Battery LIfe?

Galaxian
Newbie

I'm really disappointed with the limited batery life on my new Galaxy Nexus.  I've got the screen set to auto-adjust brightness and I've been working off my wireless network for most of the day, but the thing is still sucking down juice like crazy.

 

I know Verizon's 4G phones are notorious battery hogs, but this is ridiculous.  On 4G cellular, I doubt that a fully-charged battery would last more than an hour in this thing if you were constantly using the phone.  

 

Is anyone else having a similar experience? 

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18 Replies
Tidbits
Legend

Galaxian wrote:

I'm really disappointed with the limited batery life on my new Galaxy Nexus.  I've got the screen set to auto-adjust brightness and I've been working off my wireless network for most of the day, but the thing is still sucking down juice like crazy.

 

I know Verizon's 4G phones are notorious battery hogs, but this is ridiculous.  On 4G cellular, I doubt that a fully-charged battery would last more than an hour in this thing if you were constantly using the phone.  

 

Is anyone else having a similar experience? 


Extended  battery 12 hours with 25% to spare :smileyhappy:  

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GreenRobot
Contributor - Level 3
Normal battery life for a 4g device. Simple as that.
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franklin270h
Newbie

My battery life on 3G is just as bad as 4G. Signal is pretty weak. Hoping the next update or an update soon will have much improved radio. 

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jtown
Contributor - Level 3

Galaxian wrote:

I'm really disappointed with the limited batery life on my new Galaxy Nexus.  I've got the screen set to auto-adjust brightness and I've been working off my wireless network for most of the day, but the thing is still sucking down juice like crazy.

 

I know Verizon's 4G phones are notorious battery hogs, but this is ridiculous.  On 4G cellular, I doubt that a fully-charged battery would last more than an hour in this thing if you were constantly using the phone.  

 

Is anyone else having a similar experience? 


Define "sucking down juice like crazy".  It's hard to compare if you don't provide specific numbers and usage patterns.  If you want to have the full Cloud Experience where you're constantly syncing to your google account, auto-uploading photos, pre-fetching news articles, live-updating twitter, location services, etc. you're going to use a lot of power.  Doesn't matter if it's WiFi, 4G, or 3G.

 

FWIW, my phone used about 20% running overnight with WiFi on and a 3G connection.  So, sitting idle with the screen off and data syncing over WiFi, it'd probably go a bit over a day and a half.

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ajnevares1
Specialist - Level 1

i anticipated the battery to go down quickly (5th 4G device so far) but this one has been the worse by comparison....this morning after checking facebook, replying to a few text and listening to a couple of songs...it went from 97% to 72% within an hour and a half, which averages out to about 6 hours of life?

 

it came with an extra battery and dock/battery charger when i got it, guess bad battery life was anticipated. besides that and the ******* battery cover, i am really liking this phone. 

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jbruer
Newbie

It seems that some of us are experiencing much higher battery drain than normal. Take a look at your battery usage statistics in the Settings app. If you see "Android OS" listed as using a large percentage of battery life, then you are affected by this. Some system process is keeping the phone awake while it should be sleeping. This is leading to terrible battery life with minimal usage of the phone.

 

See here for more information: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=22878

 

Note that some Nexus S users who have received the OTA upgrade to ICS have been experiencing the same problem, so it appears that this isn't limited to the Galaxy Nexus. This is a serious problem that Google has yet to acknowledge. It's hard to say how many users are actually affected by this.

 

I've completely wiped my phone and have not set up my Google account. I'm waiting to see if the problem still exists (even though it appears that other people have had it persist after a factory reset).

 

If this is not affecting all users, I might try to exchange my phone at a Verizon store. After the delay in releasing this phone (presumably to fix bugs), it is incredibly frustrating to be left with this glaring bug. Verizon, do you have any thoughts about this? It appears that Google has been silent on the issue so far.

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ajnevares1
Specialist - Level 1

Screen 67%

A OS 23%

 

Guess thats on me...just got the device and havent put it down much lol

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jbruer
Newbie

As an update to my earlier post, I did factory reset the phone. Battery life was MUCH better (~1% drain/hr), and the phone wasn't being kept awake by Android OS. I added back my Google account without the backup service and the battery life still held fine. Note that this was also on 4G and not WiFi.

 

I have restored my old setup from a nandroid backup and cleared the battery stats. I'll get a new baseline and work from there. It would seem that there is nothing wrong with the phone. Now it's just a matter of figuring out what is being added that is causing the sharp decrease in battery life. I guess this is good news as the battery life should be fine on this phone once the culprit is discovered. This may prove to be difficult though.

BetterBatteryStats doesn't show any obvious app causing a wakelock. If the problem persists, I will try to disable Google sync. Possibly one of the additional sync adapters like Google+ or Music is causing this issue.

 

This is frustrating, but I think I'll be perfectly happy with the battery once the phone actually goes to sleep properly.

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jtown
Contributor - Level 3

I turned off all data, LTE, and location services for 10 hours last night and the battery was at 95%.  That's about half a percent per hour with only the phone function enabled.

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jtown
Contributor - Level 3

I'm guessing much of what we're seeing in battery life issues will be resolved as ICS is fine tuned along with the apps.

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jbruer
Newbie

I'm seeing much better battery life after resetting the battery stats. At the moment drain is about 4%/hour under the same conditions that caused 10%/hour loss before. Android OS is still responsible for a lot of "keep awake" time, but I can live with this sort of battery usage until an update is released.

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DroidRBD
Newbie

The battery life is about the same as my previous 4G phone.  I always keep a spare battery as a spare just in case.  So far it is not a problem.  Poor Razr owners don't have that option. 

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camerus
Newbie

I've had issues but things are getting better. First of all I like this phone so much that I want to give it a chance until all the bugs are fixed. I've ordered an extended battery (-50% discount right now) + battery charger with an additional standard battery. So I'm ready to get long hours of Nexus fun.

I'm currently trying to see if the battery last longer with NFC deactivated. I don't use it anyway since Google Wallet is banned. So far I've been on battery for 9h35 min with 56% remaining. Before that I needed to charge 2-3 times a day.

I've read comments from people using Google Wallet on Nexus S and complaining about battery life due to it. So I figured maybe it's NFC. Let see! Any thoughts?

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Crawlnstall
Newbie
I've had my nexus since the 19th and at first I would drain my battery pretty quick, about 10-15% an hour I would say. I've learned that if I keep all of my data off when I don't need it, and use 3G when I don't need the blazing speed of 4G I can make it through the day. I have an extra battery and spare charger that I got as a back up but haven't needed it yet. My previous devices were the Droid2 and the OG Droid and I don't see much of a difference in battery life in my opinion.
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maxicat1960
Newbie

I am not 100% happy with the battery life, but I have found a few things that help.  Go into settings-developer options. Then check "Don't keep activities".  Also, go into "background process limit", and limit the number of apps you have running in the background.  I also put my screen to sleep when not using the phone, as it seems that the majority of battery drain seems to be coming from the screen (which is something I hope the next OTA update addresses).  Using these little items, on a standard battery, I get 7-8 hours with moderate use.  Using the extended battery, I get 10-12 with moderate use.

 

 

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camerus
Newbie

I don't need to make so many changes to get to a descent battery life. Initially I had extremely short battery life either on the standard or the extended one. I've even reactivated NFC to enjoy Google Wallet and still, I'm really happy now with battery life. It seems like my phone is improving days after days (signal is much better, battery life and speed -I've clocked 37 mbps download). With my extended battery I'm getting now 16h46mn with 19% remaining. I charged it yesterday evening and it's now 3:45 pm on 12/27.

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Tidbits
Legend

in a previous thread I hit 10 hours with 43% life left and posted pictures.  There's a lot of factors involved and it's hard to pinpoint the problems when someone has poor battery life.  If you play Words with Friends or Hanging with Friends I recommend you remove them.  Their notification coding is terrible.  I was able to extend my battery life by an hour, and imagining a heavy user +1 hour is a good thing.

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GreenRobot
Contributor - Level 3

I loooooove the extended battery. 22+ hours with only a 20 minute charge a little before putting it on the charger.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-eYER81YyH14/TwHbLq8HMdI/AAAAAAAACkA/BSzs2IjsBj0/s512/Screenshot_2012-01-01-20-09-38.png

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