Real World Battery life for LTE GS3

sean76 · Aug 12, 2012

OK I think its about time we have a thread about Battery life in the real world for the LTE version of the GS3. No disrespect to the T-Mobile, or the Euro version. Its just that LTE burns up alot more battery them HSPA+ or 3G and I'm curious what people are getting.

So lets have it, what are you guys getting on at&t , Big Red or the few cites that Sprint has LTE up and running. Lets keep this real, and no I'm getting 72 hours with mobile data on, GPS on, wifi on, with 6 email accounts syncing every 15 minutes as I search the web for 2 hours straight while also talking on the phone, and texting at the same time with the Brightness on 100%...Save it BS artists! Time for some real battery life talk.

As for me I got roughly 10hrs today with pretty moderate use, Brightness at about 70%, a few phone calls, some texting, 3 email accounts set to sync every 4 hours, checking Facebook, the web and the Phandroid app here and there, as well as using my camera throughout the day. Not bad, not amazing, but not bad. Also a side note, I have alerts set to off on Facebook and the Phamdroid app, as they do burn up the battery when the app is syncing on its own.

How about everyone else?

brucesmays · Aug 12, 2012

I have had my Verizon branded S3 for several weeks. Today is typical. Unplug it fromcharger around 8am. I do have 7 email accounts, some are push, the others are checked every 10 minutes. Lots of texting, some phone calls, some web browsing. It is now almost 13 hours later now, it is at 47 percent left

roush611 · Aug 13, 2012

I took my phone off the charger at 7 this morning and used it pretty lightly today. Maybe about 70 texts, a couple phone calls, 1 gmail account, downloaded a few apps and Pandora for about an hour and I am at 47%. But yesterday I felt I used it less and it was dead at hour 15.

This is with brightness all the way down and everything else is turned as far as WiFi, GPS, mobile data, wifi

RoarOfZonda · Aug 13, 2012

My battery sucks.
Wake up 9-10 am with 100% battery and by 8:30pm my phone went completely dead. I checked what's burning the battery up so fast and 65% of it was from Android OS. My phone is ATT

edit: and I honestly didn't do much with it today since I was just at work... all I did was text, facebook, and twitter. That's it!

zemerick · Aug 13, 2012

RoarOfZonda said:
My battery sucks.
Wake up 9-10 am with 100% battery and by 8:30pm my phone went completely dead. I checked what's burning the battery up so fast and 65% of it was from Android OS. My phone is ATT

edit: and I honestly didn't do much with it today since I was just at work... all I did was text, facebook, and twitter. That's it!

That's almost surely a wakelock problem. Check around these forums and you should be able to find a solution. You can message me if you can't find anything.

Evo 5oh · Aug 13, 2012

I used my phone a lot and I never heard my phone dying. . . I wonder how my S3 sounds when is about to die....

sean76 · Aug 13, 2012

Evo 5oh said:
I used my phone a lot and I never heard my phone dying. . . I wonder how my S3 sounds when is about to die....

Wow! So you haven't charged the phone yet since you got it.

IFLOPPEDIT · Aug 13, 2012

I wake up at 530, unplug from a night's charge. I'm averaging around 4 hrs screen time a day, mid-brigthness. Some web browsing, Words With Friends. Most of my drain comes from the screen. With no mid-day charge, I'm close to dead by 6pm. It's average at best. How these people are going so long on their batteries is beyond me, but I use the hell out of my phone.
As of this moment:
5 hrs 17 min on battery, 81% left, 1hr 17 min screen time.

StuDaddy · Aug 13, 2012

Take off the charger at 7A, onto the train for an hour of Flipboard and Sudoku, then intermittent use for the next three hours, email, Facebook, news, etc.

I should note my screen brightness is set to 100% and the timeout set to 10 minutes.

It generally goes down 1% every two minutes of screen use.

alexander323bc · Aug 13, 2012

its a phone with a big screen and LTE, If your heavy user pounding out texts and social media with the batter saver off you will get 6-8 hours. Depends on its a heavy or moderate pounding. Just normal moderate use will get you 10-12 hours. put the batter saver on and with a heavy pounding you can get 10-12. moderate use with batter saver on I get 13-15 hours easy.

Batter save off:
Heavy is 6-8
Moderate is 8-10
light is 12-15

Saver on:
heavy is 10-12
moderate is 12-14
light is 15/17.

The most have gotten out of my batter was 20 hours with batter save on and used it lightyy for text and phone calls with Facebook on the browser. on 20 hours it was at 5% left.

rushmore · Aug 13, 2012

The GS3 has an absolute spilt personality:

1. If the 3G/4G signal is medium to good- AMAZING battery life

2. If the 3G/4G signal is weak- BAD battery life. This is especailly true for 3G, since the device gets warmer and the battery runs out a lot quicker. 30% quicker is a fair estimate, but perhaps up to 40%.

Still, 4G reception is great and call/text range is as good as any Moto device. The weak link seems to mainly be 3G in weak signal areas. Overall, since call/text tange is not an issue, I choose the overall package of the GS3.

I hope they can update the kernel though, to stop the drain in weak signal areas (especially 3G). It does with 4G weak areas too, but ironically nowhere as bad as weak 3G areas.

Added: This of course assumes you use the device medium to heavy, since the drain happens when you actually use the radios (like for browsing or streaming). Battery life is not impacted much if a light user.

lion2 · Aug 13, 2012

sean76 said:
No disrespect to the T-Mobile, Sprint or Euro version. Its just that LTE burns up alot more battery them HSPA+ or 3G and I'm curious what people are getting.

The Sprint version also has LTE.

tilk23 · Aug 13, 2012

Take it off the charger at 6 am. I check facebook, twitter, emails. I play music through bluetooth for half an hour on the drive to work.Do some heavy browsing throughout the work hours and 20 min. of youtube during lunch in 3g low signal areas. 4 email accounts on push, gps off, bluetooth off, nfc off,brightness is on Auto 40-60% most of the time,. Then music over bluetooth in the car and 1- 1.5 hours of music through headphones. At 5:30 it's at 10-15% and that's really an average day. With an Iphone 4 I had to plug it in around 2:30 with about 5% charge doing the same things. Gs2 I9100 was a bit better running ICS by probably an hour over the Iphone but not as good as the GS3 so I'm pretty happy with it so far.

alexander323bc · Aug 13, 2012

lion2 said:
The Sprint version also has LTE.

Ya but only in like 10 cities. Verizon has the most 4g coverage. It has more than at&t and sprint combined.

sean76 · Aug 13, 2012

lion2 said:
The Sprint version also has LTE.

Like the previous poster has said, the majority is vzw and at&t when were talking about LTE. However, if you are a Sprint user, and have LTE in one of the few cites that have got the roll out....please feel free to post away.

sean76 · Aug 13, 2012

alexander323bc said:
Ya but only in like 10 cities. Verizon has the most 4g coverage. It has more than at&t and sprint combined.

I also included Sprint.. its a small footprint..but it will be interesting to hear if some members are using it in those few cities.

sean76 · Aug 13, 2012

lion2 said:
The Sprint version also has LTE.

I edited the thread to also include Sprint as well, since yes you are right, Sprint does in fact have LTE, while may it only be in a few cites...We might have some Members in those few cities.

Hogan773 · Aug 14, 2012

These threads are interesting I guess but not really useful since everyone uses their phone differently and everyone has a different definition of "light, moderate or heavy" usage, etc.

I can tell you that my phone discharges around 2-3% per hour while sitting on my desk doing nothing....so this might be a helpful indicator for the LTE drain. I set up a second "3G ONLY" API profile but don't bother using it because I like having the LTE speeds when I actually use the phone and saving an extra 0.5% or 1.0% per hour of drain doesn't mean that much to me because I usually end the day somewhere in the 40-60% range with normal usage (which for me is probably light to moderate in most people's definitions) and then I throw it on the charger when I go to sleep.

The screen is the largest power drain I believe, so your drain is directly tied to how much you actually use the phone. I also set my screen near the lowest brightness setting which might help a little.

rushmore · Aug 15, 2012

If in an area with medium to good signal, I get virtually no idle power drain. It is when the signal is weak and IF you have apps pulling data in the background. Then you will see 2-3% an hour. If you do not have apps pulling data, the consumption is nominal.

Seems a good policy is if in a weak signal area (especially 3G) to set the device to turn off data when the display is off.

Added:

That would actually be a nice trigger setting to have built into the device: If the signal is weak, the device turns off data when the display is not on.

scooz16 · Aug 15, 2012

Verizon here. Battery is amazing.

unplug every day at 730am. use google music on the way to work, twitter, chrome, emails gchat during the day. All on 4G and Bluetooth always on. Wifi off when not home. Usually when I get home at 530 I'm still around 50-60%.

Can go 20-24 hours and 3-3.5 hours screen time easily every day.

Don't know what more we could ask.

sean76 · Aug 15, 2012

Well I'm going to chalk the GS3's battery life up to Dr J and Hyde...lol, and that's with me trying 2 different OEM batteries on my phone.

One day I get 8hrs, the next I get 10-12. And some days I get 5, even with lite to moderate use. I would say it really depends on how much I'm using the phone, but I'll sometimes get really terrible battery life on days when I hardly use the phone? And yes that's with no apps running, nothing syncing, and wifi and GPS off. So ultimately I can understand why some people are so annoyed by the battery life they are getting. I'm especially annoyed by the standby time, some mornings its fine and I loose 5%, other mornings I wake up to 10% when it was fully charged the night before and on 100%. There deff is a bug in this phone that needs to be addresed and updated that has to do with battery life and random drains....

All this talk about wakelocks, and kernal wakelocks and the better battery life app is Ridiculous, never before have I had to monitor stuff like that. My Galaxy Note used to last all day from 9am -10pm with extreme heavy use, that's what I expected out of the GS3.

Either way, called at&t this morning and Warrenty is shipping me out a replacement device. See how that goes!

Hogan773 · Aug 15, 2012

Hogan773 said:
These threads are interesting I guess but not really useful since everyone uses their phone differently and everyone has a different definition of "light, moderate or heavy" usage, etc.

I can tell you that my phone discharges around 2-3% per hour while sitting on my desk doing nothing....so this might be a helpful indicator for the LTE drain. I set up a second "3G ONLY" API profile but don't bother using it because I like having the LTE speeds when I actually use the phone and saving an extra 0.5% or 1.0% per hour of drain doesn't mean that much to me because I usually end the day somewhere in the 40-60% range with normal usage (which for me is probably light to moderate in most people's definitions) and then I throw it on the charger when I go to sleep.

The screen is the largest power drain I believe, so your drain is directly tied to how much you actually use the phone. I also set my screen near the lowest brightness setting which might help a little.

I switched mine to 4G only (not LTE) and have been letting it sit on the desk all day. I haven't used it hardly at all. Look at this graph....see all the millions of wakeups that the phone has had all day long. I'm still getting about 3% per hour with the LTE off, so it doesn't seem like there is that much difference vs LTE.

One question I have is why is my mobile networks line basically empty....shouldn't it be green with some tan from time to time?

heavychevy · Aug 15, 2012

I am in Atlanta on SprInt and 4g is very spotty and use the phone pretty heavily. I unplug about 4am and drive 45mins downtown and on both ends of the spectrum have 4g but it's constant on off of 4g. I read cross connect for 30 minutes in the am then call the wife and maybe a couple other calls less than 30 min usually. There is no phone use for a 2hrs period and then I'm back on it browsing, emailing, texting some.

Needs charge early afternoon. Battery is marginal at best. My gs2 does as well.

rushmore said:
The GS3 has an absolute spilt personality:

1. If the 3G/4G signal is medium to good- AMAZING battery life

2. If the 3G/4G signal is weak- BAD battery life. This is especailly true for 3G, since the device gets warmer and the battery runs out a lot quicker. 30% quicker is a fair estimate, but perhaps up to 40%.

Still, 4G reception is great and call/text range is as good as any Moto device. The weak link seems to mainly be 3G in weak signal areas. Overall, since call/text tange is not an issue, I choose the overall package of the GS3.

I hope they can update the kernel though, to stop the drain in weak signal areas (especially 3G). It does with 4G weak areas too, but ironically nowhere as bad as weak 3G areas.

Added: This of course assumes you use the device medium to heavy, since the drain happens when you actually use the radios (like for browsing or streaming). Battery life is not impacted much if a light user.

SUroot · Aug 16, 2012

Sean,

Would it be worth screenshots of the battery page, graph and screen on time in both lte and 3g mode?

Also you say you have bbs. Maybe some shots of that too?

sean76 · Aug 16, 2012

Just got my new phone today....

And when I go into the battery settings it had Screen at 52%? What's going on here with Samsung.. I have my brightness at 50% and haven't even used my phone in the last hour.

Real World Battery life for LTE GS3

Android Expert

Lurker

Member

Member

Android Enthusiast

Android Enthusiast

Android Expert

Lurker

Newbie

Android Enthusiast

Extreme Android User

Newbie

Member

Android Enthusiast

Android Expert

Android Expert

Android Expert

Android Enthusiast

Extreme Android User

Well-Known Member

Android Expert

Android Enthusiast

Android Expert

Extreme Android User

Android Expert

BEST TECH IN 2023

Smartphones

Best Android Phones

Upcoming

Best iPhones

Upcoming

Tablets

Best Tablets

Upcoming

Laptops

Best Laptops

Upcoming

Televisions

Best TVs

Upcoming

Game Consoles

Best Game Consoles

Upcoming

Wearables

Best Wearables

Upcoming

Smart Home

Smart Home Tech

Upcoming

Similar threads