Had to make important call: Battery Dead..Ready to jump ship

Buy a portable charger.

Deep charge your battery (s/b done once for a new phone/battery) and install JuiceDefender.

Just switch. Having come from the iPhone myself, I doubt you'll find the grass much greener. But you probably won't be happy until you play the field.

jlm86 said:

Have now owned 3 Androids, (2 HTC, and now a S3), my wife has Iphone 4s..

I swear i'm ready to go over to Apple... i've NEVER seen my wife have to run around and find a outlet to plug her phone in..

I was REALLY hoping the S3 would not do this, and am very sad, no different than my HTC's...

The battery capacity is just is not able to keep up with the display, quad processors etc, and i am always having to plug my damn phone in some type of power outlet: car, work, home, friends' houses etc...

i'm a techno-file, and love the android custom apps, and all the neat stuff we all do with them, but i'm hitting the damn wall now with frustration.

The android form factor I believe is a failed system in our mobile world. If the system is not able to handle more the 6 hours of hard use, which i do at times, then what is the point?

Click to expand...

It would be hard to tell what is going on without seeing what you have running in the background, if you are using live wallpapers, if you are on LTE all the time or in an area with less reliable signal, is your screen brightness on 100%, and so on. So many things can eat your battery life and on Android it is up to you to control it all. With Apple, they control most of the behind the scene functionality. This can be a good thing for some people.

If you think the iPhone may suit you better, def buy one. With a smaller screen and 3G only, you may be able to squeeze a bit more life out of the phone, but given equal settings, you won't see a significant improvement. From what I have read, maybe an hour more? Or you could buy another battery for the S3. It takes about 60 seconds to turn off the phone, change batteries and cold start back to fully on and ready.

Lastly, iPhone 5 is less than 3 months away. 4S will go down in price by $100 then and the 4, which is now at $50 on 2 year contract will likely drop to free. 3GS will likely stop being sold. Lots of options on the table for you. But hinestly, if you can hold out just a bit longer, you will be able to find out what exactly the iphone 5 will have hardware wise. You already know it is a great phone, just very limiting to me personally. Good luck.

Sorry, but your issue has nothing to do with the Operating System. You will see the exact same thing on iOS. In fact, I've heard the SGS3 has better battery life than the iPhone 4S.

The issue is your heavy use. While it would be nice to get more than 6 hours of continuous heavy use, it just isn't going to happen without some major changes.

Massively extended battery is 1 option. Especially since we can easily swap out our batteries, something you'll never see on iOS.

Another is gimping out your phone by enabling the power saving option to limit the maximum CPU speed. You can take this even further by rooting and underclocking and undervolting the CPU.

I'm assuming you've looked into the usual already as well. Lower the brightness of the screen, use auto-dimming, always turning the screen off when not using, limiting the number of accounts that sync and their frequency, using wifi when accessing the internet ( but switch back to mobile data when idling...or even turn it off too. ), disabling the various vibrations such as haptic feedback, disabling animations, removing live wallpapers/continuously updating widgets, removing weather stuff. Whatever you can think of that you don't need. Each person all of these things will vary greatly.

Unfortunately, battery life is pretty much just keeping even with battery drain ( Well, probably slightly pulling ahead a very small amount at a time, but effectively staying even. ) This means this is unlikely to change any time soon.

Remember btw that there are a number of features that your SGS3 has that iPhones do not, such as 4G. Disabling 4G, while gimping your phone, could improve your batteries life a fair bit.

Basically though, you've bought a Lamborghini and are now complaining about the gas mileage. Pros and Cons.

what exactly do you do on your phone?

what exactly does your wife do on hers?

My 4s battery won't last 6 hours either. It's been years since I've gotten decent battery life. I really don't see the big deal in having to charge your phone at work or in the car.

My phone is always in airplane mode with only wifi on and i burn through the battery in one day. Makes me wonder what if........

people... these are smartphones! why are you people expecting them to push 24hrs+ with heavy usage is beyond me.

changing phones will not help, changing what you do will.

My s3 last much longer than my gfs 4s. I can go a day and a half on a charge. Thats with texting, emailing, streaming audio via bluetooth in my car for about 30 min. Watching netflix for about 45 min with bluetooth on. I love my battery. Oh yeah lte is on all the tine.

noisydroid said:

My phone is always in airplane mode with only wifi on and i burn through the battery in one day. Makes me wonder what if........

Click to expand...

What are you actually doing during that time though? If it's really idling/standby most all of the time, you should be looking at 3-4+ days, not 1. I have moderate usage and finish the day out with about 20% left over. ( 2 emails syncing hourly, 3g/4g always on, Pandora but with screen off for at least 4 hours, an hour or 2 of gaming somewhere in there, a dozen or so texts. 16+ hours usually off charger. Only power saving options are screen low power mode, and disable haptic feedback. All auto-dimming/background tones are off. )

PS: Are you leaving wifi on while the phone is idling? While wifi uses less power during network usage, it uses more when idling. For standby/idle it is best to switch wifi back off.

Hmmm. I'm having very different experience and have had great battery life with both the GS3 & GS2.

Had the GS3 phone just over 2 weeks and use it *heavily* - but have been amazed at the battery life from this thing. Running many widgets, many synced applications, LTE always on, wifi often, GPS (lots of biking), pretty high brightness, not using the power saving option - usually get about 20 - 30 hours a charge. Today I've had it on since 9am (currently 11pm) this morning, and have been working with it quite a bit today. It's currently at 43% - and that's with a 1.5 hour bike ride with GPS on.

Things I've fiddled with to extend the battery:

* Regularly run 'task manager' - clear the RAM. I do this every couple of hours when in heavy use.
* Only use wifi, GPS, bluetooth when in use. Turn it off immediately when done.
* Disable auto-updating on everything. Update only what is necessary - and you get regular 'update available' summaries from Play anyway.
* Solid black locked screen wallpaper. Doubt this has much of an effect, but whatever.
* Avoid live wallpapers - other ways to make the phone look great that I'm sure eat up less power.
* perhaps use the power saving option when you're only doing regular phone / text / email. Seems to get quite clunky when that function is on and you're doing any major tasks on the phone.
* Limit widgets, etc. running. There are some great apps that will combine multiple functions into one widget - saving you from having to run, for example an alarm clock, calendar, task manager, weather, etc. all separately. The better apps will allow you to manually sync all programs to one - so they're not all syncing in the background.
* Use the 'limit background processes' (settings / developer options) if you can. Unfortunately the maximum is 4 with this function, which might be too low if you're doing a lot on your phone.
* Limit the use of haptic feedback with stuff like the keypad & texting.
* I use a lot of 'app drawers' for my icons. Takes up a lot less screen real estate - again, not sure if this translates at all to battery. But it does look cleaner - and I'm sure the icon rendering must take up some power.
* Email syncing is set to every 15 minutes to an hour instead of 5 minutes. You can always manually check if you're waiting for something anyway.
* Maybe consider a second battery. Amazon has extra Samsung batteries for the Galaxy S III for sale for $25 on Amazon here: Amazon.com: Samsung EB-L1G6LLAGSTA Galaxy S III Standard Battery (2100mA) NFC - Battery - Retail Packaging - Black: Cell Phones & Accessories


Anyway - there's probably a lot more stuff more seasoned users can suggest. A couple of mine are probably useless. But that's some of the stuff I do, and I seem to get excellent battery life...so far.

My wife's 4s doesn't come close to my S3 battery life..Now, I know her 4s is 6 months old, but...I can also go to a store and buy another battery. Can't do that with an Iphone?

zemerick said:

Sorry, but your issue has nothing to do with the Operating System. You will see the exact same thing on iOS. In fact, I've heard the SGS3 has better battery life than the iPhone 4S.

The issue is your heavy use. While it would be nice to get more than 6 hours of continuous heavy use, it just isn't going to happen without some major changes.

Massively extended battery is 1 option. Especially since we can easily swap out our batteries, something you'll never see on iOS.

Another is gimping out your phone by enabling the power saving option to limit the maximum CPU speed. You can take this even further by rooting and underclocking and undervolting the CPU.

I'm assuming you've looked into the usual already as well. Lower the brightness of the screen, use auto-dimming, always turning the screen off when not using, limiting the number of accounts that sync and their frequency, using wifi when accessing the internet ( but switch back to mobile data when idling...or even turn it off too. ), disabling the various vibrations such as haptic feedback, disabling animations, removing live wallpapers/continuously updating widgets, removing weather stuff. Whatever you can think of that you don't need. Each person all of these things will vary greatly.

Unfortunately, battery life is pretty much just keeping even with battery drain ( Well, probably slightly pulling ahead a very small amount at a time, but effectively staying even. ) This means this is unlikely to change any time soon.

Remember btw that there are a number of features that your SGS3 has that iPhones do not, such as 4G. Disabling 4G, while gimping your phone, could improve your batteries life a fair bit.

Basically though, you've bought a Lamborghini and are now complaining about the gas mileage. Pros and Cons.

Click to expand...

No way, no how, is the GS3's battery even in the same universe as the iPhone 4s. I'm a realist, and love Android just as much as most people here, but that is not a valid statement. I've owned way to many Android Phones, and every single iPhone to date...and honestly,,,ios basically beats us down when battery life is the topic.

Now I've just recently gave up my 4s for the GS3, and there is a world of difference in battery life...now there are some common sense reasons why...These are the 2 biggest IMO

A-That Big beautiful screen, which is just plain beautiful indoors..
B- LTE connectivity

However...The standby bug is just ridiculous, I'm a seasoned person when it comes to setting up my phone... I can start the day with 100%, not use it for a half hr and still loose 15% while its sitting on my counter. And this is with nothing syncing expect my 4 email accounts every 4 hours, other then that.. nothing.

Samsung has some work to do with an update...ASAP.

jlm86 said:

I swear i'm ready to go over to Apple... i've NEVER seen my wife have to run around and find a outlet to plug her phone in..

Click to expand...

and how do your usage habits compare to hers??..im willing to put money on the fact that your screen is on significantly more than hers...

jlm86 said:

I was REALLY hoping the S3 would not do this, and am very sad, no different than my HTC's...

The battery capacity is just is not able to keep up with the display, quad processors etc, and i am always having to plug my damn phone in some type of power outlet: car, work, home, friends' houses etc...

i'm a techno-file, and love the android custom apps, and all the neat stuff we all do with them, but i'm hitting the damn wall now with frustration.

The android form factor I believe is a failed system in our mobile world. If the system is not able to handle more the 6 hours of hard use, which i do at times, then what is the point?

Click to expand...

what do you mean by 6 hours of "hard use" are you getting 6 hours of screen on time??...next time you take your phone off the charger...play with it as you would normally...when it gets low on batter (like around 10%) check your screen on time (settings>>batter>>screen) and see what it says...if you're 4+ hours youre getting stellar battery life...

noisydroid said:

My phone is always in airplane mode with only wifi on and i burn through the battery in one day. Makes me wonder what if........

Click to expand...

youre screen has got to be on a ton...

just for HAHA's after i got my S3 i charged my old Droid X to 100% and just left it on my desk...picked it up every once and awhile to check the battery...even ran some side by side benchmarks with the SGS3 (quadrant, smartbench etc)...and it lasted almost 9 days not in airplane mode and with WiFi and GPS enabled...

if you want an Android phone that is going to last no matter what you throw at it...buy a Droid RAZR Maxx...the 3300mAh battery beats the pants off ANY smart phone out there...period...

sean76 said:

No way, no how, is the GS3's battery even in the same universe as the iPhone 4s. I'm a realist, and love Android just as much as most people here, but that is not a valid statement. I've owned way to many Android Phones, and every single iPhone to date...and honestly,,,ios basically beats us down when battery life is the topic.

Now I've just recently gave up my 4s for the GS3, and there is a world of difference in battery life...now there are some common sense reasons why...These are the 2 biggest IMO

A-That Big beautiful screen, which is just plain beautiful indoors..
B- LTE connectivity

However...The standby bug is just ridiculous, I'm a seasoned person when it comes to setting up my phone... I can start the day with 100%, not use it for a half hr and still loose 15% while its sitting on my counter. And this is with nothing syncing expect my 4 email accounts every 4 hours, other then that.. nothing.

Samsung has some work to do with an update...ASAP.

Click to expand...

I can do half hour in wifi mode and nothing else on except email push and lose 1%. that is not a typo. 1%! You must have something running in the background sucking juice or you have a bad battery. I can play NOVA 3 for half an hour, with screen brightness at 100% and not lose 15%.

sean76 said:

No way, no how, is the GS3's battery even in the same universe as the iPhone 4s. I'm a realist, and love Android just as much as most people here, but that is not a valid statement. I've owned way to many Android Phones, and every single iPhone to date...and honestly,,,ios basically beats us down when battery life is the topic.

Now I've just recently gave up my 4s for the GS3, and there is a world of difference in battery life...now there are some common sense reasons why...These are the 2 biggest IMO

A-That Big beautiful screen, which is just plain beautiful indoors..
B- LTE connectivity

However...The standby bug is just ridiculous, I'm a seasoned person when it comes to setting up my phone... I can start the day with 100%, not use it for a half hr and still loose 15% while its sitting on my counter. And this is with nothing syncing expect my 4 email accounts every 4 hours, other then that.. nothing.

Samsung has some work to do with an update...ASAP.

Click to expand...

30 mins doing nothing and lose 15%... yea, you definitely have something wrong. that isnt an ios in another universe than Android, thats a you have a serious problem with your phone. Standby you should get about 1% per hour, which is 30 times better than that.

Covart said:

I can do half hour in wifi mode and nothing else on except email push and lose 1%. that is not a typo. 1%! You must have something running in the background sucking juice or you have a bad battery. I can play NOVA 3 for half an hour, with screen brightness at 100% and not lose 15%.

Click to expand...

Abosulty nothing that shouldn't be running in the background on my phone. I was extremely surprised to see these results, as I was reading tales of pixie dust and what not with people seeing awesome battery life with their GS3's. I'm all in on getting my phone exchanged and trying one more time with the GS3, as I honestly do love everything else about this phone.

zemerick said:

30 mins doing nothing and lose 15%... yea, you definitely have something wrong. that isnt an ios in another universe than Android, thats a you have a serious problem with your phone. Standby you should get about 1% per hour, which is 30 times better than that.

Click to expand...

Lost 3% while just typing this while on wifi?

sean76 said:

Abosulty nothing that shouldn't be running in the background on my phone. I was extremely surprised to see these results, as I was reading tales of pixie dust and what not with people seeing awesome battery life with their GS3's. I'm all in on getting my phone exchanged and trying one more time with the GS3, as I honestly do love everything else about this phone.

Click to expand...

How do you know nothing is running in the background? Have you explored with something like Better Battery Stats? Sometimes you can really have some apps causing your phone to stay awake in the background without even knowing

Metfanant said:

How do you know nothing is running in the background? Have you explored with something like Better Battery Stats? Sometimes you can really have some apps causing your phone to stay awake in the background without even knowing

Click to expand...

I always kill everything running in my background before I shut my phone off. Everything I'm using as far as apps has been used on my previous 2 Android devices which were the Original Razor, and the VZW Gnex...Never seen a battery drain like this before on wifi, LTE yes, but never before on wifi. The router is a Verizon Fios router that has never givin me any issues with the Gnex or the iPhone 4S. But with the GS3 I can basically sit and watch the battery meter run like a NYC taxi cab...lmaoo

I really hope this is a rare thing with my phone using up juice like this...

sean76 said:

Lost 3% while just typing this while on wifi?

Click to expand...

Def not normal. You may have been unlucky and got a lemon. Or just something as simple as a bad battery. Or your phone is trying to constantly find an lte signal, but can't and is constantly switching between 4g, lte and eeven 3g?

I have two oem batteries and an oem charger for the batteries. The one that came with the phone does not last as long as the one I bought recently. Both should have been brand spanking new, but I get the feeling that the batteries coming with the phones have been sitting around a while and possibly incorrectly cycled in the factory?

Regardless, turn it in for a new one.

jlm86 said:

Have now owned 3 Androids, (2 HTC, and now a S3), my wife has Iphone 4s..

I swear i'm ready to go over to Apple... i've NEVER seen my wife have to run around and find a outlet to plug her phone in..

I was REALLY hoping the S3 would not do this, and am very sad, no different than my HTC's...

The battery capacity is just is not able to keep up with the display, quad processors etc, and i am always having to plug my damn phone in some type of power outlet: car, work, home, friends' houses etc...

i'm a techno-file, and love the android custom apps, and all the neat stuff we all do with them, but i'm hitting the damn wall now with frustration.

The android form factor I believe is a failed system in our mobile world. If the system is not able to handle more the 6 hours of hard use, which i do at times, then what is the point?

Click to expand...

i hear ya i had the same problem i'm a very heavy cell user and i had a iphone 4s and i just had to make a call but couldn't cause the battery had died due to my heavy cell use. so i had no choice but to jump ship to android because the dumb ass ip4s dosen't have a removable batt. now everything is all good, cause whenever my batt dies it just takes less than min and i'm back with full speed ahead