Help Battery drain: Approximately 24% an hour?

[RobertRiter]

Well, I just conducted a test with minimum phone usage but leaving 4G enabled, and it comes out to being 24% drain an hour approximately.

I know this phone has a reputation for burning the battery fast, but is this within normal operation? I was under the impression you could get a good 8 hours at least out of the thing, but this will be dead in just over 4. Not counting internet usage!

Also, my phone gets pretty warm when it's just in standby / idle state and 4G is on.. is this normal?

I'm starting to think my problems may go above and beyond the average battery drain issues. Given another poster can't keep the phone on the charger when in 4G (I can, but it charges like 3% an hour) I'm wondering if there's some defective batteries out there?

 

[ickster]

I have to agree with your calculation. I had mine in the charger, pulled it out and three and a half hours later, the battery was down to about 10%. That's why I have a spare battery.
I do have everything set on the worst settings. Brightness all the way up, screen time out on ten minutes, powersaver settings off, all animations on, etc.

 

[MetroPOS]

Yes I have noticed that even leaving the phone idle with LTE enabled will obliterate your battery after enough time passes. And if you think that's bad...if you have it turned on and run a TV streaming app, your battery will lose over 40 - 50% of its life within an hour. Why was I watching a tv streaming app for an hour? Well one of the international channels just so happens to have porn on at a certain time of day. Those lucky bastards.

 

[ickster]

why was i watching a tv streaming app for an hour? Well one of the international channels just so happens to have porn on at a certain time of day. Those lucky bastards.

rofl !

 

[MetroPOS]

baysiderider has already covered this pretty thoroughly...but with my Indulge, when I disable LTE, plug the phone into a wall charger and turn off the screen (hit the screen lock button) and leave it alone, I gain +-35% battery life every hour.

Started charging tonight after battery life got down to 4%, and turned the screen back on to check the battery life exactly 1 hour later and it was at 41%
Then exactly 1 hour after that I checked again and it was at 75%
So we're looking at an average of about 35% battery life recovery per hour of charging with LTE turned off and no activity. I also still have some bloatware left on my phone too...so perhaps without the bloatware I'd be able to squeeze out a little more from a charge as well.

But the point is..if you turn off LTE and leave the phone alone, you should be able to fully charge it in 3 hours.

If leaving 4G on for an hour with minimal activity is draining you by 24% an hour...well let's just say you throw in a little bit of youtube/sms message/web browsing/couple phone calls during that hour. You'd probably be looking at closer to 35-40% drain on battery life after an hour with 4G on. But if you can charge it with 4G off and leave the phone alone for just 1 hour after that, the battery should be able to get back up to where it was an hour ago before all your usage. That must be how I'm managing to get through an 8 - 9 hour workday with a little bit of battery life left by the time I get home. Some days I'll charge it for 2 hours in the middle of the day when I know I just drained the hell out of it with an app/game/video...but usually just 1 hour of charging around 1 or 2pm is all I'll need.

Really depends on your daily schedule though. If you're a student who is in class for several hours a day, I can see how you could be screwed with this phone cause you'd have 3+ hours with no way to charge. But if you're in an office setting...the battery life is very manageble by disabling 4G mode...especially if you bought a second USB cord for charging at your computer like I did.

 

[tiede]

While I admit that battery life on this phone is not the greatest for me, it's not anywhere near as bad as what you folks are reporting. I charge my battery over night, with 4g on, before I go to work and never charge it again until at least 5:30. And that's if I remember. And at that time, my battery will be hovering at around 40%... My day starts at around 9-10 am. Granted I turn 4g off during the day (if I remember to cause otherwise it drops to 25-30%), and I don't have any bloat ware at all on the phone, and I have setcpu on conservative mode and a replacement launcher (Go Launcher Ex), I am shocked to hear how bad some of your phones battery life are!

 

[MikesTooLz]

When they say the phone gets 3 hours of talk time, is that while plugged into the charger?

 

[MetroPOS]

Wow it is amazing how bad the 4G drain really is. Right now I have the phone plugged into wall charger with Pandora running on 4G and I'm not doing anything else with the phone...and the battery life hasn't even gone up by 1% after half an hour of charging. It's just stuck where it was before I connected the charger. Pretty ridiculous.

 

[RobertRiter]

I recently tried turning off background data and am shocked, and I mean shocked at how much an improvement there is at all times.

The phone no longer gets hot in my pocket. It's battery, even with 4G on, is now lasting at least twice as long as it did before, possibly better.

I'm not sure what the hell default program MetroPCS is running on the Android that's using that much background data, but it seems like it has made a night & day difference. Once I've tried it out for a couple days, I'll probably post a new thread with my findings.

I would almost wager it's one of their "feature" programs that's basically accessing the 4G non-stop until the phone battery completely obliterates itself. If any of you guys want to try too, I'd love to hear how it impacts everyone!

 

[TRS-80]

When they say the phone gets 3 hours of talk time, is that while plugged into the charger?

lol

 

[dongemus]

any updates?