Good Evening Everyone,
I thought I would post here seen as over the past two weeks I'v been searching frantically for battery solutions and have come up with the reason as to why >>my<< main reason to battery drain is. I'll go over my steps to try mitigate the issue and what I'm having to do with my phone now.
To start off with I'll say that I'm bitterly disappointed with the end product for the amount of money I'm paying per month with regards to signal strength and plain ole battery performance, even down to the size of the battery. The Edge does have a very marginal bigger battery over the S6 however I believe if you want to utilize your phone to it's full potential you'll have to be sat next to a charger.
My Attempts to Fix / Mitigate
These options came from countless hours of browsing the forums and tech dev blogs.
My S6 Edge's Journey. Stock / Not Rooted - 64 GB -
Simple to Advanced
- Screen % Brightness.
I don't trust auto and reports that it's broken concerns me. Manually set to 20% - 30%
- Location Settings.
(Disable when not in-use)
- Sync.
Manually set-up Sync, Setting >> Accounts. Disable Google Account Syncs, Basically down to a bare minimum.
- WiFi
Like a lot of people I need WiFi on 100% of the time when I'm at home. This can come down to contractual mobile data limits or other restrictions on data usage. It drains battery yes however there are settings to change on your router to mitigate the power use I believe. This is a power hit I'm prepared to take.
- Background Wallpaper
Black Black Black, due to the nature of the screen the phone actually shuts off the pixels that are completely black resulting in a power save and the screen is the biggest hit on this phone by a mile.
- Cache Cleaning // Memory Cleaning Applications
Honestly, I'm not 100% on this. I have read conflicting reports that applications such as Clean Master, DU Battery & More don't actually contribute to battery save however put an even bigger drain on the battery. I have read that the applications in question clean cache's that are at some points created to stabilize the performance of certain apps, they also run as 'hidden apps' in the background draining power. Please correct me on this if this is not the case.
- Advanced (Ish)
Manually clean the phone's cache. Whilst the phone is powered down, hold down the power button, home key and volume up buttons until you see the android icon appear. using the volume key's as menu sliders tab down to clean cache and hit the power key. This will perform a cache clean, then scroll up to reboot device and press the power key. This has been reported to increase performance and battery (unsure how).
Bare in mind this is a list of tasks I have completed and not a mandatory must do to get perfect battery life.
- Full Reset The Device
Recommended before you even start personalizing the device. Reports that it refreshes the phone completely and improves battery life. To do so follow the above procedure but on the boot up menu instead of cleaning the cache scroll to reset device.
- Power Saving Modes
A great feature, however I dislike it because I prefer a top of the line phone running at it's best. I use it however when I'm out and about on a preset that suits me, on another note I do use this for an overnight idle state. The power saving mode can be set to activate immediately or when the battery hits a certain %. This reduces the clock speed on the CPU and disables a lot of the fancy flowery stuff such as key vibrations and other extras that drain (minimal) power.
Bloat & Application Updates
When you first power your brand sparkly new phone on you'll be hit with a start-up sequence that runs you run account setups and fingerprint security setups. I usually skip account setups until I manually do it for the play store or certain accounts etc. You'll want to head over to Settings >> Applications >> all and run down the list and uninstall // disable all the applications you are not going to use from Skype to Hangouts to S Voice.
You'll also have updates pending from the play store. Samsung's Push Services will be one which I believe is important as one of the change logs describes a power saving issue being fixed. (It never goes into detail however even on their website) so it is unknown as to what was actually fixed but reports of battery drain being reduced have been shown.
Google are apparently working on a battery drain mitigation for the new lollipop update but again that's from what I'v read on the forums.
My Phone's Getting Exchanged
This is entirely unrelated to the battery drain problems as I do believe this is entirely software based and I'll tell you why.
Last night I left my phone with 60% charge on with :
- WiFi - On
- Mobile Data - On
- Location - Off
- Battery Saving Du Pro - On (Runs in background apparently)
(Feature turned on that kills background hidden applications every 30 minutes)
- Sync - Off
- No Applications Running Apart from the above
Went to bed approx midnight and woke up at 8am. The phone was completely dead.
I know the problem, I know the cause and it's completely utterly down to my signal.
I had done a complete phone reset and installed absolutely nothing and roughly the same drain happened, a good 30-40% overnight.
I am with Vodafone in the United Kingdom and the coverage for my area on the websites mapping was completely green. 4G + Signal, however I only receive 1 bar of signal. However my Fiancee who is with EE gets 4/5 bars on her IPhone and her battery doesn't budge.
Whenever the signal on the Edge gets low, the phone automatically boosts power to the chip in attempts to maintain the signal and not completely drop out which results in battery loss.
WiFi, I get 1 bar on WiFi as my router is downstairs. I believe (however unsure if the same applies as to the cell signal) that the phone boosts the power to the WiFi to try maintain the strength and not drop out. This is one of my main reasons to battery drain and I can't help that. However. My previous phone the HTC M8 could maintain a steady 2 bars and full WiFi signal.
Conclusion?
Disheartened but not to the point of unhappy. I love the phone I do, I love the Edge's design and stand-out eye catching architecture, the camera is the best I'v seen on a phone, touchwiz is better than ever and I'v chosen to stick with it over a custom launcher. I am however exchanging my phone due to GPS problems which have been confirmed by the outlet whom sold me the device (after testing).
The battery I believe isn't my main concern, it's the signal strength. I have turned my cell data off overnight and lost considerably less battery % however what I don't understand is why a phone that costs so much can't maintain a signal that the M8 could.
I'll update this once my new phone has arrived and see how the two devices differ from each other. I do hope mine is just a defective one and the GPS problem is somehow contributing to the power loss.
Thanks for reading and please reply with your attempts to improve your battery life or even successful attempts to do so!
(also don't be afraid to correct anything I'v said and I'll change it accordingly)
I thought I would post here seen as over the past two weeks I'v been searching frantically for battery solutions and have come up with the reason as to why >>my<< main reason to battery drain is. I'll go over my steps to try mitigate the issue and what I'm having to do with my phone now.
To start off with I'll say that I'm bitterly disappointed with the end product for the amount of money I'm paying per month with regards to signal strength and plain ole battery performance, even down to the size of the battery. The Edge does have a very marginal bigger battery over the S6 however I believe if you want to utilize your phone to it's full potential you'll have to be sat next to a charger.
My Attempts to Fix / Mitigate
These options came from countless hours of browsing the forums and tech dev blogs.
My S6 Edge's Journey. Stock / Not Rooted - 64 GB -
Simple to Advanced
- Screen % Brightness.
I don't trust auto and reports that it's broken concerns me. Manually set to 20% - 30%
- Location Settings.
(Disable when not in-use)
- Sync.
Manually set-up Sync, Setting >> Accounts. Disable Google Account Syncs, Basically down to a bare minimum.
- WiFi
Like a lot of people I need WiFi on 100% of the time when I'm at home. This can come down to contractual mobile data limits or other restrictions on data usage. It drains battery yes however there are settings to change on your router to mitigate the power use I believe. This is a power hit I'm prepared to take.
- Background Wallpaper
Black Black Black, due to the nature of the screen the phone actually shuts off the pixels that are completely black resulting in a power save and the screen is the biggest hit on this phone by a mile.
- Cache Cleaning // Memory Cleaning Applications
Honestly, I'm not 100% on this. I have read conflicting reports that applications such as Clean Master, DU Battery & More don't actually contribute to battery save however put an even bigger drain on the battery. I have read that the applications in question clean cache's that are at some points created to stabilize the performance of certain apps, they also run as 'hidden apps' in the background draining power. Please correct me on this if this is not the case.
- Advanced (Ish)
Manually clean the phone's cache. Whilst the phone is powered down, hold down the power button, home key and volume up buttons until you see the android icon appear. using the volume key's as menu sliders tab down to clean cache and hit the power key. This will perform a cache clean, then scroll up to reboot device and press the power key. This has been reported to increase performance and battery (unsure how).
Bare in mind this is a list of tasks I have completed and not a mandatory must do to get perfect battery life.
- Full Reset The Device
Recommended before you even start personalizing the device. Reports that it refreshes the phone completely and improves battery life. To do so follow the above procedure but on the boot up menu instead of cleaning the cache scroll to reset device.
- Power Saving Modes
A great feature, however I dislike it because I prefer a top of the line phone running at it's best. I use it however when I'm out and about on a preset that suits me, on another note I do use this for an overnight idle state. The power saving mode can be set to activate immediately or when the battery hits a certain %. This reduces the clock speed on the CPU and disables a lot of the fancy flowery stuff such as key vibrations and other extras that drain (minimal) power.
Bloat & Application Updates
When you first power your brand sparkly new phone on you'll be hit with a start-up sequence that runs you run account setups and fingerprint security setups. I usually skip account setups until I manually do it for the play store or certain accounts etc. You'll want to head over to Settings >> Applications >> all and run down the list and uninstall // disable all the applications you are not going to use from Skype to Hangouts to S Voice.
You'll also have updates pending from the play store. Samsung's Push Services will be one which I believe is important as one of the change logs describes a power saving issue being fixed. (It never goes into detail however even on their website) so it is unknown as to what was actually fixed but reports of battery drain being reduced have been shown.
Google are apparently working on a battery drain mitigation for the new lollipop update but again that's from what I'v read on the forums.
My Phone's Getting Exchanged
This is entirely unrelated to the battery drain problems as I do believe this is entirely software based and I'll tell you why.
Last night I left my phone with 60% charge on with :
- WiFi - On
- Mobile Data - On
- Location - Off
- Battery Saving Du Pro - On (Runs in background apparently)
(Feature turned on that kills background hidden applications every 30 minutes)
- Sync - Off
- No Applications Running Apart from the above
Went to bed approx midnight and woke up at 8am. The phone was completely dead.
I know the problem, I know the cause and it's completely utterly down to my signal.
I had done a complete phone reset and installed absolutely nothing and roughly the same drain happened, a good 30-40% overnight.
I am with Vodafone in the United Kingdom and the coverage for my area on the websites mapping was completely green. 4G + Signal, however I only receive 1 bar of signal. However my Fiancee who is with EE gets 4/5 bars on her IPhone and her battery doesn't budge.
Whenever the signal on the Edge gets low, the phone automatically boosts power to the chip in attempts to maintain the signal and not completely drop out which results in battery loss.
WiFi, I get 1 bar on WiFi as my router is downstairs. I believe (however unsure if the same applies as to the cell signal) that the phone boosts the power to the WiFi to try maintain the strength and not drop out. This is one of my main reasons to battery drain and I can't help that. However. My previous phone the HTC M8 could maintain a steady 2 bars and full WiFi signal.
Conclusion?
Disheartened but not to the point of unhappy. I love the phone I do, I love the Edge's design and stand-out eye catching architecture, the camera is the best I'v seen on a phone, touchwiz is better than ever and I'v chosen to stick with it over a custom launcher. I am however exchanging my phone due to GPS problems which have been confirmed by the outlet whom sold me the device (after testing).
The battery I believe isn't my main concern, it's the signal strength. I have turned my cell data off overnight and lost considerably less battery % however what I don't understand is why a phone that costs so much can't maintain a signal that the M8 could.
I'll update this once my new phone has arrived and see how the two devices differ from each other. I do hope mine is just a defective one and the GPS problem is somehow contributing to the power loss.
Thanks for reading and please reply with your attempts to improve your battery life or even successful attempts to do so!
(also don't be afraid to correct anything I'v said and I'll change it accordingly)
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