Real life battery life

[Rotund]

Hi. I got my S3 a week ago, and like it mostly. This is my first android phone after 2 iPhones.

The thing is the battery. I was really expecting it to easily outlast my iPhone 4 with no problems, but it doesn't.

I'm consciously using it less than I did my iPhone, and there is no chance it will last a day without a top up charge. iPhone typically had around 30-40% left at the end of the day.

Is my battery a bad one, or are my expectations too high?


Best wishes


Chris

[greenman]

Difficult question to answer in that you have no doubt played a lot with your new phone and so probably used more power than your normal use.
However, one thing you can do is to let your phone fully discharge, then fully charge and leave plugged in.
Do this a couple of times to get the chip in your phone optimised.

[Rotund]

When you say "leave plugged in", how long for?

I'll give anything a try.

As an example, this morning I unplugged from the charger, 3 or 4 texts, a quick 2 mins on the web, and it said 96%.

Continued sending 3 or 4 texts and looked again 10 mins later, still 96%.

Pick up the phone 30 mins later and it was at 85%.

Now careering down at about 68% with next to no use since last 2 hours.

Hmmmm.


Chris

[greenman]

When phone is fully charged it tells you to unplug - just leave it in. In practice try to run until it turns itself off, then aim to charge overnight for example.
Sounds like you've all bells and whistles running. I find turning off GPS helps lot. Look at what's syncing and how often.
Google do have a habit of tracking you by default, turn it off.

[manoob]

the best advice i got was to turn off unneccessery things when you dont need it. you can do that on the screen you pull down.
gps-wifi-mobile data(this one draws a lot if you have a lot of apps that keep going),sync
your screen brighness is another thing.
now i remember on s2 people who had rooted their s2 used an overclocking app and took the power usega of cpu down . some kept the battery for up to 3 days!
hope this will help

[Rotund]

It's kinda counter intuitive for me to turn things off on a state of the art device, designed to keep you in touch all the time, automatically.

Always had everything turned on on my iPhone, syncing every app that I now have on this phone. (other than the Pizza Express app, which you can't get on Android)

If this has a 2100 battery, what size/number was the iphone 4?

Chris

[Jejoma]

Always had everything turned on on my iPhone, syncing every app that I now have on this phone. (other than the Pizza Express app, which you can't get on Android)

I don't know which iPhones you had but iPhone didn't used to multi-task fully (and might still not) thus when you switched an app to the background it stopped working and hence stopped using the battery. Android doesn't do that and apps can still be running in the background and using the battery.

[Rotund]

Can I set my S3 up to replicate the way my iphone did it?

Looking at the battery usage I get the feeling that the screen is using more than anything. 57%. Is that kinda normal?


Chris

[Tufftoad]

The percentage is just a percentage, your screen can be @ 60% battery usage and as soon as you start calling someone the dialler will increase it's percentage and the screen will decrease.

No-one knows how you had your iPhone setup? You should be getting half a day (high usage) to a day and a half or two(on low usage).

edit: Btw I have been testing the Pizza Express app for Android, think I might get in trouble for mentioning this.

[Rotund]

I had no special tools or power saving utilities on the iPhone 4. Very standard, but with lots of use. Expected this to last longer, with all the hype about the big battery and so on.

OK. While nobody is waytching, is the PE app good? When do you think we'll see it?

Cheers


Chris