My issue with battery life

[PapaGary]

just a little more info, I currently use a 2014 2nd gen moto g which I got just to get back on android after apple for 2 years , My battery life is just starting to go strange ( have not found out why yet ) but normal use 100% at 7am down to 30 - 50 % at 11pm with 3 ish hours SOT ( a little bit less at the moment but not looked into why yet ) as for the bench marks stuff the main one is phone areana which covers loads of areas about the phones but confirmed some things on other sites ( cant remember what sites).

I have two Motorola XT1053s. One purchased in December 2013 and one purchased in October of 2014. Both were NIB. This last April the oldest one was starting to show battery loss in that it would only go for about 18 hours before needing a charge. As we were going on a three week vacation I copied the contents to the new one (gotta love Motorola Migrate) and swapped the SIM. Just for grins I factory reset on the older unit and then shut it off and put it in the drawer. After we got back I copied everything back to the older one and again used it as my daily carry. Much to my surprise I found that it would easily go 24 to 36 hours on a charge.<!> So- try a factory reset before giving up on it. You may be pleasantly surprised as I was.

 

[syspry]

I'm starting to notice something in the notification bar of some of the screenshots claiming exceptional battery life. Mobile data on their phone is showing 4G without the little "LTE" text next to it.

 

[erasat]

For those of you wondering what kind of battery life we are talking about here with the S6 Active, this is my first day with normal usage, no more settings or installing stuff, somewhere around 9 hours of SoT.

 

[erasat]

I'm starting to notice something in the notification bar of some of the screenshots claiming exceptional battery life. Mobile data on their phone is showing 4G without the little "LTE" text next to it.

Because LTE icon is only shown in the American carriers, Most of the rest of the world 4G means 4G LTE in the states are in some Caribbean and Latin American Countries.

 

[Erm10]

I unplugged at 6 a.m. and I am already at 54 percent at 10:30 a.m. . Very light use I am already at 54 percent at 1030 am . Very light use and I have strong cell and wifi signal. I refuse to constantly turn location off and adjust settings.

 

[syspry]

I suspected that it was simply carrier labeling but wasn't sure, thanks for clearing that up

 

[razza1987]

Because LTE icon is only shown in the American carriers, Most of the rest of the world 4G means 4G LTE in the states are in some Caribbean and Latin American Countries.

Exactly. Here there is no such thing as just LTE coverage. In Australia 4G IS LTE

 

[Aloys G]

Depends on the level of your cellular signal. Moderate to weak signal will kill your battery, better stay on wifi then. When you have a very strong signal, the drain is higher on wifi.

 

[Aloys G]

Since there is a lot of S6-based replies, please allow me to chip in with my G4 experience (not comparing since I never owned the S6).

Overall battery life is, I'd say, above average for me. I get easily through the day and then some, with 3 to 4h SOT.
That being said I say never trust an SOT statement. SOT with lightweight apps like whatsapp or news reading is not comparable with SOT on some games or network-intensive apps.

On the settings side for me:
- Location always on high accuracy
- Google Now on
- Wifi automatically deactivated when I leave home (for all intent and purposes I use Tasker but this can be done with the built-in smart settings as long as you keep location on high accuracy)
- BT always on since I have an Android Wear device
- Brightness set to auto (I'll never understand people staying on full brightness or low one, love the phone's readability in direct sunlight)
The rest is pretty much out of the box (I enabled Fast Dormancy but that's the only "exotic" tweak I did and I'm not even sure this is making a world of difference)

My setup is to favor functionality over battery life, but I still try to keep an eye on what's killing my juice.

Also, if you care about wireless charging, getting it on the G4 is very easy (buy a sticker on Amazon, 5 minutes to install and you're good to go). Finally, G4 does support Quick Charge but the supplied wall plug isn't a Quick Charger.

Hope this helps you with your choice.

 

[MaccaBird]

I'm chiming in with my battery life details.

I have a Verizon Galaxy S6, and my battery life is terrible. I get about 6-7 hours of use before I'm at like 10%. Total screen time around two hours. Currently, my battery is just being completely obliterated by the WiFi standby bug. If I'm connected to WiFi my battery drains really quickly, and the phone gets hot when browsing twitter or other trivial things. "Cell Standby" and "Android System" are always above "screen" on the battery stats.

 

[warpdrive]

AT&T S6, if this is bad battery then please show me something better...

Posted via the Android Central App

Edit: this is with 3 hours of gaming, some YouTube and other junk.

 

[8taylor8]

My galaxy s6 has its good days and its bad days. It all depends on what im doing on it that day. Either way i have had it for a month now and only had it die on me once before putting it on the charger when going to bed. All in all, im happy with the phone and the battery.

Posted via the GS6

 

[Almeuit]

Wifi drains the phone faster than the cellular data does

Depends on the situation. I get good signal with T-Mobile around town but home has been weak and wifi helps.

I got a booster recently to help my cell signal and still use my wifi and the drain is minimal on my G4 (international model). I lose about 0.5 percent an hour with nothing disabled / full syncs.

So the wifi vs cellular definitely varies from area to area.

 

[taft]

My girlfriend has the S6 and gets terrible battery life.

There's definitely steps you can take to address that... Many steps if you are willing... But is it worth buying? I would not buy a phone if the expectation is that you must alter your usage or tweak things just so you can get average battery life.

Now it needs to be said that LP has been horrible on battery life for many phones. Standby drain issues are widespread, and usually only addressable with custom ROMs or kernels. I expect things to improve soon, but in the end if your phone does not have a big battery there is only so much you can expect it to do under ideal use conditions.

the S6 has a below average sized battery but with above average screen resolution; you should be seeing red flags if you are anything more than a light to average user.

 

[ray sital]

You basically need to disable all the cool/useful features of the phone and reduce what seems like an amazing device to an old school flip phone.

You guys are calling his tips optimizations???

It's more like dumbing down the phone.

Smh.

The battery life on the s6 is mediocre. Every reviewer has said. Even the reviewers on this site.

Here's the link where just about everyone said, the battery life is bad.

http://m.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s6-three-months



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[taft]

You basically need to disable all the cool/useful features of the phone and reduce what seems like an amazing device to an old school flip phone.

You guys are calling his tips optimizations???

It's more like dumbing down the phone.

Smh.

The battery life on the s6 is mediocre. Every reviewer has said. Even the reviewers on this site.

Here's the link where just about everyone said, the battery life is bad.

Samsung Galaxy S6, three months on | Android Central



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

To be fair, those "optimisations" mentioned don't really "dumb" the phone down. I had a look through them and they are pretty basic. The optional steps, on the other hand, go a little into dumbing down the phone territory.

S6 users looking for better standby time, and are rooted, would be better off following the steps here: [GUIDE]Extreme Battery Life Thread(Greenify+… | Android Development and Hacking | XDA Forums. These tweaks are the real deal.

 

[erasat]

I am the author of that thread, and like I mentioned at the beginning, those are for people that want to do what they can to get better battery life, for those of you that don't like them or think whatever you want about it, it's simple, then don't do it.

Obviously they are there for people that own the phone, those of you that don't even own the phone, I still don't understand why you keep coming to this forums, almost 4 months after the phone has been released when your intentions have never been to get one.

The "optimization" term came recently, because people love to say that iPhones are better optimized, I simply mentioned that iPhone seems better optimized because simply doesn't run tons of services and apps in the background like Android do by default, that on iPhones, for some it means optimization, but doing the same in Android (removing bloatware, and disabling and uninstalling dozens of unnecessary services and apps from Google and Samsung) is crippling the device and turning useful things on Android, talking about double standard here. Again, I'm optimizing my device simply because it comes heavily loaded by default, every possible service and useless features on by default, turning them off is optimizing my device, something that not even Google is doing. Leaving everything on isn't a good thing no matter what you think, if you want to keep doing it, good for you.

I'm still amazed by the way people take this recommendations and how they still don't understand the reason behind them, for the last time, I don't need to have Location History (now with Location Reporting incorporated) pinging my device every minute, this has been the biggest battery drain for our devices and all the rest with latest Google PLAY services installed, if you want to waste your battery on it, good for you, but not for me, I still use my Location 24X7, but in Power saving mode, just change it to GPS when need to get a more accurate location when using Google maps. The same for Bluetooth and NFC, why having them on all the time if I'm not using them, now tell me, how am I crippling my device, which are the features that I'm turning off that are dumbing down my phone?

Wifi calling and VoLTE, I don't use wifi calling, I've never need it, so it's off, if I need it, just turn it on, simple as that, VoLTE, let me tell you only one thing, not available where I live, so why leave it on? This 2 were proven to be cause for some of the cellular standby drain bug since the phone was released, so tell me, do I need to leave them on wasting battery life of I don't use them? For those of you that use them, great, I've never said that turn off things you will use, I've never encouraged anybody to cripple the device, I've been very clear in my threads and posts, that every thing that I'm recommending to turn off is because you don't need them or to turn them off temporary until a fix is released, like it was the case of this 2 features, and according to some, latest software updates released this week covered those 2 issues.

Enough of this, I don't have time to keep explaining the same, for those of you that want to get the best battery life on or phones, do the tweaks you think you can do, they will definitely help you, for those of you that refuse to do your part on getting better battery life, it's up to you, but listen, it's not Samsung's fault like it or not, they designed and made the phone and clearly told you the specs including the battery size, if you went out and bought it, then you should have known better that in order to get great battery life you'll need to do some tweaks, 2550 or 2600 mAh batteries on a qHD display is not a killer combination to get great battery life, so you needed to know at least that. But even then, doing some simple tweaks that won't cripple your device, no matter what others insist on saying, removing all Carrier, Google and Samsung Bloatware plus turning off some default running services until needed, can give you great battery life like has been shown here dozens of times by me and a lot others.

 

[OriginalMrC]

There's lots of talk of the s6 having mediocre battery life but that is not my email experience at all. I get between 5-7 SOT and the battery easily lasts a day of heavy use. This is comparable with my s5 and also very similar to what I get on my iPhone 6. I have nothing turned off and have done no optimisation other than to set a number of apps to auto close after 10 mins.

I know some people have issues with the s6 battery but it shouldn't be assumed that it has mediocre battery life because that is not the case at all for all users

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[erasat]

I know this is not the S6 Active forum, so this will be my last screenshot about it, I'm posting this to show you what can be achieved by doing some tweaks, I've done basically the same tweaks I've done in my 2 S6 to the Active, removing all bloatware and uninstalling or disabling all carrier, Samsung and Google apps or services that I will NEVER use, plus the brightness in auto while outdoors and at around 15% while indoors, I've been a lot outdoors lately because of work and workouts, and before you even dare to critique my 15% indoors, that's the most my eyes tolerate and around the same brightness I always use in my HTC, LG, Sony, Motorola and OnePlus devices I've had in the past year.

Only thing I'm doing different on this one because as you can see I don't need to charge it every night, is that I'm using Airplane mode while I sleep and when I wake up, it's still at the same battery percentage I left it when I went to sleep, I don't need calls or notifications while sleeping, and I still can use it as my alarm.

I've been running for more than 36 hours and I'm still at 50% averaging 9 hours of SoT, simply amazing.

 

[razza1987]

I know this is not the S6 Active forum, so this will be my last screenshot about it, I'm posting this to show you what can be achieved by doing some tweaks, I've done basically the same tweaks I've done in my 2 S6 to the Active, removing all bloatware and uninstalling or disabling all carrier, Samsung and Google apps or services that I will NEVER use, plus the brightness in auto while outdoors and at around 15% while indoors, I've been a lot outdoors lately because of work and workouts, and before you even dare to critique my 15% indoors, that's the most my eyes tolerate and around the same brightness I always use in my HTC, LG, Sony, Motorola and OnePlus devices I've had in the past year.

Only thing I'm doing different on this one because as you can see I don't need to charge it every night, is that I'm using Airplane mode while I sleep and when I wake up, it's still at the same battery percentage I left it when I went to sleep, I don't need calls or notifications while sleeping, and I still can use it as my alarm.

I've been running for more than 36 hours and I'm still at 50% averaging 9 hours of SoT, simply amazing.

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I hate seeing screen shots for the active. Gimme gimme gimme lol