Doing some testing, here’s the idle battery life I can see at present:
modem+wifi: 10:25 (Ten hours and 25 minutes)
modem: 13:00 (Thirteen hours)
Testing Methodology: Running a date script that wrote to a file every 5 minutes.
Error potential:
Only one sample tested for each testing type (I don’t want to kill the battery)
When on wifi, it was polled and backed up from my backup server during the test, though I expect this didn’t take long as no real changes happened on the system.
Geary was running in the background getting new mail for both tests.
Alarm went off once during both tests.
Overall, this seems to be a pretty good idle time to me considering it still doesn’t support suspend.
It really sounds to me that once we have suspend, this phone will be more than fine on the battery front. I still agree that having better runtime power usage is priority, but I’m wondering how much more can be done on that front.
To anyone thinking that ~10 hours isn’t very good - recall that this is basically a laptop with a tiny battery. I’d be surprised if many other laptops could last ~10 hours on a 4500 mAh battery.
That’s impressively bad. I can try mine with bluetooth on, though I haven’t been able to get it to pair with anything. Is yours paied with something during that?
I get similar runtime when actively using my 9 months old Evergreen. Please check whether something hogs the CPU in the background, that’s an abnormally short result.
In your case that’s most likely 5GHz WiFi network, 9h can be plausible. I hope that we can get power_save to work reliably on the Redpine cards in some near future, as that would save quite a lot of power.
If the PinePhone is any indication, we might see a drastic improvement with suspend enabled. I don’t have the exact numbers at hand, but I believe mine went from approx. 10h idling to over 24h after suspend was implemented in my distro.
Except it’s a phone, not a laptop. You compare the uptime against other phones. Besides, every phone is basically a “laptop” with a tiny battery. None of the others call it a day after 10h of rest.
Try with a 2.4GHz network - the Redpine card seems to be very power hungry on 5GHz for some reason
I asked about SD card as there could be indexing going on in the background (and SD card access wakes the USB hub up which also eats some power) - it’s good to check it with tracker status.
Okay, so…this phone still barely makes it through an average business day, and the primary hope is to get suspend working? Do I understand correctly that this would be like any usual PC’s suspend, i.e. the phone is doing nothing during that time? Or is it only certain hardware that gets suspended?
How can it be that the battery lifetime is that bad, and other modern smartphones (or even old smartphones) manage to run for more than a week with batteries significantly smaller than the Librem 5 has? I don’t get it.
This is currently one of the issues that concerns me the post with this phone. If I leave the house in the morning and can’t be sure it is still running when I get home, it is not very useful to me. Then I see blog posts that announce a 33% increase in battery life, while the improvement should actually be closer to a 10-fold increase. You can understand that does not inspire confidence.
What this will basically do is what your current phone does when the screen is off.
This phone is fully awake, although more and more sub-systems are in power-save mode when not needed, which already increased battery life over the course of development.
The final expected thing is that basically everything, including CPU, can sleep, except for maybe the modem, so it can wake up the phone on incoming calls, and maybe something that could react to a timer.
It’s not a crazy concept, it’s what your current phone does to achieve the battery life that it has. So will this.
The battery life issues on Librem 5 It is because L5 it using special security/pricacy/Libre Chipsets this chipsets are not optimized for phones, so Purism it doing all this huge work by optimizing these chipsets to phone, Battery life on L5 will be good on time.
Big companies like Qualcomm they create chipset(SoC) for phone very optimized(Big battery life) but this SoCs NOT for security or privacy either freedom to end user.
