brand new Galaxy S4 with battery problems and no help from Samsung! - Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hi Everyone
I’ve bought yesterday a brand new Samsung Galaxy S4 here in Brazil (model GT-I9515L, it’s a Snapdragon 600 4G one), and I’m kinda worried about my battery life, which drags 1% every one or two minutes on simple Wi-Fi web browsing, I have been from 100% to zero in less than two hours, and I honestly don’t think that is normal.
I’ve tried a lot of things, I tried disabling some battery dragging features like the gestures, gps and etc, and still got terrible battery life
I’ve noticed that if I sit the phone down idle (screen off but powered on), it doesn’t seem to drag the battery much, when idle it seems equal to my Nexus 4 that I had previously, I'm starting to miss this phone more and more since I got the Galaxy.
The charging time is normal too, it goes from 0 to full in average time, two hours or so.
My phone is in 4.4.2 Kitkat (TouchWiz, unrooted) I’ve haven’t done anything to the phone other than apply OTA updates once it turned on the first time.
I’ve tried doing a factory reset via the settings menu (is this the same thing than reseting from recovery?) and not installing anything after but still got the battery drain problem.
Thinking that it was a faulty battery or phone I’ve brought it back to the store (an official Samsung Store here in Brazil), but they told me that my software was out-of-date, which I thought was strange because both the Software Update menu in phone settings and Kies found no updates to be applied.
I watched them as they put my phone in Odin mode and plugged my phone into one of the store’s computers, opened a program called “samsung master” in order to update my phone, but they couldn’t do it because my “Knox” was somehow messed up (which isn’t because it shows as 0x0) and told me to come back another day when the technician is there.
I became really frustrated with this, so far what I could diagnose was that somehow that my battery drain problem is a software one, and is solved by some kind of update that isn’t available by Kies, just in Samsung stores.
Can you guys give me any directions? I’m open to suggestions and if you guys need any other information, please tell me that I can post here, sorry for my English because I’m brazilian.

Drain almost always applies to when your screen is off. If you don't have drain while your screen is off, then it's perfectly normal.
2 hours of screen on time is perfectly normal. Your screen uses power, not much you can do about that.

Lennyz1988 said:
Drain almost always applies to when your screen is off. If you don't have drain while your screen is off, then it's perfectly normal.
2 hours of screen on time is perfectly normal. Your screen uses power, not much you can do about that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When it's off, the batteery seems to last, but the performance is way worse than on my Nexus 4 (which is known for it's bad battery performance) when it comes to screen time, I've got near the double web browsing time on the nexus.
Your galaxy drains battery like this too? it seems insane to me. 2hours from 100% to zero without any of the features, brightness on the lowest level, only Wi-Fi on, I don't think every galaxy is like this.
When I brought them to the store, the salesperson told me that it had an update to be applied, but when I search for an update or put it into kies it shows me as up-to-date, do you guys know anything about that?

Here you can find the latest
http://www.sammobile.com/firmwares/
Though I doubt a firmware upgrade would change it.
And yes, 2 to 2 1/2 hours screen on time is what I get.

Related

[Q] Nexus 4 Instant Battery Drain/Shut-Off

Hi
I have recently started having a problem with what I presume to be the battery of my Nexus 4. It seems to have started suddenly about a week ago, though was working absolutely fine before. I don't think it was due to any specific app having been installed. I have also done a factory reset on it, but that didn't solve the problem.
Basically, the battery will discharge to about 75%. The phone will then suddenly switch off; turning the phone back on, it simply shows the battery to be fully depleted and switches off. If I plug it into a power source, the phone turns back on and begins charging, from 0%, though seems to suddenly fully charge it within about half an hour.
My phone has not been rooted.
I would really appreciate any help/advice on this issue as it is incredibly frustrating having to have my phone almost permanently on charge.
I have attached two screenshots of the battery usage graph.
Thanks!
bab88 said:
Hi
I have recently started having a problem with what I presume to be the battery of my Nexus 4. It seems to have started suddenly about a week ago, though was working absolutely fine before. I don't think it was due to any specific app having been installed. I have also done a factory reset on it, but that didn't solve the problem.
Basically, the battery will discharge to about 75%. The phone will then suddenly switch off; turning the phone back on, it simply shows the battery to be fully depleted and switches off. If I plug it into a power source, the phone turns back on and begins charging, from 0%, though seems to suddenly fully charge it within about half an hour.
My phone has not been rooted.
I would really appreciate any help/advice on this issue as it is incredibly frustrating having to have my phone almost permanently on charge.
I have attached two screenshots of the battery usage graph.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you are on stock, try flashing the stock image(4.2 or 4.3 up to you) there's plenty of threads on here thatll guide you thro the process.
I've had the same issue about three times, during the first week of using my Nexus 4 (about half a year ago). I've already had my mind made up to RMA it, but waited for it's shut-off to happen once more to collect some evidence of this problem and... it never happened again. I'm pretty confident that I didn't install anything that might have helped (I only installed BetterBatteryStats to check the instant drain, but really doubt it could change anything, it's just statistics), and I've never factory wiped the phone's data yet.
I've been searching for answers around the internet back in May, but never found anything of value, so my only advice is... wait a little, and if it doesn't get better itself return it to the merchant. My previous HTC phone was restarting almost everyday from the first day I bought it, until a month later I returned it for warranty repairs and after they changed almost all internals of the phone it never crashed again (till today, since I still use it as GPS and media player when running).

Battery-life Issues with N4 after 4.4KitKat

I have an LGE Nexus 4 and I just got the 4.4 update a few days ago. I love the update so far, but one thing that really irritates me is:
Battery life! Ever since updating to 4.4, Exchange services is using up more battery than my screen! Other power hungry apps since the update are: Mediaserver, and Android System. (I'm running Nova Launche Prime, that's probably responsible for the android system usage.
I used to come home from school at 5PM with around 35-40% Battery. It's currently 12:45PM and i'm already at 65% :S. Anybody with tops and tricks to help me conserve battery life please do share with my self and the community!
thanks world ( ::cyclops:
NeXusLeXus said:
I have an LGE Nexus 4 and I just got the 4.4 update a few days ago. I love the update so far, but one thing that really irritates me is:
Battery life! Ever since updating to 4.4, Exchange services is using up more battery than my screen! Other power hungry apps since the update are: Mediaserver, and Android System. (I'm running Nova Launche Prime, that's probably responsible for the android system usage.
I used to come home from school at 5PM with around 35-40% Battery. It's currently 12:45PM and i'm already at 65% :S. Anybody with tops and tricks to help me conserve battery life please do share with my self and the community!
thanks world ( ::cyclops:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't think you've provided enough information for us to really tell you. Try getting BetterBatteryStats and then check for yourself what's going on. Sven has fixed it to work on 4.4.
I've experienced the battery to be affected negatively on 4.4 as-well.
For now i turned off the voice command [ok google] which seem to help a bit but still not as good as 4.3.
ITs location services... turn it off and see how much better battery life you get or use device only then check your google services useage
Exchange Push is the issue
I have found that changing my Exchange settings from "Push" to check every X minutes has greatly improved my battery life. It seems to be much more inline with what I was used to with 4.3.
Hope this helps,
GusBot
Well... I flashed 4.4.2 the other day and I saw my battery plummeting like mad... so naturally the first place I came to was XDA, and saw that a lot of people were having a big problem with battery life.
So I didn't do any battery pulls or anything like that on my N7100, but when the battery went from 85% down to 12% what I did was to turn on everything that I could in order to drain the battery... turned on Data, WiFi, turned off the battery saver etc. etc.
Down at about 6%, I got that alarm with the notification to plug in the charger but I just let it go.
After a while, the phone wouldn't turn on at all... nothing. Nada.
So I plugged in the charger and let it go.
I checked it in about 1.5 hours and it said 100% but the red charging LED was still on so I let it charge for about another half hour and finally the LED turned green.
I turned on the phone and held the power button until the screen flashed three times (About 15 seconds), and let it boot up.
I had 100% charge last nite @ 11:39, and right now on standby (12:45 the next day) I still have 95% on the battery.
Strangely enough, I didn't get one call on this phone all day... but when I don't answer my Note 2, people just try the other number on my iPhone 5s.
Granted, I never leave the WiFi on or data... but I have the stock ROM with all the crapware that it has... but I flashed that French version of KitKat off of that site that I won't mention (But it's that one that if you're not a paying member, it takes you half a day to download anything).
Pretty happy with KitKat stock rom so far, but that first few hours when when I saw my battery sucked dry before my eyes was pretty disconcerting.

I9505 Android 4.4 GE battery issue explanation

Hi,
Reading the thread of Jamal's Google Play Edition 4.4 ROM, i noticed some users were saying they could get 4 hours of screen on time. Sadly enough this wasn't the case for me, and I think many other users can confirm. On a full charge, i can barely get 2hours of screen on time out of it, which is of course unacceptable. I decided to analyse the battery usage.
What I've got after a full discharge is illustrated in the attachment. If you know how I used my phone during this period, the curve is very surprising and hard to explain. The first hours I had my 4G on for extended periods and I noticed pretty decent battery life, i.e. 25% gone after 1 hour of screen on time. That's surely an acceptable score and would give me also that beautiful 4 hours. But suddenly, the phone made a weird change. You can see that the phone starts discharging much faster with a new and constant slope. I tried stopping it but it didn't change at all. My 4G and wifi were all set to off, even my location settings were turned off. Nothing changed.
I started searching the web if some applications were not optimised for android 4.4 yet, but didn't find anything significant. But then I found topics about the Exchange issue which already gave many android 4.4 users headaches. I read about a constant error-looping that could cause fast battery drain and, sneaky enough, doesn't start immediately when the phone boots but can start after a period of several hours. I decided to shut the whole thing off and deleted my Exchange account. Rebooted the phone and the issue was gone.
Hopefully a fix will be brought out soon!

[Q] Phone is very warm and drains battery, even when OFF!!!

About 3 weeks ago my phone started acting up with fast battery drain (about 20-25% per hour) and would be quite warm (90F in normal room temperature while idle).
Some notes:
It's warmest around the camera lens
CPU use is low/nil
Turned on power saver and airplane mode, same deal
Becomes even warmer if I charge it while phone is on
I've swapped in another N3 battery, same deal
I've taken out the sim and memory card (Samsung EVO)
I've done factory resets and formatted the memory card, same deal
It doesn't matter whether I have strong or weak reception.
And the best part...
the phone is slightly warm and the battery drains even when powered off (about 10-15% per hour)
I was on Hyperdrive 7 (4.3 and MJE) when this happened. Took this chance to update to the DeOdex 4.4.2 and now on NC2 but whether on stock rom or Hyperdrive 8 or Alliance, the problem still persisted.
I've tried searching for anyone with the same problem as me both on these forums and on Google, no luck. Closest I found was a bunch of guys in Singapore where going to another SEA country overworked their antenna but their problem was fixed as soon as they returned to Singapore.
Any suggestions?
p.s. I bought this phone used. Assuming I have to call Samsung for warranty service, will they want me to be the original purchaser? I don't have any documents showing the original purchase although the phone's manufacturing date is December 2013 so I'm clearly (though barely) still within the 1 year warranty period.
For warranty I believe they ask for the serial of the device also I had nothing but issues with Samsung reps so word to the wise call get it replaced don't tell them it's used act like it's yours and get the most of the warranty if someone gives you issues hang up call back completely different person will answer and eventually give you what you want. Took me 3 months to fix my charger issue on my note 3 5 reps lied to me saying it was shipping when in fact they just wanted to push me on to someone else and I wasn't even in the system when they act like there looking you up. I eventually talked to a manager that said they did everything wrong from telling me how to ship arrival etc so this is my advice don't give up don't listen to all the reps most don't know anything about phones if so ask to talk to a manager or supervisor that is golden good luck
Sent from my SM-N900V using XDA Free mobile app
---------- Post added at 06:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:38 PM ----------
Serial of device is on back of phone under back panel.
Sent from my SM-N900V using XDA Free mobile app
QuadCannons said:
About 3 weeks ago my phone started acting up with fast battery drain (about 20-25% per hour) and would be quite warm (90F in normal room temperature while idle).
Some notes:
It's warmest around the camera lens
CPU use is low/nil
Turned on power saver and airplane mode, same deal
Becomes even warmer if I charge it while phone is on
I've swapped in another N3 battery, same deal
I've taken out the sim and memory card (Samsung EVO)
I've done factory resets and formatted the memory card, same deal
It doesn't matter whether I have strong or weak reception.
And the best part...
the phone is slightly warm and the battery drains even when powered off (about 10-15% per hour)
I was on Hyperdrive 7 (4.3 and MJE) when this happened. Took this chance to update to the DeOdex 4.4.2 and now on NC2 but whether on stock rom or Hyperdrive 8 or Alliance, the problem still persisted.
I've tried searching for anyone with the same problem as me both on these forums and on Google, no luck. Closest I found was a bunch of guys in Singapore where going to another SEA country overworked their antenna but their problem was fixed as soon as they returned to Singapore.
Any suggestions?
p.s. I bought this phone used. Assuming I have to call Samsung for warranty service, will they want me to be the original purchaser? I don't have any documents showing the original purchase although the phone's manufacturing date is December 2013 so I'm clearly (though barely) still within the 1 year warranty period.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
They wanted Proof of Purchase (receipt) from me when I wanted just a cable replacement....so you may be SOL if you don't have proof you purchased it.
Sent from my Note 3 via Tapatalk
After updating to 4.4.4, my phone was doing the same thing you described. I went into Wi-Fi settings/advanced, and turned off "notify me when Wi-Fi connections are available"; changed "keep Wi-Fi on during sleep" to only when plugged in; and turned off "always allow scanning". After changing these settings, my phone is no longer overheating when plugged in or sitting idle and my battery consumption is back to normal. Apparently my Wi-Fi was constantly scanning, whether on or off, and keeping my cpu clock almost maxed. Again, after changing the settings, the cpu clock has settled back down.
rockehill10 said:
After updating to 4.4.4, my phone was doing the same thing you described. I went into Wi-Fi settings/advanced, and turned off "notify me when Wi-Fi connections are available"; changed "keep Wi-Fi on during sleep" to only when plugged in; and turned off "always allow scanning". After changing these settings, my phone is no longer overheating when plugged in or sitting idle and my battery consumption is back to normal. Apparently my Wi-Fi was constantly scanning, whether on or off, and keeping my cpu clock almost maxed. Again, after changing the settings, the cpu clock has settled back down.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the same problem. Where is this WiFi Settings/ ADVANCED???
Found it- Thanks...
I had the exact same problem. It worked fine for months and suddenly wouldn't hold a charge. Same issue, even turning it off and trying to charge, it couldn't keep up. I tried different chargers and batteries and even did an ODEN back to stock. Nothing worked. Then suddenly it quit draining the battery, with no explanation. Very odd.

[Q}Lollipop Yotaphone 2 battery life - any fixes?

Hi all,
Having just bought a Yotaphone 2, latest model 801 processor and with Lollipop installed, I was impressed with it... lovely screen, sharp response, great display on the back ....until I realised that battery life on the EPD or indeed doing nothing was (and is) terrible.
This somewhat negates the point of having the EPD. Because whether you use the EPD or not, as others have found, the processor seems to be spending 100% of the time doing something like trying to connect to Google headquarters to report my unethical swearwords as I look at the battery level heading south.
To try and make sure the phone was using the least power, I went through all the running apps and services and terminated as many as I could, turned off things like Yotafit tracking, turned off the service that sends all your contact details to the Kremlin, and so on... then, I turned on the Yotaenergy mode and despite that, we are at less than 24 hours with virtually no phone usage at all. Fully 50% of all the energy according to the battery stats is being used by Android System and Android OS processes when the system is in standby. And the historic battery screenshot shows that the processor is active 100% of the time., even though the phone has not been touched. (sorry, not attached, I'll post at some point, but its not very interesting)
So, does anyone have any clues about how this can be fixed? I have seen screenshots where people have shown that their processors are not active the whole time, and I imagine they have Lollipop? I have heard Lollipop has got some kind of bug which means that data connections are live the whole time, not sure if this is related.
(This might explain the sudden appearance of half price devices on eBay around six months after launch in the UK.)
Many thanks in advance!
YotaDevices has acknowledged the problems on Lollipop battery life, which is the reason they won't be shipping devices coming to USA preinstalled with Lollipop, but with KitKat. Now that I've played around with the EPD and created some widgets/applications for it, I can spot many places where things can go wrong in maintaining battery life and still keep things working.
Personally I've been lucky with the battery life on all versions of Android. When I updated to the last version of Lollipop (firmware 1.44), the phone did show poor battery life for hours after the installation was finished, before calming down to the promised 5 days stand by. Are you on the very last firmware? (Settings - about phone - build number)
As a last resort if your device won't settle down, I guess you could roll back to Kitkat, which had a very good battery life for pretty much everyone. You can install it with Yota's flasher tool: ftp://fw.ydevices.com/YotaPhone2/YotaPhoneFlasher/yotaphone2_flasher.exe
Just carefully select your own region and then the last version of KitKat (4.4.3) they offer. As you are rolling back from one major version to another, I would suggest flashing pretty much everything. You will lose your data.
Yota has said that they are working on bringing Lollipop 5.1 or 5.2 to Yotaphone 2. Let's hope that that works better.
Thanks that was very useful. The question is, will Yota do another build ... or build another device? I'm hoping the Y2 has a bit of life left in it yet and they do launch in the US - it can only help the development community!
I reset back to factory/Lollipop last night as it was eating battery so fast I could not believe it, and I am on the latest build 1.44EU (and was before). Since then.. it doesn't seem to be misbehaving so much, but it does seem to insist that the WIFI is on (when it is switched 'off' in the settings) by 'on' I mean the battery usage recorder... I wil take your advice and 'take it slow' for now, but may flash back to Kitkat if necessary. It is a bit tedious having to reinstall all your apps by hand but this seems to be the only way to ensure it is relatively clean.
The screengrabs below show the phone doing nothing at all in Yotaenergy mode - per first post.
ridgemagnet said:
Thanks that was very useful. The question is, will Yota do another build ... or build another device? I'm hoping the Y2 has a bit of life left in it yet and they do launch in the US - it can only help the development community!
I reset back to factory/Lollipop last night as it was eating battery so fast I could not believe it, and I am on the latest build 1.44EU (and was before). Since then.. it doesn't seem to be misbehaving so much, but it does seem to insist that the WIFI is on (when it is switched 'off' in the settings) by 'on' I mean the battery usage recorder... I wil take your advice and 'take it slow' for now, but may flash back to Kitkat if necessary. It is a bit tedious having to reinstall all your apps by hand but this seems to be the only way to ensure it is relatively clean.
The screengrabs below show the phone doing nothing at all in Yotaenergy mode - per first post.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am quite confident that they will release updated Lollipop sooner or later. They don't have the resources to piss off all their customers just yet.
Your Wifi still does some scans on its own for Google's location service, even if it's not enabled. You can disable this feature in the advanced wifi settings. But that is not the cause of your battery problem. Basically your device is awake all the time, meaning something is holding a wake lock. And by something I mean one of Yota's EPD compoments, which are counted as part of "Android OS" and "Android System" - your biggest battery hogs. It could be one of the EPD widgets that is misbehaving, or it could be some specific combination of them, or just something out of your control.
You could try removing ALL the widgets from the rear screen from Yotahub, then restart the device, and then let it run for an hour with the screen off. Then check the detailed battery log if the device went to sleep or if it was awake. If it went to sleep, you can try adding widgets back one at a time, and then check again if the device sleeps. Basically all the widgets which update periodically hold a wake lock momentarily (time, battery, calendar, weather etc). Of course if the problem lies on Yota's EPD framework, then this wont help at all.
Jeopardy said:
I am quite confident that they will release updated Lollipop sooner or later. They don't have the resources to piss off all their customers just yet.
Your Wifi still does some scans on its own for Google's location service, even if it's not enabled. You can disable this feature in the advanced wifi settings. But that is not the cause of your battery problem. Basically your device is awake all the time, meaning something is holding a wake lock. And by something I mean one of Yota's EPD compoments, which are counted as part of "Android OS" and "Android System" - your biggest battery hogs. It could be one of the EPD widgets that is misbehaving, or it could be some specific combination of them, or just something out of your control.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agreed, I suspect the YotaFit app going bonkers despite my efforts to kill it.... or the Yotagram service, the thing is, looking at the Yota specific apps, you don't really need them, as you can flip the screen with the Yotamirror, and then use any Android app. Sure it would be nice to have notifications on the EPD, but my main focus for this phone is use in bright daylight, and long battery life, not to actually look at the thing 24x7 so I can respond to emails every 30 seconds.
At this point though I'm just trying to determine how bad the underlying hardware is. The GPS on this phone seems to a bit flaky, as does the basic reception of mobile signal. (And I'm not using a metal bumper.) So, I'm happy to flash back to KitKat 4.4.3 to try and give it the best chance..
So, any clues/links about the Yota flash tool? I've put the phone into USB debug mode, installed the flash tool on my windows 7 desktop, and installed ADB/Fastboot as well, but at this point I'm having a bit of an android driver problem, and ADB can't see the phone so that probably explains why the Flashtool says 'waiting for device' when I fire it up. I will go digging to fix that, but I assume that the Flashtool will do all the stuff like putting the phone into bootloader mode, unlock etc...
ridgemagnet said:
Agreed, I suspect the YotaFit app going bonkers despite my efforts to kill it.... or the Yotagram service, the thing is, looking at the Yota specific apps, you don't really need them, as you can flip the screen with the Yotamirror, and then use any Android app. Sure it would be nice to have notifications on the EPD, but my main focus for this phone is use in bright daylight, and long battery life, not to actually look at the thing 24x7 so I can respond to emails every 30 seconds.
At this point though I'm just trying to determine how bad the underlying hardware is. The GPS on this phone seems to a bit flaky, as does the basic reception of mobile signal. (And I'm not using a metal bumper.) So, I'm happy to flash back to KitKat 4.4.3 to try and give it the best chance..
So, any clues/links about the Yota flash tool? I've put the phone into USB debug mode, installed the flash tool on my windows 7 desktop, and installed ADB/Fastboot as well, but at this point I'm having a bit of an android driver problem, and ADB can't see the phone so that probably explains why the Flashtool says 'waiting for device' when I fire it up. I will go digging to fix that, but I assume that the Flashtool will do all the stuff like putting the phone into bootloader mode, unlock etc...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The widgets I'm running at the moment without any problems are Time, Mini Calendar, weather, battery, and communications (the small widget which shows phone calls, notifications and sms). And of course my own widget.
The best way to make sure there are no useless services running is to root the device and uninstall them completely, but that's another story.
For the flashtool to detect the device, you need to boot it into download mode manually. The easiest way is to turn off your device and plug the usb in while holding volume down -button. The screen will show "download" or something in very small white text. After that the flashtool should find the device. You probably don't have to flash the user partition (it asks for it separately), i.e. the simulated sdcard section which holds all your photos, documents and music.
Edit. And when you have kitkat installed, the first thing you might want to do is to disable automatic system updates. Otherwise it will nag you about the Lollipop update all the time.
I've been facing similar issues and am considering a downgrade when I have the time. I'm really disappointed in yota and won't be buying their next device.
I have found this thread useful, you may too.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-extreme-battery-life-t3095884
thanks gents, oddly, the advice to let the phone 'calm down' seems to be working. I decided not to revert to KitKat (yet), as every day I use the phone the battery life seems to improve. Yesterday it was down to 40%, today 60% after about a days use. I'm thinking a week of running in will give it time to stabilize. I would love to root the phone but I want to use the Good app, and that doesn't run on rooted phones... (shame but I guess that's the flipside of working for a big corporate for you!)
ridgemagnet said:
thanks gents, oddly, the advice to let the phone 'calm down' seems to be working. I decided not to revert to KitKat (yet), as every day I use the phone the battery life seems to improve. Yesterday it was down to 40%, today 60% after about a days use. I'm thinking a week of running in will give it time to stabilize. I would love to root the phone but I want to use the Good app, and that doesn't run on rooted phones... (shame but I guess that's the flipside of working for a big corporate for you!)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try putting the battery widget on your epd. If it shows 5 days remaining when you are above 85% and you don't use the phone, then the device works as advertised.
That Good app sounds like a real killjoy. There seems to exist some Xposed modules to disable the root check, but they seemed to be rather finicky to setup and very easy to mess up.
I was suffering from terrible battery life after the lollipop upgrade and the EPD battery widget was never showing much above 1d anymore. After much research and tinkering, it has now improved and I am seeing greater than 3d again. I think the culprits were maybe google fit tracking which I have now turned off and I also de-installed and re-installed the google play services updates which is a tip I saw in an android forum. I also over the last two days have received several yota widget updates which may have also helped. At least for now I am seeing a comfortable day's use again!
I experienced poor battery life out of blue again. I went through all the settings, cleared dalvik-cache and cache partition, tried disabling everything, but nothing helped. It only showed <1 day battery life at 100%.
But then I went to mess around in the developer settings, and when I set the animation scales from 1x to 0.25x and enabled "Force GPU rendering", the battery life returned instantly to 5 days.
Just thought I'd add this to the list of things to test out if someone's experiencing poor battery life. The forced GPU rendering might have some unexpected effects on some software rendering based games.
dont know if this will help but just seen some of the new features of android m "marshmallow" one of which is doze and there is a separate app available on play store for this. i have installed and it has helped battery life !!!
I was going through terrible battery life after Lollipop as well. Suffered, tinkered, tried various things. Eventually I just said screw it, backed everything up and factory reset it from recovery. Since then it seems like it's almost back to it's old self. Obviously having root and using some kernel control apps, greenify and some other things helps it but It will happily do at least a couple of days with little-normal usage. Still don't think it's as good as KitKat but it's not too far off. The EPD really does help spread battery out too.
I did the same thing but a 3 weeks on, the battery is as shocking as ever.
Today, on battery since 0730, now @ 1115 51% and 3hrs left!??
No obvious apps causing battery drain, just google services!
Rarelyamson said:
I did the same thing but a 3 weeks on, the battery is as shocking as ever.
Today, on battery since 0730, now @ 1115 51% and 3hrs left!??
No obvious apps causing battery drain, just google services!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have had the phone nearly a week, and these are similar figures I experience. What's the point of the epd if my battery dies by lunch!
Sent from my YD201 using Tapatalk
I think it is something with Android 5.0 that is causing the drain issues. I can go anywhere from half a day to a week with good batteyr life and then it will randomly start draining again. Some background activity seems to hold a permanent wakelock and will not let go of it. I am unable to pinpoint what app is creating the wakelock with better battery stats or wakelock detector since there isn't access to kernel wakelocks in either of the apps for our phone. A restart always fixes things though, so I have a tasker script now that lets me know when idle battery drain exceeds a threshold for too long so I know to do a restart, it's not elegant, but my battery life is exponentially better and gives me enough battery life to make it through the day without a recharge and leave the eink screen on all night as a tv remote.
I got a new phone
sportsfan986 said:
I think it is something with Android 5.0 that is causing the drain issues. I can go anywhere from half a day to a week with good batteyr life and then it will randomly start draining again. Some background activity seems to hold a permanent wakelock and will not let go of it. I am unable to pinpoint what app is creating the wakelock with better battery stats or wakelock detector since there isn't access to kernel wakelocks in either of the apps for our phone. A restart always fixes things though, so I have a tasker script now that lets me know when idle battery drain exceeds a threshold for too long so I know to do a restart, it's not elegant, but my battery life is exponentially better and gives me enough battery life to make it through the day without a recharge and leave the eink screen on all night as a tv remote.
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Click to collapse
In the end, I got a new phone after my Yotaphone decided to brick itself. Its a Zopo Speed 7, Octacore, dual SIM, nice screen, and does 4G very well in my part of the world. It is also around $200 at time of writing. Its a Chinese phone typical of the genre, Zopo seem to be moderately responsive to bugs compared with Yota... This Zopa phone is running 5.1 Android and I can tell you that Lollipop is not the problem...
That's after charging the phone and leaving it overnight, with the battery saver mode on... not too shabby. Of course it won't actually last 28 days, but this phone is nothing special and it is capable of running without all those services running that the Yota has.
The Yota spent its entire time when I had it trying to contact Moscow with that dodgy 'dictionary app'. What (honestly) is the point of the e-ink display if it doesn't save power...
If you are experiencing "always awake" and wifi always on despite your settings saying otherwise it may be worth going into your advanced wifi settings and changing "wifi frequency band" from "auto" to "2.4 GHz only. I remember reading this tip somewhere else for an Android 5.0 phone that was having battery issues similar to this. I made this change about 24 hours ago and have noticed a dramatic difference in battery drain when the screen is off. When I look at my battery stats I am no longer seeing a solid bar for both wifi and awake. Worth trying.
For what it's worth, I have had fairly light use today, some checking of emails and facebook, 40 mins or so of music via bluetooth (with screen off). Total screen on time of 35 mins. The phone has been off charge since 06:30 this morning. It is now 17:00 and is showing battery of 71% with an estimated 2d and 8h left. Better battery stats show deep sleep of 71% whereas previously it had shown awake at 100%. Far better than I had before.
stapo101 said:
If you are experiencing "always awake" and wifi always on despite your settings saying otherwise it may be worth going into your advanced wifi settings and changing "wifi frequency band" from "auto" to "2.4 GHz only. I remember reading this tip somewhere else for an Android 5.0 phone that was having battery issues similar to this. I made this change about 24 hours ago and have noticed a dramatic difference in battery drain when the screen is off. When I look at my battery stats I am no longer seeing a solid bar for both wifi and awake. Worth trying.
For what it's worth, I have had fairly light use today, some checking of emails and facebook, 40 mins or so of music via bluetooth (with screen off). Total screen on time of 35 mins. The phone has been off charge since 06:30 this morning. It is now 17:00 and is showing battery of 71% with an estimated 2d and 8h left. Better battery stats show deep sleep of 71% whereas previously it had shown awake at 100%. Far better than I had before.
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Click to collapse
Have you tried using the setting so Wifi is only on while screen is on? (Unless on charge...)
I think I found the issue, at least with my phone.
I was syncing with exchange, and there is a nasty bug with android 5.0 and exchange sync. The sync is taking forever and doesn´t sync everything. Calendar and contacts missing.
Then I removed the ActiveSync connection on my phone and set up the app Nine to sync instead.
After that I got much better battery. This may help for others as well. The phone is just hammering the exchange server all the time and this takes up a lot of power.

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