Crazy battery drain on 8X

[champion-7891]

Hi,

I have been using an HTC 8X for 8 days, most days battery life was good with moderate to heavy use, including texting, 30 mins of games like Wordament or AlphaJax, an hour or so of browsing. By good I mean that I would leave at 100% on 9 am and be at 30-40% by 6 pm. I would only need to charge before going to sleep.

WiFi is always on, no cellular data, and WiFi remains on if screen times out, GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth are always off, screen brightness is always low.

Today however, the battery dropped to 80% within an hour and completely drained by 5 pm. I didn't even use my phone extensively: one email, 5 or 6 texts, 5 mins of Wordament and that's all. There were no suspended apps (by suspended I mean if I hold back button to bring up the app switcher to view other apps, then there were none). Its since been through a reboot.

My question is, was that freakish or should I keep expecting this?

Edit: following apps are running/ can run in background:
- Battery Meter
- Calculator3
- Facebook
- gMaps
- HTC
- Skype
- WhatsApp

I have since blocked Calculator3 and gMaps.

 

[Red Storm]

Did you install any new app today?

 

[champion-7891]

no but a couple of apps got updated included whatsapp. Oh and I had an attention required for an app update that had previously failed multiple times. But it never bothered me before. I have since uninstalled that app.

PS. I have heard (and this may totally be wrong), that battery measuring apps can sometimes cause battery drains?

 

[Deeko]

Skype and WhatsApp have had known issues with their background agents; generally uninstalling and reinstalling them takes care of it, give that a try.

Also, I would have to recommend Battery Widget over Battery Meter, but that's just because the developer is handsome and super cool.

 

[Belegost]

I have had similar issues on my 920. I would sometimes find when I took it out of my pocket that the area above the camera module (where the SoC is) was warm/hot. And the battery had drained a lot, like 10-15% and hour. This would happen maybe one day out of 10, but it was enough to really bother me.

I ended up killing almost all the background processes, as well as disabling location, wifi, and bluetooth. Now I can get up to 2 days of use between charges.

Currently I have been slowly re-integrating some background processes, and giving a week or so to see if it happens. Currently I am allowing Battery Status (a really good battery monitor with quick links to enable/disable wifi, bt, cell; lock screen integration and a nice live tile, as well as good graphs and stat logging) and Weave news reader and I haven't noticed any bad days.

I think my next move will be to re-enable location services.

I had hoped there would be some overlap between background services that might help narrow down the problem, but we actually use completely different things.

 

[Deeko]

PS. I have heard (and this may totally be wrong), that battery measuring apps can sometimes cause battery drains?

Not true. In WP8, there is only one type of non-native app that truly runs in the background - location-enabled apps. These have the potential to really crush your battery. The next closest is background audio agents - which some apps use to get around this limitation (like WhatsApp). These are the apps that can eat up your battery in the background.

The other apps use what is called a Periodic Task - it runs no more than every 30 minutes, can only run for a very short period of time in that 30 minute window, and is very constrained on what APIs it can access. These apps (which battery apps fall under) use a negligible amount of battery life.

 

[Deeko]

I ended up killing almost all the background processes, as well as disabling location, wifi, and bluetooth. Now I can get up to 2 days of use between charges.

Bluetooth and location have a habit of being battery hogs on the 920.

 

[Belegost]

Thanks Deeko for the info (I also picked up Battery Widget and replaced my other app, all the same features and a better live tile look!)

Yea, I very rarely use bluetooth so that's not a big deal, but I use Nokia maps for traffic at least twice a day so having to enable location, check traffic, and disable location is a hassle. So if I can get that on I would be pretty happy.

 

[Deeko]

Thanks Deeko for the info (I also picked up Battery Widget and replaced my other app, all the same features and a better live tile look!)

Yea, I very rarely use bluetooth so that's not a big deal, but I use Nokia maps for traffic at least twice a day so having to enable location, check traffic, and disable location is a hassle. So if I can get that on I would be pretty happy.

With location enabled apps, if you back out of it, rather than pressing home, you truly close it. That can help. Also disabled tap+send, that helps too.

Also, do you have Lync or Skype installed? They both used a "special" API from Microsoft that conflicted, and when both were installed, it caused big battery drain. The uninstall/reinstall trick was supposed to fix that, but I just never reinstalled Lync.

 

[Belegost]

No, I don't have either installed. And yea, I have gotten in the habit of backing out of apps to close them, and disabled the maps and cityview background services in the settings.

 

[champion-7891]

Thanks for the replies guys. And Deeko thanks for explaining the way apps work in the background, that was quite informative.

So, its been about 18 hours since my last charge and battery is at a healthy 65 percent (only wifi on), within these 20 hours I used the phone no more than an aggregate of an hour. So I am guessing that there was some rogue process or some looping sync that was going on which was remedied by the phone restart.

 

[notposting]

Maybe they will have the first Service Pack out by the time Verizon gets the "flagship" Lumia 920 (probably be a year old by then). I leave everything running on my Trophy and it's been nice. Having to fiddle things on and off seems way too "Android" for me.

 

[champion-7891]

Hi,

Just wanted to further how changing the email sync setting of my various accounts from "30 mins" to "as items arrive" will affect the battery life?

 

[pantsaregood]

I'm not sure what it is, but there are some tasks in WP8 that don't properly suspend. It isn't a problem with the phone or an inherent problem with the OS.

My Lumia 920, for example, will usually make it through a day under heavy use quite easily. Sometimes, however, the battery drains absurdly quickly - fully discharging in a matter of hours while doing absolutely nothing. When this happens, the phone also gets hot.

Even after suspending background tasks, this still happens sometimes. I'm unsure of the cause, but it may be possible that there's some issue with some legacy (WP7.x) apps running improperly.

If you notice your battery draining quickly, reboot your phone and it should stop.

EDIT: Also, changing e-mail sync settings and such won't have any significant effect on battery life. The rapid drain that happens is a result of some task hammering the SoC, not frequent syncing or any features like NFC. If you notice your battery draining really quickly, rebooting your phone is the only way I know of to stop it.

Disabling syncing and NFC will improve battery life, but they aren't the cause of your battery crashing. Disabling such features may add an hour or two to your battery life when it is behaving normally, but when you find it crashing rapidly, it won't really help.