E71 Battery life

pollag · #1 18-11-2008, 01:56 PM

My Battery really is lasting great. For the first time I can leave things running on my phone and not worry all the time is it running out

Q's:
How long does your battery last depending on what u do ?
Also how long does it take to charge?

My E71 :
Lasts 3 to 4 days with fair amount of usage and charging is very fast normally just a hour or so.

DervMan · #2 18-11-2008, 08:34 PM

It's early days so far, but I am a little disappointed with my E71 but I do have high expectations.

I'm going from full to four bars in 28 hours. During this time, I have Microsoft Exchange Sync working in push mode for 14 hours and my Gmail working in either push mode or two hour sync over 18 of these hours, plus a few calls. Fortunately, I live and work in an area with high speed 3G access and enjoy the odd web browse session or two.

Meh; on second thoughts, I'll be seeing two days of moderately heavy use to a charge, which is pretty good really...

chucky.egg · #3 18-11-2008, 08:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DervMan

Meh; on second thoughts, I'll be seeing two days of moderately heavy use to a charge, which is pretty good really...

I'd say that much data over 3G was very good going.

I have Mail for Exchange pushing 18 hours per day, lots of calendar action but pretty few emails.
I use about 1-2 hours of calls per day
A bit (< 1 hr) of GPRS web browsing

So far I don't think I've got through more than 2 bars (3 max, 1-2 on average).

I used to use an overclocked Win Mob device, which lasted at best 14 hours, so I'm very very happy with mine

DervMan · #4 18-11-2008, 08:46 PM

Yes, you're right - I do have deliberately high expectations though.

I'm seeing superior battery life from my 3G E71 than my old 2G Treo 680.

dave9999 · #5 18-11-2008, 09:19 PM

...I was going to post about this and you beat me to it! My battery life is a bit of a mystery. I've had the phone 7 days....5 of those days I got 11 hours or less. 2 of those days it barley used any battery at all! I cant tell you what I did differently!!!!

...My other problem is charging. I think it takes about 3 hrs to charge up...if I'm using it (like on the train today - web and music player) it hardly charges at all...

I'm thinking either i have a duff battery OR its a software problem. Its actually worse than my Treo 680...

Anyone else struggling? May HAVe to got back to Treo (which has better messaging but worse everything else....)

DervMan · #6 18-11-2008, 09:25 PM

Have you calibrated the E71's battery? The trick with the Treo 680 (disclaimer: for me) was to run down the battery until it shut down, then put it on an overnight charge and it would work much better.

I did almost the same thing with the E71 - first charge, I ran it down, then I've used it normally ever since. It may not make any difference with the Nokia...

GPS does seem to drain the battery very quickly, probably a combination of data and the GPS radio; if you leave Nokia Maps / GPS / GoogleMaps open, you might notice a difference...

dave9999 · #7 18-11-2008, 09:33 PM

...thanks for that and have tried that already....the E71 kindly dies every day by about 6:30 pm!! Might try and beg another battery of T Mobile and see if it makes a difference...

Early 680's had a software fault (camera drained battery) and they released a patch. Was wondering if this was same....read loads of conflicting stuff about E71's battery life...some people raving about it, some folk having same issues as me...

Will keep trying...

JonWill · #8 19-11-2008, 07:41 AM

I had similar intermittent battery problems, and tracked it down to having GPS running in the background - try two things - hold the "home" button down to see wbhich applications you have running in the background - see if there is a GPS application there. If not, go through them and turn off GPS (I found that Google Maps was causing trouble) - then see if your battery life improves - mine went from less than on day to three. Just need to be careful with GPS!

DervMan · #9 19-11-2008, 09:00 AM

And it doesn't help that there are a large number of ways to drain battery life either! Back in the old PDA days, you had memory being kept alive, processor use, serial port use. Maybe the infrared port and backlight if fitted and used. Now we have a number of wireless radios (2G, 3G, Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, Infrared), high speed processors, graphics accelerators and sometimes other processors apart from the main one, variable brightness screens and keyboards, vibration motors, LEDs, memory cards, a multitasking operating system doing stuff in the background, speakers and microphones, meh you get the idea.

I suppose as an example, my Palm IIIxe would see around 18 to 20 hours of uptime to a pair of high powered rechargeable batteries if I didn't use my foldable keyboard. That dropped to about 12 hours of keyboard use because it used the serial port. Uptime on my m515 varied from somewhere under four hours (Bluetooth card active, full brightness, web browsing and email use) to somewhere around 18 hours (no backlight, underclocked, mostly ebook reading). Throw in a bunch of other devices in there too.

Today is day six of ownership, day five of use. I'm trying a reduced synchronisation schedule. I may try the device in 2G mode only, maybe in 3G mode only <grin> to see if it makes a difference. And I did have high expectations, which have (after thinking about it) been met.

dave9999 · #10 19-11-2008, 02:32 PM

...well the nice people at T Mobile have given me another battery. I'm actually wondering if its the screen saver (have Handyweather enabled) so have switched that off...

Uber carefull with the GPS - allways exit (had thought of that one..)

I've reduced my sync schdule too (I use EMOZ for my email) and it certainly does go into "sleep mode" (you can see it connect/dissconnect via the E71's WiFi/3G indicators...)

..will keep trying....if I can crack it I'll be over the moon with the phone...

Or I could just keep it turned off and use my Treo (E71 is sooooo shiney I dont want to scratch it!)

D

DervMan · #11 19-11-2008, 06:46 PM

From today's use and this is no surprise, connecting to my office's Exchange server in push mode is hard on the battery.

Switching to a half hour sync and when I get home the battery bar is showing six bars, dropping to five in a few minutes of QuickWord use...

dave9999 · #12 20-11-2008, 09:04 AM

...ok....is there a prize for "most foolish forum member"? If there is, then I'm afraid I'm in the frame...in fact I claim the award now!

...I had set up "mail for exchange" to sync my diary and contacts when I got the E71. I'd set my offpeak sync to every 4 hrs and didnt set the peak sync times...its been constantly conected between 8 and 5 everyday (hence the amazing battery life on the weekend!) No wonder the battery's been hammered!!

Jeeezzz......what a burk....

D

DervMan · #13 20-11-2008, 09:03 PM

That still seems a little heavy - do you have a busy Exchange connection?

And that's the wonderful thing about the BlackBerry infrastructure. My E71 can do all that a BlackBerry can... it just uses a lot more power in doing so!