Battery life

mikeakanice

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So, I charged my battery to 100% last night to do a battery test this morning. I have all my notification options off except for wifi, reading, and power mode. I used the battery guide posted for the 10.1 http://forums.androidcentral.com/sa...-life-how-youre-being-robbed.html#post3248366 I used this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0x7ZsTioCQ This video is supposedly in 1080 hd. and these are the results I got


Screenshots_2014-05-01-16-27-48.jpg

If I double that I would get around 8 hrs and 20 minutes or so. Something wrong with my battery? I'm on power save and auto brightness. That's 8 hrs and 20 minutes screen time i should clarify;.
 
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muzzy996

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Comparing battery life is so difficult. There's far too many variables to get an accurate comparison. Unless everyone used the same test file and had the same settings and software on their tablets the values would undoubtedly be inconsistent. Trustedreviews.com did a battery life test using SD quality video and got something like 13 hours of life. Hard to compare your result against that without having their exact file on hand and duplicating their settings as well.

I doubt that there's anything wrong with your battery but perhaps you could try getting a lower resolution video file saved onto your tablet and test longevity with the tablet in airplane mode, that way you're getting the longest possible time (which is likely how battery life tests in reviews are testing).
 

mikeakanice

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Comparing battery life is so difficult. There's far too many variables to get an accurate comparison. Unless everyone used the same test file and had the same settings and software on their tablets the values would undoubtedly be inconsistent. Trustedreviews.com did a battery life test using SD quality video and got something like 13 hours of life. Hard to compare your result against that without having their exact file on hand and duplicating their settings as well.

I doubt that there's anything wrong with your battery but perhaps you could try getting a lower resolution video file saved onto your tablet and test longevity with the tablet in airplane mode, that way you're getting the longest possible time (which is likely how battery life tests in reviews are testing).
Well the thing is, it seems I get the same battery drop no matter what I'm doing. I was reading and it seems to fall at the same rate. 12 points per hour.
 

mickeylittle777

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I easily get over 10 hours on mine. But that isn't with constant use mind you. That is checking email, Web surfing, office applications, and things of that nature. I guess the driving point for me is that I've owned quite a few tablets and at the end of my day none of them would have the battery juice left that this Note 12.2 has so for me that is how I do the comparison. And yes I've had some good ones such as the ipad 4 and even the Air.

When is the last time that you hard booted your tablet? Sometimes doing that tends to clean out some issues.
 

mikeakanice

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I easily get over 10 hours on mine. But that isn't with constant use mind you. That is checking email, Web surfing, office applications, and things of that nature. I guess the driving point for me is that I've owned quite a few tablets and at the end of my day none of them would have the battery juice left that this Note 12.2 has so for me that is how I do the comparison. And yes I've had some good ones such as the ipad 4 and even the Air.

When is the last time that you hard booted your tablet? Sometimes doing that tends to clean out some issues.

I just got it yesterday. I got the updates and then did a factory reset.
 

mikeakanice

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Well that answers that. I did notice that 30% was for you tube and I believe that the you tube app uses more battery than using you tube from the web. I'm not sure about this but I think I'm right.

Yea. I was keeping everything minimum so I could get a good estimate running only the youtube video. Do you think the more time I use the tablet the battery might "settle in" and get better or am I just typing nonsense. Thanks for the help btw.
 

muzzy996

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Well the thing is, it seems I get the same battery drop no matter what I'm doing. I was reading and it seems to fall at the same rate. 12 points per hour.

Probably because the screen is the deciding factor based on the activities you are doing.

I typically use it indoors with the brightness set to about 1/3 on the scale. I charge all of my devices overnight every day and sometimes top them off throughout the day and based on my observations I can't say I really find fault in battery life with my Note Pro. I do think that under heavy usage I get similar run time to what you're describing. I'll make some observations tonight and see what I find.
 

mikeakanice

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Probably because the screen is the deciding factor based on the activities you are doing.

I typically use it indoors with the brightness set to about 1/3 on the scale. I charge all of my devices overnight every day and sometimes top them off throughout the day and based on my observations I can't say I really find fault in battery life with my Note Pro. I do think that under heavy usage I get similar run time to what you're describing. I'll make some observations tonight and see what I find.

OK please do. The thing is though is I`my not doing anything heavy. My scream is on auto bright and YouTube is the only app running. My cache is completely empty. So I'm sort of at a loss for words as to what's going on. Especially when you and others are getting so great battery time.
 

muzzy996

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Yeah I wouldnt say I'm getting great battery life. IMO if my screen is on bright and I'm getting 10%/hr on average I call it good. Its when I'm seeing more than a few % per hour while the device is OFF that I get irritated. 8 hours of battery life with constant screen on isn't a deal breaker for me.

In any case I'll report back. I'm rooted and have installed a battery stat tool so I'll be able to give some detailed numbers.

Keep in mind we're all different so these kinds of things are completely subjective.
 

mickeylittle777

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Yea. I was keeping everything minimum so I could get a good estimate running only the youtube video. Do you think the more time I use the tablet the battery might "settle in" and get better or am I just typing nonsense. Thanks for the help btw.

No I don't think it will improve. If you really think that the battery life isn't what it ought to be then you should probably get it exchanged.

Now I don't lose any battery while my tablet sleeps for an hour or so. Overnight it loses 2-3% max.
 

mikeakanice

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Yeah I wouldnt say I'm getting great battery life. IMO if my screen is on bright and I'm getting 10%/hr on average I call it good. Its when I'm seeing more than a few % per hour while the device is OFF that I get irritated. 8 hours of battery life with constant screen on isn't a deal breaker for me.

In any case I'll report back. I'm rooted and have installed a battery stat tool so I'll be able to give some detailed numbers.

Keep in mind we're all different so these kinds of things are completely subjective.
Ah, you're rooted. Does that improve battery life? I've never rooted before and even though I've read some stuff on how I still don't think I understand it well enough to do it. I don't want to brick the device and not be able to return it.

And I wouldn't disagree with you about battery life not being a deal breaker if I hadn't payed just about as much as I would have for a 64 gig Ipad air.
 

mikeakanice

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No I don't think it will improve. If you really think that the battery life isn't what it ought to be then you should probably get it exchanged.

Now I don't lose any battery while my tablet sleeps for an hour or so. Overnight it loses 2-3% max.
Yea I'll keep an eye on how much drains tonight. I'm at 34% now. I might exchange it instead of return it.
 

muzzy996

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Ah, you're rooted. Does that improve battery life? I've never rooted before and even though I've read some stuff on how I still don't think I understand it well enough to do it. I don't want to brick the device and not be able to return it.

And I wouldn't disagree with you about battery life not being a deal breaker if I hadn't payed just about as much as I would have for a 64 gig Ipad air.

Apples and oranges lol, to me the cost difference between an ipad air and one of these is irrelevant since they aren't of the same value to me in terms of usefulness. I'm on my second note pro, I lost the first one by accident (my own stupidity really) and bought another so that gives you an idea of how much I value this tablet having paid for it twice.

Running full tilt on CPU speed at a given brightness a device is going to drain at a particular rate and rooting won't change this. That said there certainly would be greater control to reduce total processing load with root by dropping the number of applications running in the background. Once said resources are freed up though any heavy program you're running like a cpu intensive game will still push drain to the max. The value of rooting for battery life is in standby and deep sleep where the reduced load results in reduced drain. The comparison of Android vs iOS is challenging though even if the average consumer may not realize it, Android allows much more services to run which impacts battery life. Whether these added services are of value to the consumer is subjective.





Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk
 

muzzy996

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I just watched a 1 hour video with wifi turned off and observed almost 13% drain which correlated with your observation. I had screen brightness set to max.

With the Note Pro having a battery that's 8% larger (9500mah vs 8800mah) but supporting a screen that is 48% larger I'd say that the battery life is commendable.

Update: it appears as though on standby I am seeing a drain of about 0.04% per hour. The tablet deep sleeps very well.
May 2, 2014 51750 AM HST.jpg
 
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mickeylittle777

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I think one of my reasons for good battery results is that I keep my screen on about 35% brightness with auto brightness off. I don't like a dark screen and on my Galaxy Note 3 I have my screen brightness set to right at 50%. When I had my LG Optimus G Pro a couple months ago I had it set to 60%. My point is that I am not one to settle for a darker screen to save battery life because I have an office job so I can plug up pretty much 24/7. So I have my phone and tablet set like I like them and at 35% that is a great brightness for me, with auto brightness set to off.

So you guys with auto brightness on may want to experiment for a few days by turning it off and seeing if you can turn your brightness level down a tad.
 

mikeakanice

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Sorry for responding so late. I always thought auto brightness was the best option for saving battery life. That's pretty interesting. Do you know by chance what % auto bright is set at?
 

mickeylittle777

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Sorry for responding so late. I always thought auto brightness was the best option for saving battery life. That's pretty interesting. Do you know by chance what % auto bright is set at?

Yes I have heard that as well about using auto brightness to save on battery but that doesn't make sense to me as it is always monitoring and adjusting depending on conditions. But like I said feel free to just try this for a couple of days as an experiment and please report back as to if you feel it helped or not. As to what % auto brightness is set to I'm afraid that I do not know.
 

mikeakanice

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Yes I have heard that as well about using auto brightness to save on battery but that doesn't make sense to me as it is always monitoring and adjusting depending on conditions. But like I said feel free to just try this for a couple of days as an experiment and please report back as to if you feel it helped or not. As to what % auto brightness is set to I'm afraid that I do not know.

Will do. I'm going to charge it up twice more and do two different experiments. The first one will be with auto brightness and multi view using the youtube app and google playbooks. After that I will try youtube alone with auto brightness off and try get close to 15-20% and see what those numbers are. These were my final results.
Screenshots_2014-05-02-13-14-19.jpgScreenshots_2014-05-02-13-14-02.jpg

It's just curious because I'm reading peoples battery life on xda Note 12.2 Battery Life - xda-developers and some people are getting incredible battery life, the type samsung is saying you should get to. Like this guy battery.jpg while another person said they are able to stream from pleax and only lose 20% battery. But if I'm not satisfied I will exchange it at amazon and hopefully the battery life will be better.
 

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muzzy996

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What exactly is incredible about that screenshot? Seems to me that it's 6 hours of screen on time . . basically . . If you look at the bottom graph you have a history of 15h44m, and in that timeframe you see these long plateaus on the blue graph where when you look below them at the bottom the screen/wifi bars indicate that both screen and Wifi were off during those times too. Essentially during those plateaus the tablet basically completely in deep sleep which is why they're so flat.

Edit: The difficult thing about reading these charts is that they don't give a complete idea of what the usage was like during the steep downward trends where battery is draining rapidly. On cell phone charts sometimes you'll see cellular signal strength indicated as low/weak and the drain will take a nose dive due to increased power requirements. On this chart you see screen is on quite a bit and wifi is on a lot as well, just not the full 15 hours. What we dont see is how much processing is being done and by what application. For that I had to go into the other thread you linked and pull up the application list associated with the battery drain chart. From that I summized that the reason battery life is so good for this person is they are not doing anything really intensive. The top ranked applications are all things that wouldn't be pushing CPU speed to max power. Things like Google Play Newstand (reading application), Facebook, Tapatalk, Chrome, and Messenger are all things where you won't see it running at full clip for an hour straight. Without a CPU state report for the same sample duration there's no way to know just how far these applications pushed CPU speeds up and for how longh though so we'll never know. If the YouTube application was ranked #1 on that chart, he still had seen 6 hours of screen on time and had the tablet on battery for 15 hours then I'd say thats great battery life. Again though, I could sit in youtube for 6 hours just tapping the screen without playing anything and make it the top ranked application in battery stats without pushing CPU very hard (though I'd run out of patiences after several minutes LOL!). Point is, there's TONS of variables.​

If I get 1% per hour burn rate in deep sleep I can basically unplug my Note Pro at a full charge while it's powered on, not touch it and expect it to be at 50% after 2 full days. Not very amazing IMO.

No . . to me the critical thing about battery life besides maximum drain rate at full brightness is how light on drain rate the device is when in deep sleep. Kernel has a lot to do with this but it's irrelevant for those who don't root (and those of us who have are still waiting for custom kernel development too so its not going to be any better than it is now anyway). That said, the stock kernel seems to be fairly aggressive on power consumption already since it is so good in standby.

I'm with mickeylittle777, I'm the type to charge frequently since I too have an office job. For me the most critical battery life measure I worry about is standby drain since I view it as mostly a waste of power when i'm not using the device actively. If I know I'll be away from power for a while I'll bring my Anker Astro3 along with me and I'll be fine.

I often wonder if those who worry a lot about battery life are the type that do not top of charge and instead charge once every couple of days. I've always been of the opinion that waiting until the battery is low before charging as opposed to topping off nightly really isn't going to benefit me much at all in terms of lifespan of the battery. Charging from lower battery levels only puts the battery through a higher temperature charging cycle for longer periods of time throughout the life of the device. This is all subjective opinion though but charging every night has worked for me on all of the devices I've had so thats what I'll continue to do. Besides, I'm always near a power source at least once a day so why not take advantage of it instead of being sorry I didnt when my battery is low on the go.
 
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