I decided to merge them.
-Once finished, I re-enabled Contacts Storage on my phone, charged it and battery worked perfectly.
- Phone now lasts about 1.5 days between charges and have all my functionality back.

Assumptions:
----------------------
My guess is Contacts storage had a problem and was stuck in some sort of (tight) loop when it encountered these duplicate Contact entries. Most likely the developers can catch this sort of problem and firewall against this behavior...or at least log or do something that would help someone understand what its doing.

I've seen several forum postings with regard to Contacts Storage being at the top of the list in terms of battery consumption. First step would be to verify your Contacts are ok by heading over to gmail (or where ever you maintain your contacts).

Hope this helps others who may run into the problem.

 

[Mr-Guy]

I read on flipboard this morning our battery drain problems might be our gps turned on, and to clear the cache. I did both and bingo battery drain way down again after lollipop update.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[nahoku]

I've had this phone for about 1.5 years.

That's amazing... the phone was released in Oct 2014... which means this month it just made 1 year old. Glad you got your problem worked out though!