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Battery drained 9% just idle while I slept

Eso said:
If you are happy with the battery life you get, don't worry about it. Personally, I also restored from a 2G backup and was getting worse battery life than my 2G and was not happy. When I say worse, I mean just a bit worse, I usually averaged about 5 hours of mixed use (very little use of cellular data, however) and a day and a half of standby. However, it was disappointing since the performance was less than that of my 2G and significantly less than the advertised battery life.

Having restored, battery life is greatly improved and I am much more satisfied.



Pretty much complete crap. This comes from the fact that Safari will run in the background which allows it to load up pages in the background. It will also keep the browser and the pages in RAM until needed.

Now, keeping anything in RAM will not use more battery power (RAM itself will take some battery power just to operate, but whether free space or used by an application, it is the same).

An application that is not actively processing anything will have virtually no load on the CPU (verify by observing your desktop computer idling at 0-1% CPU usage while idle). The only circumstance in which the browser will use more battery power as a background process is when it is loading a page, which takes all but a few seconds.

Now, if you have a page that constantly refreshes itself, like a page of sport scores, it could potentially drain your battery. The question is whether or not Safari actually allows pages to refresh themselves while in the background - especially if the screen is locked. I highly doubt this is the case - it's very poor design - and testing could verify what is going on.
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I don't think it loads pages in the background, since I use the regular MacRumors site (not the mobile one) with Forum Spy. Whenever, I go to safari, it still has the last page of Spy when I was using it and then it updates. So, yeah, it's a pretty easy thing to check, and obviously would be a poor design as you say.
 
MadDog31 said:
Could there be an app that is getting stuck?
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I mean that could be an issue i guess, but who knows. I will try a reset and see if that clears things up. In my experience with this phone, this one being the 4th one i have had of the 3GS line, i think its more dependent on the phone. I mean we are all running the same software so settings and hardware must be coming into play.

I think tonight i will leave the phone in airplane mode and see what happens.
 
My iphone is a week old. last night I went to sleep at midnight and the meter was at 82%. Put the phone to sleep as I use it for my alarm clock (not sure if a total off disables alarm). I woke up at 6:00am and it was at 79%. I'm more than happy with that.

Mike
 
DuckSoup said:
My iphone is a week old. last night I went to sleep at midnight and the meter was at 82%. Put the phone to sleep as I use it for my alarm clock (not sure if a total off disables alarm). I woke up at 6:00am and it was at 79%. I'm more than happy with that.

Mike
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What settings do you have on?
 
First off all - there's also a missing factor when it comes to push/fetch here that no one is "admitting"

How many emails are you getting while "at rest"

For example - some people might not get any - or one or two because they are not in a heavy email situation or whatever

Personally - working for a news organization, I get a good 100 or so while I'm sleeping.

Whether you are pushing or fetching - it uses more battery (obviously) the more emails you have to download, etc

The other night (because I was about to recalibrate my battery) I think I lost about 5-6 percent in the 7 hours I was asleep. Perhaps if I turned my email off I would have gotten 3-4 percent. Or perhaps if I didn't get any email it would have been 3-4 percent. Dunno - and truthfully - don't care that much. It is what it is. If I woke up and I went from 60 percent that day down to 20 percent I'd be concerned. But less than 10 percent and I think that's acceptable.
 
critic81 said:
I recieved 4 emails, so not enough to warrant 16% drop i think.
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Sounds like you have push email checking on though, so even if you had received zero emails, there would be battery drain when the iphone periodically checks the servers for new email, even on idle. People should maybe turn push off entirely, even if just for the night, because are you really going to read and reply to those emails when you're asleep...?

FWIW my push is off forever, I just open the email app when I feel like it.
 
samcraig said:
First off all - there's also a missing factor when it comes to push/fetch here that no one is "admitting"

How many emails are you getting while "at rest"

For example - some people might not get any - or one or two because they are not in a heavy email situation or whatever

Personally - working for a news organization, I get a good 100 or so while I'm sleeping.

Whether you are pushing or fetching - it uses more battery (obviously) the more emails you have to download, etc

The other night (because I was about to recalibrate my battery) I think I lost about 5-6 percent in the 7 hours I was asleep. Perhaps if I turned my email off I would have gotten 3-4 percent. Or perhaps if I didn't get any email it would have been 3-4 percent. Dunno - and truthfully - don't care that much. It is what it is. If I woke up and I went from 60 percent that day down to 20 percent I'd be concerned. But less than 10 percent and I think that's acceptable.
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I don't get where people say fetch really drains the battery. All fetch does is check to see if you have email at the frequency you prescribe and then notify you that you have email. It's not until you go into email and look at the email that downloading takes place and then battery is used. So, a small amount of battery is used for the check and notify, that's all.
 
iphone.aggie said:
I don't get where people say fetch really drains the battery. All fetch does is check to see if you have email at the frequency you prescribe and then notify you that you have email. It's not until you go into email and look at the email that downloading takes place and then battery is used. So, a small amount of battery is used for the check and notify, that's all.
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I didn't say it really did or didn't drain the battery per se. And I do believe that if you have fetch on (depending on the duration between fetch's ) that it does, in fact, download at least header info. depending on how many messages you get and how often you are sending that request - it HAS to have "some" affect on the batery.

If you're polling a server every 15 minutes and there is email do actually download - given 8 hours "at rest" - you are talking about 32 times the server is going to get polled and information exchanged.

Also keep in mind that sometimes email servers have lag - so it's not always a 1 second polling - sometimes to log in, check, download and log out - you could be talking a bit of time. Less than a minute I'm sure - but still - it's battery drain.


But regardless - even at rest, the phone is keeping time, checking alarm settings, polling the network, and probably some other tasks during "at rest" which is likely to cause up to a few percentage points during 8 hours. Any and every phone would. Most phones don't have percentage meters - but battery indicators that are anywhere from crude to sophisticate where you still couldn't notice a few percentage point difference.

I don't mind seeing the percentage meter - but, yes - I think for many, it becomes a focal point where people believe they are getting worse battery life than they are.
 
3 items:

How many bars do you have (both wifi and 3G)?

The radio turns on periodically to say "here I am!" to the cell tower in case someone calls in the near future, and uses more transmitter power the farther you are from the nearest cell tower. Standby time seems to be spec'd for people who live right under a cell tower, not people who are far away.

Did you reset your phone before bed time?

If you didn't then Safari, Mail, App Store, and a few other things can continue to run and download a fairly large amount, even in the middle of the night. If Location Services is on, then the GPS receiver will check for satellite positions periodically as well. Turning Push off, Location Services off, then a reset, followed by not starting those apps will stop that. Otherwise, you pay for what you turned on or started, and your phone will stay quite busy.

Have you calibrated your battery?

Even if you do, the first and last 10% are probably not accurate. e.g. the gauge may go down from 100% to 90% without changing how much actual talk time you have left before the phone shuts off. You would have to try to time your usage till shutoff under controlled conditions (equal type of usage, equal temperature, etc.) to actually know for sure.


ymmv.
 
iphone.aggie said:
I don't get where people say fetch really drains the battery. All fetch does is check to see if you have email at the frequency you prescribe and then notify you that you have email. It's not until you go into email and look at the email that downloading takes place and then battery is used. So, a small amount of battery is used for the check and notify, that's all.
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Just turning the radio transmitter on periodically to check uses a fair amount of power compared to idle. Even more if you only have one or two bars.
 
iphone.aggie said:
I don't think it loads pages in the background, since I use the regular MacRumors site (not the mobile one) with Forum Spy. Whenever, I go to safari, it still has the last page of Spy when I was using it and then it updates. So, yeah, it's a pretty easy thing to check, and obviously would be a poor design as you say.
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That must be an isolated case. Try loading any other page, exit to the homescreen before it loads, then wait 10 seconds. Then go back to safari and it's loaded completely.
 
it seems that having a battery precentage meter has only given people more reasons to be paranoid and/or complain about battery life..
 
NovemberWhiskey said:
When I went to sleep, I had just unplugged my iphone and it was at 100%. When I woke up about 8 hours later, my percentage had dropped to 91%.

The only things that happened on the phone were that my alarm rang a couple of times, and i received one text message.

I have push email turned off, wifi, brightness down, nothing else seems to be eating the batteries. Is this normal?
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No. I have everything on. Push Email (me.com), Location services, Wifi. Everything ON. I when I wake up it is < 5% used.
 
Pared said:
This is absolutely TRUE!
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RE: Battery % meter

Just tell people the meter chews up battery power, which it probably does, and watch them run to disable it. I leave mine off, and just look at the icon, who cares :)
 
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