M8 quick battery drain after full charge until 88%

[anon(9026430)]

Hi,

After browsing for abit and reading some threads, I couldn't find my answer so I thought I sign up to the site and ask.

Had my M8 for 2 weeks now and at first the battery was terrible as I could barely get 12 hours out of the phone. After a hard reset, its now up to 30-35 hours with about 6-7 hours screen time. First of all, is this normal or is this still lacking? The most I got was 50 hours with 3 hours screen time and about 15% left on the battery before charging. I don't use the power saver feature on the phone.

Secondly, I have noticed that when I charge my phone to full, between 100% and 88%, the battery drains extremely quickly. It takes a third less time to drop a percent than below 88%. After that point the battery drain seems to be normal and fairly slow. Has anyone else experienced this and if so, did you have a solution?

Really appreciate any help you guys can offer.

Thanks, Ian

 

[Captain_Throwback]

Maybe your phone is trying to go back to the future?

But seriously, that's normal. A full charge can be anywhere between 90-100% on these devices, so that initial drop typically looks more dramatic than it actually is.

 

[Android Optimizer]

Had my M8 for 2 weeks now and at first the battery was terrible as I could barely get 12 hours out of the phone. After a hard reset, its now up to 30-35 hours with about 6-7 hours screen time. First of all, is this normal or is this still lacking? The most I got was 50 hours with 3 hours screen time and about 15% left on the battery before charging. I don't use the power saver feature on the phone.

Secondly, I have noticed that when I charge my phone to full, between 100% and 88%, the battery drains extremely quickly. It takes a third less time to drop a percent than below 88%. After that point the battery drain seems to be normal and fairly slow. Has anyone else experienced this and if so, did you have a solution?
Thanks, Ian

There are a lot of variables that could effect the answer to your questions.

First, what are you using your phone for during the screen time?
If you're using it to play games or video it's going to consume the battery faster than if your using it to listen to music, which in turn is going to consume it faster than if you are using it to view websites or update a widget. Likewise text-ing and phone calls would also use up the battery at a different speed. Battery life is very dependent on how you use the phone. Different users are going to get different results.
If you have apps set to sync or update in the background then you're going to use more power for wi-fi, mobile data, read/write to the internal/sd drive(s), and the cpu during those times compared to someone who has those disabled, or set to occur less often.

Many people on the forum use an app called GSam battery monitor, and it can predict (based on a number of different time periods of your choosing) how long the battery will last based on the way you've used your phone in that time period. GSam can also tell you what features (phone, screen, wifi, bluetooth, apps, etc) are using up how much of your battery. Are you using auto brightness, full brightness, or have you reduced your brightness setting. Screen brightness can have a significant effect on battery drain depending on how you have it set.

If you haven't already you can also check in App manager and the running section to see what apps are active and may be draining your battery. Any that you don't use or plan to use shown there you may want to either disable or uninstall. Finally if you have developer mode enabled on your phone you can go into the process status area to see what processes are the most active on your phone.

You say your battery drains extremely quickly from 100% to 88%, but how long is extremely quickly? 5 minutes, 8 hours? What's it doing during that time? Is it in use by you (screen on time), or is it sleeping?

For reference I get over 8 and 1/2 hours during that first 10% of a fully charged battery with it mostly sleeping, but also with light use during that time. It all depends on a combination of what you have running, how much you're using the phone, and what you're using it for during that 100-88% time.

 

[anon(9026430)]

There are a lot of variables that could effect the answer to your questions.

First, what are you using your phone for during the screen time?
If you're using it to play games or video it's going to consume the battery faster than if your using it to listen to music, which in turn is going to consume it faster than if you are using it to view websites or update a widget. Likewise text-ing and phone calls would also use up the battery at a different speed. Battery life is very dependent on how you use the phone. Different users are going to get different results.
If you have apps set to sync or update in the background then you're going to use more power for wi-fi, mobile data, read/write to the internal/sd drive(s), and the cpu during those times compared to someone who has those disabled, or set to occur less often.

Many people on the forum use an app called GSam battery monitor, and it can predict (based on a number of different time periods of your choosing) how long the battery will last based on the way you've used your phone in that time period. GSam can also tell you what features (phone, screen, wifi, bluetooth, apps, etc) are using up how much of your battery. Are you using auto brightness, full brightness, or have you reduced your brightness setting. Screen brightness can have a significant effect on battery drain depending on how you have it set.

If you haven't already you can also check in App manager and the running section to see what apps are active and may be draining your battery. Any that you don't use or plan to use shown there you may want to either disable or uninstall. Finally if you have developer mode enabled on your phone you can go into the process status area to see what processes are the most active on your phone.

You say your battery drains extremely quickly from 100% to 88%, but how long is extremely quickly? 5 minutes, 8 hours? What's it doing during that time? Is it in use by you (screen on time), or is it sleeping?

For reference I get over 8 and 1/2 hours during that first 10% of a fully charged battery with it mostly sleeping, but also with light use during that time. It all depends on a combination of what you have running, how much you're using the phone, and what you're using it for during that 100-88% time.

Thanks for the replies. I have already installed GSam and looking at the usage, it is mostly taken up by the screen (45-50%), followed by app usage and finally wifi at around 25%. The usual usage scenario is made up of texting, browsing the web, social networking and watching a couple of videos. I very rarely use games. I have disabled syncing for most apps, but I have left notifications enabled for apps such as facebook & ebay. Syncing is turned on for email and weather, which are set to 1 hour and 2 hours respectively. Between 1am and 9am, all syncing is disabled and sleep is turned on. Sleep mode disabled mobile data but keeps wifi active.

Regarding the initial battery drain, it seems sporadic. For instance, if I am using the phone, I will loose that battery life in less than an hour, if i am not or with light use, it lasts around 3-4 hours. Maybe its just conformation bias and I am simply looking for faults as the battery life was initially terrible but that seems to have gotten better.

What made me notice the issue was that when I fully charged my phone before going to sleep, the battery would drop 10% overnight. However, if I left the phone overnight when the battery was at say 70% it would use 1-2% at most, sometimes even nothing. I came up with the 88% by using the phone and almost looking when the length of time the percentage took to drop increased. Also, after charging it drops a couple of percent within 10 minutes of me taking it off.

I recently was converted from iPhone (I don't like apple as a company) so really I am comparing it to my old iPhone 4, which stuck at 100% for what seemed like an eternity before dropping.

Thanks for all your help.

 

[Android Optimizer]

Regarding the initial battery drain, it seems sporadic. For instance, if I am using the phone, I will loose that battery life in less than an hour, if i am not or with light use, it lasts around 3-4 hours.

Another area where my phone is likely different from your phone (and may account for some of the battery drain you're seeing during use) is that I'm using ART instead of Dalvik as my runtime system. (You can change it by enabling developer mode on your phone). Dalvik uses up battery by expanding apps every time you open them. (It also makes your phone slower to start-up). If you want to squeeze more battery life out of your phone you may want to experiment with ART to see how it works for you. Some people have said they've had problems with some older apps using ART, but I have yet to encounter any problems using ART. If you decide ART doesn't work for you you can switch back to Dalvik at any time.

 

[anon(9026430)]

Another area where my phone is likely different from your phone (and may account for some of the battery drain you're seeing during use) is that I'm using ART instead of Dalvik as my runtime system. (You can change it by enabling developer mode on your phone). Dalvik uses up battery by expanding apps every time you open them. (It also makes your phone slower to start-up). If you want to squeeze more battery life out of your phone you may want to experiment with ART to see how it works for you. Some people have said they've had problems with some older apps using ART, but I have yet to encounter any problems using ART. If you decide ART doesn't work for you you can switch back to Dalvik at any time.

Smashing thanks for the tip, I will enable it and see how I get on!

Thanks for your help

 

[SivanBH]

What made me notice the issue was that when I fully charged my phone before going to sleep, the battery would drop 10% overnight. However, if I left the phone overnight when the battery was at say 70% it would use 1-2% at most, sometimes even nothing.

Hi everyone,

Sorry to wake up this old post, but my LG G2 (which is even older than this post) is suffering from the exact same problem - before I go to sleep, I charge it fully, then I unplug it, turn off data and wifi, set the alarm, and then I don't touch it until next morning, by which time it has dropped from 100% to 85%-88% (looking in the battery usage statistics, it appears to be all consumed by Android system, cell standby and stuff like that, no apps and no screen). From this point on, the battery is actually behaving very well, it could last for a couple of days if not under heavy usage.

Any ideas?