Lumia 900 Battery Life

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dtjohnst

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May 23, 2008
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alodar1 said:
I personally wouldn't send it back until you've at least done a hard reset. Do one. See what the default drain is. Don't add anything first. Then setup your WiFi and see. Then add your mail and check. Finally add back in your most used apps. Why do it this way?? For me, I want to know. If I'm gonna *****, I want proof I can point to an duplicate. No sense in loading 150 apps if get get overload at 40.

Plus, I'm not advocating using less apps and only in certain conditions. I am advocating being aware of which apps and/ or conditions produce the biggest problems with your usage. I personally feel that if you can't use your phone the way you want, then you don't need that phone. This just helps marrow down any culprits.

For the record, yesterday was 3 weeks with my 900. This battery life is sick. I simply do have to worry about battery life...period. As an example, sitting the restaurant last night at 9pm, 16hrs into a charge, i was at 44%. That's with WiFi, BT, music, texts, phone calls, and i tried Nokia Drive yesterday...not to mention alot of internet and Wordament use. The worse battery grain came when i got a paid advertisement from Mitt Romney. What a waste of battery power.:p
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Yeah, I did a hard reset and had about 120-200mA drain. Added email accounts only, no facebook or anything else, up to 350-400mA. I left it that way and got 7 hours before a low battery warning.

I called Rogers, they basically told me to get lost since I unlocked it. I called Nokia Canada directly and they told me to turn on battery saver and disable sounds to increase battery life. When I explained that I believed I should get more than 7-8 hours of sitting on a desk not being touched, he directed me to Nokia USA to print off a shipping label for repair, which didn't work because I have a Canadian phone. I did locate the instructions to RMA on Nokia Canada's website however, and I plan on sending it in on Monday.

The moral of the story: support through Rogers sucks (no surprise) and so does support through Nokia. I just hope whatever I get back form them doesn't have a purple screen or the vibration issues. My phone is flawless except for abysmal battery life.
 
alodar1

alodar1

Senior Member
Aug 6, 2007
1,347
90
Auburn, WA
Microsoft Surface Duo
dtjohnst said:
Yeah, I did a hard reset and had about 120-200mA drain. Added email accounts only, no facebook or anything else, up to 350-400mA. I left it that way and got 7 hours before a low battery warning.

I called Rogers, they basically told me to get lost since I unlocked it. I called Nokia Canada directly and they told me to turn on battery saver and disable sounds to increase battery life. When I explained that I believed I should get more than 7-8 hours of sitting on a desk not being touched, he directed me to Nokia USA to print off a shipping label for repair, which didn't work because I have a Canadian phone. I did locate the instructions to RMA on Nokia Canada's website however, and I plan on sending it in on Monday.

The moral of the story: support through Rogers sucks (no surprise) and so does support through Nokia. I just hope whatever I get back form them doesn't have a purple screen or the vibration issues. My phone is flawless except for abysmal battery life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

I think an expectation is a hard thing to overcome. I assume you've set the sync settings to appropriate levels. Reality is, that may not be enough. Which you already know. I have 3 email accounts. 1 set to as item arrives, 1 set to 15 minutes, and the last to manual. I hate the idea that I won't see email as it arrives. But, I've learned to prioritize. Don't like it, but accept it. Rationalize any way you want, you have to live with your expectations.

Turn your email off the auto sync option. Does your battery still drain that bad? If so, maybe it is the battery. If not, would sending your phone it actually fix the thing?

As I said in an earlier post, sometimes its the combinations of apps and settings that do the damage. Sometimes its just broke.

I was in a meeting Friday afternoon. Several people were there. Strangely enough, 5 people had 900s. Everyone, save one, loved the lumia. I asked them about purple screen, no one had one. Asked about the vibrate, didn't matter to them. Asked about battery, they all laughed saying compared to previous phone, this one is good.

The one who did not like the phone was an avid apple person. He said he liked the phone, but hated the lack of screen customization. He showed me his screen, something ge did with wiztiles.

These guys were hard core corporate types and battery was not in their lists of complaints.
 
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jimski

jimski

Senior Member
Jan 11, 2009
563
26
Florida
Try turning off Data for a day and see if that helps. Use WiFi if available of course..

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express
 
alodar1

alodar1

Senior Member
Aug 6, 2007
1,347
90
Auburn, WA
Microsoft Surface Duo
I just came across something I found strange. I apologize if someone else has mentioned it. I was running pretty good on discharge, idle around 95. Turned on the light background. No other changes. Idle around 235.

Ran it for an hour, discharge was pretty much higher. Switched back to dark background. Discharged immediately dropped to 95 at idle.

I never realized the backgrounds had that much impact.
 
2

22-40

Senior Member
Aug 1, 2010
66
0
AMOLED screens draw maximum power when displaying white. It is quite the discharge increase here though!
 
K

kertong

Senior Member
Apr 14, 2007
100
21
I've been enjoying spectacular battery life on my lumia 900 (using LTE and wifi, moderate use, netflixing, etc), and I always got 1.5-2 days pretty comfortably.

Just 2 days ago, I took my phone out of my pocket at 2pm or so, and I expect the battery to be at about 80%-90% still by then. I first noticed the phone was incredibly warm to the touch, and the batt was down in the 15-20% area. WTF? THought it was a stuck program, reboot, suffered a dead phone past 3pm for the rest of the day. Recharged, and same thing happened today.

Turned out it was the latest baconit app update I did a few days ago. Teaches me to update, every time I update a mobile app it seems to introduce more ads, more bugs, and more power draw. Dang it.

Strangely, disabling the background app'ing of baconit 2.0 did not fix this. It was only when I fully uninstalled the app that it fixed itself, within 5 minutes of uninstalling the app the phone was back to its normal temperatures and does not feel hot to the touch anymore.

I'm recharging it now, hopefully it'll be back to normal behavior.. but if you guys have applied the baconit update, make sure you completely uninstall it as background-disabling didn't seem to help at all for me. Possibly a stuck open socket on wifi hanging when you leave the wifi zone?

EDIT: Also, when I hit "##634#" from the Phone, it says "field test", then "Loading......" ,and nothing happens. Tried several times now, leaving it running for 5 minutes at a time. I have good 4G signal and wifi as well.
 
Last edited:
alodar1

alodar1

Senior Member
Aug 6, 2007
1,347
90
Auburn, WA
Microsoft Surface Duo
kertong said:
I've been enjoying spectacular battery life on my lumia 900 (using LTE and wifi, moderate use, netflixing, etc), and I always got 1.5-2 days pretty comfortably.

Just 2 days ago, I took my phone out of my pocket at 2pm or so, and I expect the battery to be at about 80%-90% still by then. I first noticed the phone was incredibly warm to the touch, and the batt was down in the 15-20% area. WTF? THought it was a stuck program, reboot, suffered a dead phone past 3pm for the rest of the day. Recharged, and same thing happened today.

Turned out it was the latest baconit app update I did a few days ago. Teaches me to update, every time I update a mobile app it seems to introduce more ads, more bugs, and more power draw. Dang it.

Strangely, disabling the background app'ing of baconit 2.0 did not fix this. It was only when I fully uninstalled the app that it fixed itself, within 5 minutes of uninstalling the app the phone was back to its normal temperatures and does not feel hot to the touch anymore.

I'm recharging it now, hopefully it'll be back to normal behavior.. but if you guys have applied the baconit update, make sure you completely uninstall it as background-disabling didn't seem to help at all for me. Possibly a stuck open socket on wifi hanging when you leave the wifi zone?

EDIT: Also, when I hit "##634#" from the Phone, it says "field test", then "Loading......" ,and nothing happens. Tried several times now, leaving it running for 5 minutes at a time. I have good 4G signal and wifi as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Did you comment or review the app in marketplace? Only way to help people become aware of this is to write the review. Not all problems are caused by apps. But, personally, I'd like to be aware of the apps that do.

thanks for reporting !
 
J

jason.hamilton

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2010
517
45
Dallas
I found the battery life on this phone to be excellent. I charge it over night and have no problem with it throughout the day with pretty heavy use. Usually end the day with about 40-50%.
 
aquanaut88

aquanaut88

Senior Member
Aug 19, 2006
313
21
somewhere in the pacific
Regarding the previous comment on adware apps, no free lunches. Apps supported by ads query location, stream data, etc.

The other tips -- dark background themes, auto brightness, find my phone (Every Few Hours), feedback (OFF), review background tasks.

Here's the article on adware apps:
http://bit.ly/FPp45i

Cheers
 
alodar1

alodar1

Senior Member
Aug 6, 2007
1,347
90
Auburn, WA
Microsoft Surface Duo
aquanaut88 said:
Regarding the previous comment on adware apps, no free lunches. Apps supported by ads query location, stream data, etc.

The other tips -- dark background themes, auto brightness, find my phone (Every Few Hours), feedback (OFF), review background tasks.

Here's the article on adware apps:
http://bit.ly/FPp45i

Cheers
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

thanks for posting that...I couldn't find it again.
 
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    Lmuggs
    I have noticed that the battery life is no where near what I expected based on all the reviews and threads I am reading about it being great. I hope it gets better over time given that its only 4 days old.

    I charged the phone fully overnight and took it off the charger at 9AM. I have taken a short 5 minute call, sent a few texts, 10 minutes of browsing the web. I have 2 email accounts set to push (outlook and gmail), bluetooth off, wifi on, signal is a little weak in the house so I'm sure that diminishes the battery some due to the radio having to poll for the signal all the time. As of right now I am at 11%. That's 8.5 hours of minimal use.

    One thing I noticed is that I do see, when viewing the Battery Status page in the diagnostics tool, the current discharge seems to get pretty high without touching the phone. It will go from 100 mA to approx 600 mA, hover around 300 then back down to 100 mA and repeat this cycle over and over.

    Can it be that push is not set up correctly with Gmail? On the iPhone I remember having to set it up as an additional exchange account to get push to work correctly.
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    P
    provenflipper
    Coming from the iPhone 4S, I'm getting less battery with the Lumia. I'm fairly certain it has to do with my phone swapping from 4G to LTE all day long while I'm at work, even though when I have LTE reception its full bars. Hopefully a firmware update comes out that will either fix this issue or let me turn off LTE entirely.
    View
    1
    J
    Jigganaughty
    I happened to have been at the store to pick up some corporate devices. We're mostly an iOS shop with some Androids and Blackberries in between. I'm probably the only person that has a Windows Phone 7 device. Anyway, while I was there, I happened to bump into the Nokia rep for the store so we chatted for a bit and we discussed the device and what I like and don't like about it. He informed me that in order for the Lumia to get a full charge, you need to use the charger that came with it. Specially for the first 5-6 times. It apparently outputs at a different wattage then most charging devices and that any other charger will only charge the battery to around 70% even though it would show it at 100 on the screen. The Lumia charger will also bring the 900 to 90% charge from a dead battery state in about an hour.

    For those experiencing the dismal battery life try charging with the Lumia charger instead of your other chargers. I was doing the same thing since I had tons of micro-usb chargers from my other device. I'm going to try now to see if what he was saying is true. YMMV
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    1
    jimski
    jimski
    nraudigy2 said:
    Do you guys know if Nokia Drive will run in the background and eat up battery?



    Navigation apps on iPhones will eat up the battery in the background.
    Click to expand...
    Click to collapse
    Well as it uses offline maps, only thing running is GPS. And if you have location already turned on, GPS is active. So, probably not.

    Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express
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    1
    alodar1
    alodar1
    bbtm said:
    Being puzzled by the change in battery life, I took the plunge and did a full reset on the phone. I then recreated my email account (one exchange, one Hotmail both setup to download mail every 30min), connected to windows life but did not setup or use any app. I’m still using that microcell in my office and have wifi turned on.
    The battery diagnostic consistently showed around 95 mA which should equal to about 20 hours on a charge.
    Then I tried to take a picture and the phone requested to turn location on. I did that and the battery discharge current – was back consistently to the 350-400 mA.
    Turning location back off brought the discharge rate back down to 95 mA.
    I had tried turning off the location service before doing a full reset but it didn’t help. Could this mean that some apps use it even if it’s off?
    My plan is to start re-installing one app at a time and keep monitoring the battery to see if I can find a clear culprit.
    Click to expand...
    Click to collapse

    Go for it man....:p

    I've done this too, though not on this device....but I learned exactly what you are intending to find out.

    First, there are indeed system combinations that play better together. Period.
    There are comibinations that once turned on, are very difficult, if not impossible to turn off.

    The same is true for apps. There are some wonderful apps out there. There are some horrible apps out there. But, again, some of these apps, in combination with the system have varying degrees of 'efficency'.

    This part really makes me laugh though. People downgrade windows phone because of the size of the marketplace. You can't put 450k apps on your phone. You find the app that works for you, and you continually use it. This is demonstrated everyday by various comments, usually by newbs, here and on various forums.

    My 'research' told me:
    • load only the apps you use regularly
    • do pay attention to data use
    • do pay attention to battery life
    • be aware what each app uses. Location is used by alot of apps and does use alot of power
    • Free apps use alot of battery life because of the ads. There are some nice articles talking about battery life and ads in apps across all platforms. DO NOT IGNORE THIS.
    • Uninstalling an app does not always reset the system back tothe way it was.
    • Sometimes ONLY a factory reset will reset your system correctly.
    • Consider using Reinstaller to pick and choose your apps. It makes the ability to hard reset easy to stomach.
    • Use the cloud for your pictures and docs. This makes having to hard reset a little easier to stomach

    Another thing, monitor the amount of LIve tiles you actually use. I recall this being an issue when the first v1 phones came out. I can't imagine the issue went away. Microsoft tried to choose a balance between the amount of information you might want to see vs. the impact on battery life. Most people ignored the part about battery life...and insisted on dozens of live tiles.

    Anyway, share what you find out. We can all use that information...and whenyou find an app that devours battery...make sure you put that in the app review...others need to know this...

    Good luck.
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