Galaxy s3 battery life

[Connoisseur]

I didn't see a thread with this title so I decided to throw it up there. I've had my s3 for about a month and a half. Honestly, even with relatively light use (1-1.5 hours phone talk, 20 min of internet surfing/facebook, 20-30 min of streaming music and the rest standby) i only get about 10-12 hours of total battery life. I've tried battery saver mode and everything dialed low. I did some research and the only two possible solutions I found are:
1) Turn off sync. I went into the sync menu and am only syncing calendars and email for 2 gmail accounts. In addition, I have Good for Enterprise (for my company email), but I turned off persistent mode.
2) Cell Standby usage - Looking at my battery usage monitor, I saw cell standby usage was extremely high. Looking this up, it only seems to be a reporting issue with the cell standby and not an actual battery drain issue.

I'd rather not do a factory reset or a custom ROM (unless someone knows a way where I can use Good for Enterprise with said ROM). Any other insights? In contrast, my Girlfriend's Iphone 4, with similar usage, only ends up at around 80% for the entire day.

 

[Krazy4Real]

It's probably an app. I would uninstall anything you don't use. I can go 2 days on my phone if I have to with regular usage. You can also try something like battery monitor widget to see what exactly is causing your drain.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I have a galaxy s3 too.

 

[dguy6789]

Seconded. There's no shortage of apps out there that have some kind of service that runs in the background and sucks battery dry even if the app was closed.

 

[KentState]

I get around 36 hours out of my phone with a lot of use. 10-12 hours is downright wrong in my experience. I sync Twitter, Exchange, Hotmail, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. Other apps I regularly use are Spotify streaming 320kbps (4+ hours), MLB.tv(1-2 hours), Kindle (maybe an hour), FoxFi(1-2 hours) plus general browsing, maps and texting. What you described is my experience with the Thunderbolt that I came from.

 

[Connoisseur]

Any suggestions on battery monitoring apps? I use Watchdog Lite but it doesn't seem to offer the level of detail I need .

 

[Connoisseur]

As an example, I unplugged my phone from the charger at around 11:20am. It's 1pm now and the battery has gone down 8% with about 5 minutes of internet use and the rest inactivity. This is with all the power saving options turned on. For some reason the battery goes down to 99% within a couple of minutes of being unplugged regardless of usage (or lack thereof).

 

[foghorn67]

Better Battery Stats. You want to look at the wake kernel and partial wake

 

[NikolaeVarius]

As an example, I unplugged my phone from the charger at around 11:20am. It's 1pm now and the battery has gone down 8% with about 5 minutes of internet use and the rest inactivity. This is with all the power saving options turned on. For some reason the battery goes down to 99% within a couple of minutes of being unplugged regardless of usage (or lack thereof).

An app is draining power.

Also the phone goes down to 99% in a minute because that's how the system is calibrated to display the battery.

 

[zerogear]

BetterBatteryStats -- see if there are any apps causing wakelocks. Even check for fastdormancy.

 

[Connoisseur]

Allright so here are the steps I performed:
1) Downloaded BetterBatteryStats
2) Disabled Persistent Mode in the "Good" application (Nothing Good about that POS). Realized that it might keep the app active even during suspend
3) Disabled using Wifi for location services (Google maps)
4) Disabled Wifi for testing purposes
5) Removed sync of everything but Email/Calendar entries for 2 Gmail accounts

For testing purposes, I fully charged my phone and left it unplugged overnight with the settings mentioned above. When I woke up about 6 hours and change later, it had gone down to about 89%. While it's certainly much better than what I was getting before, is this normal drain? I took screen-caps for kernel and partial wakelock. It looks like "bam_dmux_wakelock" is still partially active. Any thoughts?

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/connoisseur/Screenshot_2012-09-17-07-53-05.png

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/connoisseur/Screenshot_2012-09-17-07-53-51.png

::EDIT:: I understand that it may be certain apps that are causing battery drain but it's damn frustrating that you have to research this crap so intensely to figure out a culprit and get the advertised standby time. I wish they'd have much more intuitive global power control options.

 

[pmark]

My s3 gets pretty bad battery life too. By the end of the work day, my phone is about dead. I listen to pod casts on the train ride (about 1.5 hrs total), but besides from that, I rarely use the phone during the day. I end up having to charge it throughout the day which is annoying.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Allright so here are the steps I performed:
1) Downloaded BetterBatteryStats
2) Disabled Persistent Mode in the "Good" application (Nothing Good about that POS). Realized that it might keep the app active even during suspend
3) Disabled using Wifi for location services (Google maps)
4) Disabled Wifi for testing purposes
5) Removed sync of everything but Email/Calendar entries for 2 Gmail accounts

For testing purposes, I fully charged my phone and left it unplugged overnight with the settings mentioned above. When I woke up about 6 hours and change later, it had gone down to about 89%. While it's certainly much better than what I was getting before, is this normal drain? I took screen-caps for kernel and partial wakelock. It looks like "bam_dmux_wakelock" is still partially active. Any thoughts?

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/connoisseur/Screenshot_2012-09-17-07-53-05.png

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/connoisseur/Screenshot_2012-09-17-07-53-51.png

::EDIT:: I understand that it may be certain apps that are causing battery drain but it's damn frustrating that you have to research this crap so intensely to figure out a culprit and get the advertised standby time. I wish they'd have much more intuitive global power control options.

Regarding that I suppose it's how often you use location based services. If you open Yelp or Google Maps or Foursquare, I suppose it's useful to have your location pinned down. Unless you open those like 2 hours a day, I think it's ok to use location services based on wireless info. And it's not *just* based on wifi. It's also based on cell tower info if you're not connected to wifi.

 

[Connoisseur]

Regarding that I suppose it's how often you use location based services. If you open Yelp or Google Maps or Foursquare, I suppose it's useful to have your location pinned down. Unless you open those like 2 hours a day, I think it's ok to use location services based on wireless info. And it's not *just* based on wifi. It's also based on cell tower info if you're not connected to wifi.

Yeah I only use it if i'm looking for a new place or for directions. So maybe around 10 minutes a day tops. I'm not so much complaining about the wifi location services. Just mostly how I have to go through a crapload of menus and apps to maximize battery life.

 

[PowerYoga]

I get about 20 hours before the phone dies if I'm not doing stuff like video chatting. I'd probably check the internet for about 1 hour total in the day, play a game or 2 for 30 minutes. Listening to music throughout the day takes about 3-4 hours off though as does actively using the phone.

Video chatting though kills my battery, I can get maybe 1.5 hours tops from a fully charged phone.

Might want to check into rooting your phone and getting a cleaned rom to see if that helps. That's the first thing I did and I never noticed any issues for battery life.

 

[Connoisseur]

I get about 20 hours before the phone dies if I'm not doing stuff like video chatting. I'd probably check the internet for about 1 hour total in the day, play a game or 2 for 30 minutes. Listening to music throughout the day takes about 3-4 hours off though as does actively using the phone.

Video chatting though kills my battery, I can get maybe 1.5 hours tops from a fully charged phone.

Might want to check into rooting your phone and getting a cleaned rom to see if that helps. That's the first thing I did and I never noticed any issues for battery life.

I think i'm close to your battery life given almost the same workload (i only listen to streaming music about 30-40 minutes a day during my commute). What's all this talk about 100's of hours of standby time? Is that pretty much putting the damn thing in airplane mode?

I wish I could root. I would've gotten JB on there so fast... unfortunately, Good for Enterprise won't work on rooted phones and i'm not aware of any workaround. The REAL problem is that my company uses Lotus Notes. W...T...F...

 

[PowerYoga]

You have more than 11-12 hours of battery life then. I think I can easily get 30+ hours on this thing just on standby if I do nothing other than text and check for the occasional e-mail.

 

[Connoisseur]

Ugh... was working fine yesterday. No real change in usage pattern. Today I streamed music like I normally do during my 20 min commute. Afterwards my battery drained by 10% within an hour. Not it appears "deleted_wake_locks" is the culprit. WHY?? One after another. I love this phone except for the inconsistent battery problems!

 

[QuantumPion]

I had an AT&T SGS3 before I returned it. I would get around ~6-8 hours of use to 20% battery. That includes light usage, texting, checking e-mailing, browsing a couple websites, etc. No streaming, movies, or phone calls. My fiancee's Verizon SGS3 is even worse, with a poor LTE signal. She gets about 3-4 hours of moderate usage before going into the red, and has to frequently plug it in in the car, at work and at home.

 

[QuantumPion]

You have more than 11-12 hours of battery life then. I think I can easily get 30+ hours on this thing just on standby if I do nothing other than text and check for the occasional e-mail.

Who cares. People don't buy smart phones to use them as pagers only checking them when they get a message. They buy them to use apps, browse web, and listen to music.

 

[jpeyton]

I run my AT&T SGS3 on Straight Talk and I'm currently at 22 hours unplugged with 47% remaining on light usage (e-mails, web browsing).

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I think when you poll battery numbers, average use patterns, you're goign to get a bimodal distribution if people are on 3G/4G versus Wifi. Those on Wifi have significantly longer use times, and are typically the ones championing 30+ hour times with battery to spare.

 

[waggy]

hmm i get good battery life. though every now and then i clear out the apps that stay on in the background and turn off the screen if im not useing it.

also i don't use the phone part very often. if i hit 200 minutes a month it was a busy month. i do a ton of texting and email. also the GPS is on nearly all the time i'm in the car

I also noticed that now that im getting 4g i have to charge nightly. before when i was gettign 3g in town i could go 1.5-2 days

 

[pmark]

Is there any way to turn off 4G? I haven't found a way and I bet that would greatly increase battery life.

 

[Wyndru]

Its probably already been mentioned, but you could use juice defender for this, it increased my battery life on my RAZR by quite a bit, I'd say almost double. It basically manages when 4g vs wireless is used, disables data when phone is not in use (or regular intervals such as enable data every15 mins) etc...It has a lot of options and is easy to customize.

 

[rcpratt]

I had my first inexplicably bad battery life day today. Like 83% by the time I got into work.

Hope it doesn't continue.