Battery life over time

mdaw

mdaw

mdaw

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18 Apr 2013
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Just wondering what peoples thoughts were on this subject. I have noticed like many others battery life becoming very poor usually a few months before the end of a 2 year contract. Most recent was when my wifes S7 edge promptly went from being ok to suddenly dropping from 100% to 20% over a few hours when she wasnt even using it. My brother had something similar with an S5 mini where even after changing the battery and a factory reset the battery would drain excessively with virtually no apps installed. How can this be? I'd have thought surely that would solve the issue.

So is it a case of the phone getting older cant handle the updated apps/OS? Maybe something else internally has gone wrong causing the battery to drain?
Heres the paranoyer in me. Is the phone programmed to basically force you to retire it after a certain amount of time to force you to upgrade?
 
bremen1874 said:
No mystery. Batteries degrade. The more charge cycles they have the more they’ll degrade.
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I get that but in my brothers case he bought a new battery and when that didnt solve the issues he then factory reset it and still made very little difference. So the was no battery degrading. At least it was minimal at that stage as it had only been charged a few times.
 
Bought a battery from where?

You can run benchmark software on phones to see how fast they’re running.

Software updates can slow phones down. Expecting them to do more on the same hardware.

Apple did deliberately slow phones down where they detected that the battery was failing. This was for good reasons but poorly communicated.
 
im not sure where he got the battery. This isnt the only case i have come across. My wife had the s5 and i bought her an official battery admittedly not direct from samsung and that made little difference and a colleague replaced his battery in the LG G5 with one direct from LG or its official supplier and he said it made no difference and he spent something like £25 on that. I have the same phone and went for a gadful battery i think its called after using the original for 15 months. Same size as normal battery and it did make a difference but not much. Its better once it hits about 25% where the old one drained very quickly at that point this one doesnt so much. Ive now had the G5 for 21 months but its still just about reasonable.
 
I hate how the batteries degrade. Would happily keep my Nexus 6P longer but i cant get more than half a day now.

Accubattery reports, 55% health.
1,904 mAh estimated, original is 3,450 mAh.
 
Just replaced the battery in my 3T and it's like having a new phone again, love it.

Can't believe how messy the 6P replacement looks, too much flipping glue!
 
mdaw said:
My brother had something similar with an S5 mini where even after changing the battery and a factory reset the battery would drain excessively with virtually no apps installed. How can this be? I'd have thought surely that would solve the issue.
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I would suspect that's more of a battery calibration issue.

I replaced the battery in my old xperia Z2 with a fresh battery, but where it's calibrated with the old/original battery, it appears to drain very fast, but will sit at 1% for quite a while. Same with charging, i struggle to get it upto 100%.
 
robj20 said:
Doesnt appear to be very easy to on this phone.
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It is and it isn't at the same time. Getting the case apart isn't an issue, it's getting the damn battery out that is - due to the strength of the adhesive on the double sided tape holding it in place. Persistance and a good credit card back and forth technique :)o:cool:) helps a lot. Highly recommend you purchase the visor and lower plastic rear cover if you do this. Most Ebay batteries I saw last year came with the tools required to pry the bugger out of the phone which was nice.

The 6P is such superb phone that I've given mine to my mother (it is on its 2nd battery) and she uses it lightly enough now. Given how I saw Google treat the 6P and indeed my Pixel C, I can never touch their devices again.

To the OP - batteries just degrade. Smaller capacity batteries in lower end phone equates to more frequent charges, which in time means degradation happens more noticeably. It is a shame that we've gone through almost SEVEN versions of Android and SoT life on handsets is still averaging 4hrs or so. Yes we're doing more and more with our devices but the battery is being utilised to the same rates too and we've seen little improvement in battery tech. Android OS and even Security updates impact battery life somewhat too and daily app updates with their plethora of tracking analytics don't help the issue either.

I think the Note 4 was probably the best performing device I've ever owned, with the most flexbility for battery life. A truly fresh battery on that device would fetch me 6hrs SoT most of the time on I believe Android Marshmallow.
 
robj20 said:
I really miss removable batteries.
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If people didn't buy phones with sealed batteries then we would still have them.

I would like to see the regulations change to at least make the batteries replaceable using only a screw driver and none of this heat gun and glue rubbish.

It happened with phone chargers to reduce waste and now it needs to happen with batteries.
 
I'll be honest, my pixel 2 XL has had more than it's fair share of issues in my use, but for once, battery life isn't something I can complain about, it's at least as good as the day I got it. Slow day at work but sitting on 5hr6 SOT with 29% battery remaining, and all my browsing done purely on 4G with the brightness quite high. I think that is excellent personally.

On the other hand my s7 edge rapidly tailed off after just a few months.

How it will be in another year, who knows, but I'm pleased with the way it's holding up so far!
 
This is why I hate the trend towards devices without removable batteries and won't buy them if I can help it.
 
I've not really done it with phones, but a factory reset on my tablets tends to see battery life improve a lot when I notice those struggling.

Suspect the OS gets bogged down over time.
 
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