You've probably read about it ad nauseum by now. "My battery life sucks. I get like 2-3 hours on screen and have to charge it by 3PM". When T-Mobile decided that they would ship their devices early, I'm sure they didn't count on such an issue almost crippling their devices. Unfortunately, for a lot of you, it did cripple your phone. There's even some of you who were having performance issues alongside the battery issue and the complaints came rolling in. Honestly, I can't blame you; this is such an amazing phone and having it handicapped like that isn't exactly inspiring. There were a lot of us that didn't want to call it a dud that early, though, and wanted to wait until other carriers released their variants. When that happened, there seemed to be quite a bit of us that got devices with largely improved battery life and no performance issues. There's still those of you not on T-Mobile who are having the issues, too, but the important part is that there's S6 and S6 Edge devices out there that are performing as they should be.
That's the key part here. Battery life doesn't just increase for no reason. There's consistency in these devices that are getting 4-5 hours on screen and 17-24 hours of use. What that shows is that devoid of any issues, the battery life ceiling on this device as of right now is pretty high. That's good news, not bad news. The bad news centers around why some of you are having such terrible battery life on a phone capable of so much more.
Lollipop was supposed to be more efficient than ever before. Obviously it would take some time for Project Volta to sink in, but the new and improved ART was going to go a long way in increasing battery life. Somewhere along the line, there was confirmation of a cell standby issue on a variety of different Lollipop devices. My Nexus 6 suffers from it. My brother's Nexus 5 suffers from it. I wouldn't be surprised if some G3 and M8/M9 owners aren't having issues. This isn't confined to just the S6. Google has to be aware of this problem and a fix to correct it probably won't be too far off. If I sold my S6 to get a Nexus 6, I would be taking a risk that my Nexus 6 is afflicted by it, too. I can't stress enough that this isn't some isolated Samsung issue.
With that said, there seems to be a few of you who refuse to alter any settings to increase your battery life. While I don't agree at all, I can understand the position. It's not that you have to tweak anything---you don't, but you can if you want to. If I handed my coworker this device to use, set up as it comes out of the box, he could use it and get a full day out of it. He easily could if he turns off features/syncs that he doesn't use or want. The option to further battery life should be a welcome one, though some of you don't seem to agree.
I'd be 100% on board with the pitchforks some of you are carrying if this was some blatant error from Samsung and all these devices performed terribly out of the box. That isn't the case. You either have the patience for Google to fix this error or you don't. Just know that you may jump right back into the fire on a new Lollipop device if that's your response to this. Both the S6 and S6 Edge have solid battery life and excellent performance. You can either trust the vocal minority or the people who day in and day out see and share how well this phone performs. That's up to you.
Posted via Galaxy S6 edge