For those of you that are happy with the battery life of your smartphone, is this because you have wifi, and 3g data turned off? For those of you that are not, do you have these things turned on? I'd like to hear your thoughts on smartphone battery life in general, in the way that we have to have a lot features turned down, or off completely to get decent (a day if you're actually using the phone heh) battery life? I mean what's the point in a really bright nice screen if you have to have the brightness all the way down? Same goes for all these apps for facebook, the weather etc. You may as well have a 500gram battery pack in your pocket to keep the phone going Thoughts?
HTC Amaze 4G battery life is typically from when I wake up to after I have gone to bed. It's my alarm for the morning so it's always plugged in when I am asleep. I never worry about the life of it. Brightness is set to auto, wifi is always on, data is always on. It just works. If you are having problems there are programs you can get that will turn off data, wifi, when the phone is in sleep mode. Of if the phone has a replaceable battery, you can buy larger one's off of ebay. But research them first as not all are good quality.
Galaxy Note with ICS update. Lasts a day, everyday. Sometimes more. Wifi is on when I'm using it, otherwise 3G all the time. I manually sync Gmail a couple of times a day. I talk on the phone a bit, text a lot and use the note taking and eBook reader all the time. Weather updates every 3 or 6 hrs (can't remember which) I have live wallpaper and use a lot of Viber over both wifi and 3G depending where I am. Brightness is on auto and is always bright enough for what I need.
It's funny that these days everyone is happy if their phone lasts a day. What happened to when we used to have phones that could last four to five days? I mean the technology in the phone has improved drastically, but the battery life has imho, gone down the toilet, in favor of making phones more advances, while making them smaller and smaller.
There is nothing wrong with battery life. Issue is thatt you are comparing incomparable. Let's sumarize the difference between your 4-5 day phone and your current smartphone : - crappy small TFT 240 x 320 (or worse resolution), with pathetic backlight versus AMOLED or SLCD 800x480-1280x800 displays for pretty much anything but lowend. You simply cannot compare the power consumption of those miniature screens with the power consumptions of these giants - WiFi was nearly never used on those old phones - mobile data was on-demand as well, compared to the always-on nature of current smartphones (if allowed that) - much, much quicker CPU - those phones had sub-300MHz single core CPU, versus the current 1GHz+ dual and quad cores - battery technology didn't improve that much as the demands And last but not least, usage pattern has changed. What do i mean ? What were you doing with your old phone ? You had it in your pocket or on the desk and used it for one of 3 things : - calls - SMS - alarm None of these tasks needed the display to be turned on for more than few seconds, max minutes. Neither it requires mobile data or WiFi. What do you do with your smartphone ? - browse the net for minutes if not hours - play games - chatting - others All of these require use of display and touch interface, and of course mobile data or WiFi. If you would use your old phone in same way as your new phone, it would "die" in a day too. It is simply the usage patterns which changed too much, and battery technology is unable to keep up with exponentially rising demands for now.
Overclocking is also worth mentioning, I overclock my GNex and that can provide battery life boosts, as you arent upping the voltage, but allowing it to spend less time at the max speed. Basically if it gets stuck at 1.2ghz for 2 minutes doing something, but can complete it in 1.minutes at 1.4ghz, it will use less battery. It is a little more complicated than that obviously, but thats the basic idea. Check your battery usage, you will probably see the screen is using the most power, lower that as much as you can.
