Nexus 5 Battery Results

I'm doing a low to medium usage test with Bluetooth, Location Access on High accuracy, WIFI, HSPA,Auto Brightness and google now. From 100% down to 0%. Then doing a Full charge time with phone turned on.

Will be posting screenshots via dropbox below with a few hours in between.

Battery usage screenshots. https://www.dropbox.com/sc/zwr2s240knxqove/_FZDWDZWmT

4hr 6mins screenshots of time on. https://www.dropbox.com/sc/zzvlu7oplnax7qf/IeDdDl9Nb_

8hr in with screen on time. https://www.dropbox.com/sc/ww0uwt5fo8tbuk9/mw_LPAcrB3

19hr screenshot with 7.5hr overnight standbyhttps://www.dropbox.com/sc/t64536q9a0l0axd/RWJ6_Oq4gJ

In addition I've used a2dp audio stream for an hour or so. I'll do a full screenshot of all the on times later.

Still very low usage scenario. Battery looking good. @22hrs 40% with updated screenshots above.

Final Result only took me to 15% with 1 Day 16 Hours. Screen on time 3hr 16mins. Needed a full battery for the day and couldn't risk it but atleast it's a general ballpark. https://www.dropbox.com/sc/oaj33ji9kssx5rt/BFiLIz-Jef

40 Hours is still pretty good for light usage. During a busy working day i would be happy with 9 hours max usage.

I did a little experiment yesterday, and posted the result on Google+ Nexus community. I got 8 hours of SoT with 18% left. No crazy battery-saving apps or ROM. Data sync, Exchange mail, Gmail and Google Now were never turned off. GPS is in battery saving mode except when I went running.

I think there's a common myth about SoT. Longer SoT doesn't mean the phone stayed awake longer, or it did more jobs. It just means the screen stayed on for so long but the rest of the system might be resting. Anandtech said Nexus 5 has PSR which allows GPU to rest when the screen is displaying static content. So I figured in order to get great SoT, I need to increase the time the screen displays static frame.

This is a bit counter intuitive. If you do things on your phone fast, ie you wake it up in short periods and turn it off after a burst of finger swipes, you will not get those unbelievable SoT because whenever your screen is on the GPU is working hard refreshing the screen and the average power consumption during your SoT is high. However, if you do your stuff slow and leave it idling while the screen is on, your GPU actually enters low-power mode and reduce the average power consumption during SoT, thus greater SoT.

So here is what I did today with my Nexus 5, which I usually get a little less than 4-hour SoT. First I reduced the brightness by creating a customized profile with Velis Auto Brightness. It's not super dim as my office is reasonably well lit (the phone measured 57 lux, according to Velis Auto Brightness). I then bought a book to read on my phone and set the display timeout to 30 minutes. Whenever people came to talk to me I just laid the phone on my desk with the screen on, therefore during most of the SoT it's displaying static content. The book reading UI only allows pages flipping, which also reduces frame updates compared with line-by-line or paragraph-by-paragraph scrolling that I normally did. Apart from reading I also spent a little time on Facebook, Youtube, Feedly, SMS(Hangouts), ran 3 miles with RunKeeper and listened to some music. No phone calls today.

Lesson learned? First of all, don't be too obsessed with SoT. It's all related to how you use your phone. More SoT doesn't mean more jobs done by the phone. Those people who get great SoT probably just do stuffs slower or let their phones idle more. Second, flip pages, or scroll fast. It allows the PSR work its magic.

MattSkeet said:

Its going to be same or worse than nexus 4.

I did say that first thing when 2300mah battery was announced.

battery bigger by 15% yet screen resolution is 40% bigger, screen is 5 % bigger, CPU is much faster (doesn't matter how efficient it is, the faster you can go the more fuel you going to burn) numbers dont add up

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No the numbers do add up, the CPU is faster so it will reach idle quicker depending on the task of course so gaming would certainly be the outlier for draining the battery as you will make full use of the speed and wont reach idle since you're simply increasing the FPS but excluding gaming it should be better as the 800 is much more efficient.

The screen is larger but more power efficient, dont just look at the technology as IPS and the screen size as things have changed behind the scenes although the lack of GRAM was a bit of a disappointment but its still more efficient. Then take into account the radio is built in the SoC which reduces power dramatically and it has envelope tracking(dont believe the G2 has this!) which reduces the power usage even further.

So yes gaming will reduce the battery quicker but most tasks will actually last longer... I must say I lost 1 % battery in 8 hours on mobile network while sleeping and thats with 2 Gmail accounts syncing and news feeds.

I will contribute to this thread and give a very early look into my current battery life on the N5, so far I am quite impressed as the N4 battery life is terrible compared to this and that was on many battery friendly ROMs and kernels with large undervolting so if we just compare it to stock its probably about 60% more than what I got from the n4 .


So 1 day 9 hours, just a brief summary of things I did:

2 Gmail accounts syncing (about 40 emails a day)
BBC news updating every 4 hours and reading some stores (most of the 6 hour syncs)
Pulse news updating every 6 hours (about 20 feeds) and reading some stores (about 15)
Using hangouts for a few messages along with about 20 SMS
about 20 photos and a 3 minute video (uploaded to Gdrive and G+)
Installing 15 apps (about 500mb download)
running quadrant two times, antutu twice, luxmark both tests, 3d mark test and a few others
Messing around with Google now talking setting alarms and shiz, probably 30 minutes
50 minutes web browsing
Skype for 15 minutes
Google music - Playing for about 30 minutes on speaker
Youtube videos for about 15 minutes


I am sure I missed out some things I did in the time but to me it seems to be much better than the N4 as I said above, I am more impressed with the fact all the Google locations were active and I know it is on "battery saving" mode but it seems to get my location quickly and effectively so everything is active and yet the battery life is by my own opinion "Good", first charge so means bugger all at the moment but I can see it getting better still and the custom rom/kernel scene will improve this further.

I think some people forget that the N4 to achieve these high battery scores you disable location and Google now, I have had everything disabled on my N4 and never matched the performance of these stats in the N4 thread so I would assume alot of people simply do nothing with the screen on or have it low brightness which reminds me, the N5 was on 100% brightness for about half of the on screen time the rest of the time it was auto (was comparing it with things lol).


edit: Forgot to say its all on Mobile network! WiFi I am not sure why it appears there but I think that is simply for the Google location stuff, it was never connected to a WiFi point.
Edit2: remembered I had Facebook on as well with 4 hour syncing and looked at it for about 5 minutes

dinodude said:

Well nexus 4 with Trinity kernel gets 6-7 hours so with nexus 5 I expect around 8 hours on a custom kernel and stock should get around 5 hours which is pretty darn good.

Sent from my HTC One using xda app-developers app

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He is liar dont believe him

r0cafella said:

Chris,

The battery life is noticeably better than the N4 from my experiences over these last couple of days

Your going to love this phone in my humble opinion it's the best phone money can buy, even if it was priced at Iphone price i'd still buy without hesitating.

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I never doubted that for a second.

It's a good excuse for me to leave work just a few hours earlier tomorrow.

I stream ALOT - so I'm intrigued to see how all these lower power features work out.

People will still try to discredit the fastest & smoothest phone out there though. (& cheapest)

To the Nexus haters....

They gave us a good camera.
They gave us 1080p
They gave us the fastest chipset
They gave us 32gb
They gave us LTE

Now it will be poor loud speaker, no 64gb option, no SD Card (sigh!), no removeable battery (sigh!) and no 3000mah battery.

Funny how more than half of those complaints will be from Samsung users.

Jealous much?

LOL

Sent from my Nexus 4 using XDA-Premium 4