Is this normal battery life?

[Spartacus MD]

I unplugged my phone today at 7am, and I did not do anything to it until I got to work (20 minutes later) and at that point the battery was down to 96%

It is now 6:30pm, and today I have done about 15 minutes of youtube on mid-brightness, checked my email several times, was on facebook for 15 minutes, and browsed the internet for maybe a grand total of 30 minutes. I'd consider this all light to average use. My battery is now down to 40%. I feel like it is draining too fast. I have included screen shots of all my settings. Please help, is my battery defective?

EDIT: also it seems like (as seen in the screenshot below) that something is "waking" my phone up quite frequently...

 

[fishepa]

Your time on screen seems a little low to me. Do you have auto brightness on?

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[AllAbout813]

From what Ive read (im no expert by any means), the location services KILL your battery. Id say part of the reason it may be dying fast is the google maps using so much of it. Its up to you and I dont know how much you depend on it but turning off location services saves tremendous amounts of energy.

Also, if you are just paranoid I have seen spare batteries for sale on Amazon already for not that much money.

 

[mhunter6378]

From my use experience I was getting similar battery usage as what your screenshots show when I first got my S4. Then I found some areas to adjust that worked for me. First your wifi can be set to turn off during sleep (when the screen is off - not in use). Go to settings, select wifi, hit menu button and select advanced, select keep wifi on during sleep then sub menu "only when plugged in". With that option your wifi only activates when you wake the phone for use or when plugged in, big power savings! Secondly, I keep all my locations services on and like you had big Maps battery usage. Turned off location services and still had big Maps usage. What I did was in settings, application manager, go to All, find Maps, clear data, clear cache, disable. New pop up ask if you want to use factory application select yes/ok and exit. Then Google maps updates and no more big battery draw. Today with all location services on including GPS, Maps usage after 14 hours is at 6%. Hope this helps.

 

[thegrants82]

From my use experience I was getting similar battery usage as what your screenshots show when I first got my S4. Then I found some areas to adjust that worked for me. First your wifi can be set to turn off during sleep (when the screen is off - not in use). Go to settings, select wifi, hit menu button and select advanced, select keep wifi on during sleep then sub menu "only when plugged in". With that option your wifi only activates when you wake the phone for use or when plugged in, big power savings! Secondly, I keep all my locations services on and like you had big Maps battery usage. Turned off location services and still had big Maps usage. What I did was in settings, application manager, go to All, find Maps, clear data, clear cache, disable. New pop up ask if you want to use factory application select yes/ok and exit. Then Google maps updates and no more big battery draw. Today with all location services on including GPS, Maps usage after 14 hours is at 6%. Hope this helps.

Wow. I like that wifi tip a lot. One question though. Will the phone use more battery while sleeping connected to 4g instead of wifi?

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[mhunter6378]

Not in my case it doesn't. As long as you have a good cellular signal it works fine. It seems 4g/Lte battery drains occur with week signal strength.

 

[Spartacus MD]

Your time on screen seems a little low to me. Do you have auto brightness on?

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Auto bright is not on

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[smooth4lyfe]

Get this app called Better Battery Stats... It tells you every little thing from apps to processes that is taking your battery... Helped me a lot

Sent from my Galaxy S4 Exynos!

 

[Titan206]

I would suggest turning off location reporting from the Google Maps application. I leave the location history on, for Google Now purposes.

Also, disabling GPS when not in use should help as well.

 

[Calidoc]

I get the same battery life. Bad.

 

[Notsosure]

My S4 is the same. Considering the battery size I can't believe how fast it drains and I have to charge twice a day. I am hoping Samsung pushes out a fix for this.

Sent from my Galaxy S4 using Tapatalk

 

[garublador]

My S4 is the same. Considering the battery size I can't believe how fast it drains and I have to charge twice a day. I am hoping Samsung pushes out a fix for this.

Sent from my Galaxy S4 using Tapatalk

I'm not sure it's a Samsung thing. People have been seeing very similar results on many other phones running Jelly Bean.

I was getting the exact same battery performance and I believe it's normal. There are a few other recent battery threads where people, myself included, have talked about what they have done to help.

 

[Johnny Roberts]

LOL, I must be a very light user. My battery averages about a day and a half on one charge.

 

[paintdrinkingpete]

To the OP -- that battery life is *great*, but it's not that bad either. I'd monitor over a few days to get a better sample size before starting to panic.

From what Ive read (im no expert by any means), the location services KILL your battery. Id say part of the reason it may be dying fast is the google maps using so much of it. Its up to you and I dont know how much you depend on it but turning off location services saves tremendous amounts of energy.

Also, if you are just paranoid I have seen spare batteries for sale on Amazon already for not that much money.

From my use experience I was getting similar battery usage as what your screenshots show when I first got my S4. Then I found some areas to adjust that worked for me. First your wifi can be set to turn off during sleep (when the screen is off - not in use). Go to settings, select wifi, hit menu button and select advanced, select keep wifi on during sleep then sub menu "only when plugged in". With that option your wifi only activates when you wake the phone for use or when plugged in, big power savings! Secondly, I keep all my locations services on and like you had big Maps battery usage. Turned off location services and still had big Maps usage. What I did was in settings, application manager, go to All, find Maps, clear data, clear cache, disable. New pop up ask if you want to use factory application select yes/ok and exit. Then Google maps updates and no more big battery draw. Today with all location services on including GPS, Maps usage after 14 hours is at 6%. Hope this helps.

Wow. I like that wifi tip a lot. One question though. Will the phone use more battery while sleeping connected to 4g instead of wifi?

Posted via Android Central App

I disagree with some of this...

1. Location services only kills your battery if you use it. When Google Now first came out, I thought it was pretty cool...but I also noticed that Google Maps was drawing a lot more juice because the app is very location-centric. I disabled Google Now cards and Google Maps is hardly a blip on my battery usage radar. Otherwise, I still leave all location services turned on for the times I need to use it. It may not be Google Now in your case, but chances are if "maps" usage is high (and you're not specifically using the Google Maps app), then *something* is constantly pinging for your location -- rather than completely disable services, I'd try to figure out what I can do to reduce that.

2. I have personally found that leaving wifi on is best practice, at least when you are in range of one of your known networks. If I have my device selectively turn it off when the screen is off, my device either uses more power syncing over mobile data or simply fails to sync at all with the screen off (and hey, I want to be notified if I get a new email!). Again, leaving wifi on isn't going to drain power -- it's apps accessing the network that will...I try to limit how much data I have running in the background, but I'm certainly not going to cripple my device by turning it off either.

This has been mentioned on a few other threads around here, but another thing to add is that if you haven't tried Snapdragon Battery Guru yet, you should give it a shot. The degree of battery savings it can give you depends a bit on how you actually use your phone, but for as light a user as the OP claims to be, it could definitely make a difference.

 

[fishepa]

The Snapdragon battery guru finished learning yesterday, so I'm running on my first day with it right now. Already down to 80% battery with on screen time of 30 minutes. Google Services, whatever those are, seem to be taking up 34% of the battery to this point. I'm just about to give up. I will never see the battery life of some people in this thread, and I just don't get it.

 

[cgardnervt]

The Snapdragon battery guru finished learning yesterday, so I'm running on my first day with it right now. Already down to 80% battery with on screen time of 30 minutes. Google Services, whatever those are, seem to be taking up 34% of the battery to this point. I'm just about to give up. I will never see the battery life of some people in this thread, and I just don't get it.

My HTC One seems to be in the same boat as you. Not sure what "Service" runs all the time! I also have battery guru running.

 

[thegrants82]

The Snapdragon battery guru finished learning yesterday, so I'm running on my first day with it right now. Already down to 80% battery with on screen time of 30 minutes. Google Services, whatever those are, seem to be taking up 34% of the battery to this point. I'm just about to give up. I will never see the battery life of some people in this thread, and I just don't get it.

I think that you should consider a factory reset. Something isnt right with your phone.

 

[Spartacus MD]

Hey OP here,

Thanks for the replies ive been trying a lot of things. I want to figure out what the problem is before enabling guru. Again, about 4 hours since unplugged. Internet browsing for about an hour email checked a few times. Played angry birds for a bit and fumbled around in the OS for about another hour. Google now still enabled, location services on.

My battery is down to 68%, on screen time is 1hr 30mins, maps used 10% and screen used 62.

I don't mind exchanging for a new device but my friend with an iphone 4s which I just migrated from is doing the same stuff as me and more and shes at 83%. Just need to figure out if my battery is defective or if my phone is not optimized

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[garublador]

I don't mind exchanging for a new device but my friend with an iphone 4s which I just migrated from is doing the same stuff as me and more and shes at 83%. Just need to figure out if my battery is defective or if my phone is not optimized

It's almost certainly some settings.

 

[Spartacus MD]

Alright folk. So here it is, the end of my day (6:40 at the time of writing this and screen shots) and the battery juice is down to 4%.

I'd say I spent 3 hours surfing, 1 hour on email and texting, 5 minutes of youtube, and 5 minutes of angry birds, and finally maybe an hour or so of messing around with the OS. Here are the screen shots, and oh google now and location services both enabled. What do you guys think, is this within the range of normal?