Sprint Galaxy SIII 4.4 Kitkat available, should I update?

[OBF]

My S3 currently runs 4.3 and on standby the battery lasts very well but when I use it for about half an hour to only watch YouTube or check email the battery will already drop almost 10%, even with airplane mode on and wifi on and all the other gimmicks off like smart eye, etc. This never happened on 4.1.1. And now I have 4.4 OTA update available. So that brings me to my question, for those who are on Sprint and have updated theirs to 4.4, should I do it, how is battery life like on 4.4. Again, I know it all depends on how much you use it but I use my phone minimum to moderately and the battery rapidly drops. Is battery life on 4.4 significantly better than 4.3 or is it much worse?

 

[j_grouchy]

GPS reception took a huge hit on my device with the update. To me, that's the biggest problem. I have no idea if it's universal or even common.

 

[dominick]

GPS reception took a huge hit on my device with the update. To me, that's the biggest problem. I have no idea if it's universal or even common.

Waze was still good for me after the 4.4 update - didn't notice a diff. FWIW and YMMV

My S3 currently runs 4.3 and on standby the battery lasts very well but when I use it for about half an hour to only watch YouTube or check email the battery will already drop almost 10%, even with airplane mode on and wifi on and all the other gimmicks off like smart eye, etc. This never happened on 4.1.1. And now I have 4.4 OTA update available. So that brings me to my question, for those who are on Sprint and have updated theirs to 4.4, should I do it, how is battery life like on 4.4. Again, I know it all depends on how much you use it but I use my phone minimum to moderately and the battery rapidly drops. Is battery life on 4.4 significantly better than 4.3 or is it much worse?

a few things to respond to this:

1) batteries degrade over time. it's a fact of life, and thankfully with the S3 you can replace batteries very easily

2) while one would hope that battery management improves with a SW update, the fact of the matter is that the OS dev cannot take ever single user's customizations into account - these include what apps they have, what features they keep on and off, sound prefs, back light prefs, cell signal, and so on - the scenarios are practically infinite. OS devs can only reasonably test a few real-world scenarios and then ship updates on their way once testing yields enough positive results (keyword: "enough"). let's say you hard reset your phone before updating... 9 times out of 10, the update should improve pretty much every performance benchmark.

3) after about 10 charge cycles on 4.4, battery life seems to be back to where it was while running 4.3 - although I will say that the 4.4 update is very dim on my S3: I used to be able to read the phone at the lowest backlight setting, but I think they upped the minimum to make it a true night-time backlighting (25% lighting on 4.4 is about the same as 0% on 4.3, to me)

 

[OBF]

I'm just concerned that if I were to get an extended battery or a normal replacement battery, the phone would still deplete the battery even if it's new. Like I said I only use my phone minimum to moderately I'm not a heavy user that's on it all day. And I've seen many threads where users report they are a heavy user on their devices and can last anywhere to 14-16 hours of use. I don't even understand how that's even possible. Now I imagine I can probably maybe 5 hours at most on my device if I'm heavily using it. I don't have many apps on it. The main ones I use are YouTube, Chrome, and Yahoo Mail, which I use moderately. I'm still unsure whether to upgrade to 4.4.

 

[smvim]

Battery life on my S3 was OK on 4.1.2 and it actually improved a bit running 4.3. I've had 4.4.2 for a couple of weeks now and I've noticed a little drop in battery life so it's more or less the same as when I was on 4.1.2. As mentioned in a previous comment, I've seen some strangeness with GPS too. It often takes longer to work but so far it hasn't been a real problem. Those are pretty much my only complaints as I've also noticed my phone is more responsive overall. All my added apps still work and even though I've read about Google changing read/write permissions on external SDcards I haven't encountered any problems accessing/editing files I've stored on mine.