I know the battery life is a work in progress, but wondering what I may be missing to increase battery life and best practices for maximizing battery in the field (and the battery life posts I saw were several years old).
I turned on all kill switches, battery was 100%, and put phone to sleep. An hour of trail time later, battery was 92%. Thus, simply maintaining it’s sleep state eats up 8% of battery/hour. That seems … steep. Ideas?
I have no web browser on and the kill switches take care of the rest of high battery use items?
That seems similar to my own experience and I try to maximize it by turning off the cellular modem, Wi-Fi, and camera modules with the kill switches.
I’m not sure what else can be done other than to ensure that your background apps are closed or kept to a minimum.
You could turn off the phone completely if you don’t expect to pull out your phone to do things like check the time (you could ask someone else for that as I have done sometimes).
The result seems consistent with expectations when not putting the phone to sleep, just merely letting it idle with screen off, in which case it’s going to last about 12 hours.
With suspend enabled, it should last about 20-24 hours with the modem on (subject to some external factors like cellular signal strength).
@dos : I presumed pushing the power button (above the vol. ± buttons) put it to sleep (suspended), but are you saying that is not the case, that it is a more active “idle”?
When suspended, the phone will wake up on incoming calls and SMS, but not on IM messages, e-mails etc. and the notification LED will stay off during suspend. Also, alarms from the Clocks app won’t wake it up in Crimson (but it’s going to work in Dawn).
You also can go in Mobile Settings → Experimental → Enable Suspend via System Menu. This enables the button when you drop down the top panel and click on the power-icon for suspension. I use this since auto suspend is not a great user experience to me (takes to long when needed, annoys when screen should stay on). I still have a very little hope someone will add suspend on power button (with a delay of 3-5 seconds).
20-24 time do no help anything because user do not using the phone, user want Active and Inactive real powersave. We already know that Gnu and Linux both lack energy consumption techniques for L5.
So we know that some fancy blobs as touchscreen v3.0 and Sparklan vX.X help on battery then others.
Can’t relate. I use 1 minute as the timeout for both screen blanking and system suspend and it works well. Whenever the screen should stay on, an idle inhibitor should be acquired and it correctly prevents both screen blank and suspend.
Newer versions of Phosh have an optional “caffeine” quick setting if you need to override it manually; gnome-session-inhibit can be used too (but if some app does not acquire an inhibitor when it should, it’s rather a bug to be fixed there than to work around manually).
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - initiate suspend (if not canceled by power button or incoming modem actions)?
Sorry, but that is standard behavior on any other mobile phone since ever.
Edit:
The only reason I do not complain much about is the existing of the software power button I spoke in my previous post. But it is one of the worst user experience things that affecting me multiple times each day. Looking at clock, login, drag down the top panel, suspend again instead of just pushing power button again (and again, I don’t want autosuspend on 1min).
It’s not a problem, the existing infrastructure just lacks the way to handle that. If you want to help to augment it to support such case, feel free to discuss this with GNOME, I’m not the right recipient here.
The 1 minute delay works well for me and provides a good experience. If you don’t like it, you can either work on g-s-d or script your phone to behave the way you want, which can be done quite trivially. You are the root after all.
I usually disable geoclue and avahi on my device, because I find these services unnecessary for my use case and I suppose if I really wanted them I would know how to turn them back on.
I also heard that it’s possible to charge the battery more slowly and have it result in having more energy. I usually have multiple batteries and chargers so I have 0 downtime with the phone, since I just swap the battery if it starts running out. In that regard, when I have a fleet of batteries and chargers, it becomes far far better than Android once my habit is to do the swap. I’ve said it before, but you can plug into a charger, rip out the battery, put in a different one, and then unplug the charger and you’re on the NEW battery but WITHOUT restarting.
So I swap twice a day, but my phone is never without energy.
Note that the gauge driver currently does not handle that scenario well, so the readings from it will be significantly off until a reboot. This is not a hard limitation, the driver could be improved to deal with that correctly, it just doesn’t yet.
In my experience this has sometimes manifested with the rather entertaining scenario where I could reboot a phone at 45% battery to get it back up to 100% and then keep using it for a while. (Despite doing nothing with any batteries or chargers.) It obviously means I’m lying to myself, but it also creates the illusion of extending battery life. As a result, the issue with the batter percentage hasn’t bothered me personally very much.