I was pretty enthusiastic about the Samsung Galaxy S7 (review based on early experience). And it is a lot of fun to awe retail clerks with the Samsung Pay magic: “Sir, I’m telling you that we don’t have the Apple Pay hardware and it is not going to work” while looking at me instead of at the POS terminal screen, which would have shown them that the transaction had already been completed. However, battery life seemed almost unusable. I removed Facebook and Facebook Messenger and that helped a bit.
Today I did a formal test. The phone came off its wireless charging station around 7:30 am. I managed the following:
- 10 phone calls totaling approximately 1.5 hours
- a 24-minute Skype session
- taking 48 still photos
- capturing 4 videos in 1080p with a total duration of about 4 minutes
- running background tasks such as Gmail, Dropbox (uploading photos and videos), Google Photos (also uploading photos, albeit low-res)
The phone died completely at 7:30 pm. The screen had been on for a total of about 1 hour and 40 minutes so it wasn’t the screen that had drained the battery. GSM Arena rates the phone at 22 hours of talk time. Android Authority got the phone to last for 400 minutes of Web browsing or at least 700 minutes of video playback. They also noted that they could run the phone for a whole day with 4-6 hours of “screen on” time. That’s what I remember getting out of my iPhone 6 Plus, which virtually never ran out before bedtime even if it had not been topped up.
Readers: Any thoughts on why the battery life is so short? What’s the debugging procedure for Samsung/Android? I would like to keep the phone because the camera is so much better than on the iPhone and some of the other features are cool. But a battery-powered device needs to have good power management to be useful.
Update: I discovered that Uber’s software doesn’t think that the Galaxy S7 is a legitimate device (we ended up having to use a friend’s iPhone)
Besides screen there is also the fact that the phone is awake which is draining the battery. There could be an app which doesn’t allow the phone to go to sleep. If you click the battery graph it will show you another graph with the “awake” moments.
Ah, the notorious “Android System” battery drain. I have an S5, not an S7, but you likely could have the same problems. “Android System” could be almost anything. All sorts of apps use various services that get lumped into “Android System.”
1) Sometimes when you first buy a phone, there are a bunch of background things that it does, setting things up that can drain the phone. But that shouldn’t last more than a day or two.
2) The infamous NlpCollectorWakeLock. (NLP = NetworkLocationProvider) Google has a brilliant idea. Every few minutes, it turns on your GPS to find where you are, then looks for wireless networks around and gathers that information and sends it back to Google. That way, Google has a large database of locations and wireless networks. So when other people want to know their precise location, their phone can look at the strengths of nearby wireless networks and compare them with Google’s database and calculate a precise location. But this means your phone is constantly being woken up and having its GPS turned on. This is a huge drain on battery and I’m surprised Google hasn’t done anything about it. It’s been a problem for literally years. You can search the web for solutions, but there are trade-offs between battery life and various location services you might genuinely like to have. I personally rooted my phone and set a limit to the number of times this wakelock could run, and my battery life has been great ever since. A simple test is to turn off “Google Now” and maybe even all location services just for a day or two. You’ll likely see your battery life increase to infinity. (Ok, exaggeration.)
Try downloading “Wakelock Detector” and possible “Better Battery Stats” to help you out.
I think that amount of stuff would kill my iPhone 6 if I didn’t have a battery case.
My friends who don’t have battery cases just seem to plug in their iPhones throughout the day.
Phones are made thinner than necessary to help sell them.
Get a battery case from Amazon and live with a thicker phone.
Disabling Bluetooth seems to help on the iPhone. Might be worth a try here too, if you aren’t actively using anything over Bluetooth?
My Samsung Galaxy S2, and then S3 both had dead batteries before they were a year old. Samsung tech service said it was my fault for charging the phone overnight, that it should never be charged for longer than a few hours. Too bad, otherwise it was a fun phone.
Two hours of calling us *a lot*. Your battery is doing pretty well IMHO.
One variable you are not controlling for is your distance from cell tower (of course different providers have different tower placements). That makes a huge difference in battery life.
I don’t have a Samsung S7 (Moto G), but those 31% of Android System seem very excessive. Never seen it with any of my Android phones (and yes, some were Samsung Galaxy). Seems like either wrong reporting of a specific app, or some scheduled service is taking up too much CPU.
I can’t believe the obvious was not suggested. Turn down your screen brightness and (while testing at least) disable automatic brightness control.
I get almost 1.5 days of battery life. I do the following
Location and sync are always off for me. I turn them on as an.when i want to know whats happening.
I installed greenify to hibernate all my apps.
I installed pavkage disabler pro to disable quite a few unnecessary services like allshare, mirroring, quite a few others. I dont toich what i dont.understand.
I disable facebook and facebook messenger, its just waste if time. I use facebook when i am on a conputer.
Thats it and the phone rolls on on mote than a day easy.
Screen on time is 6 hours.
You probably aren’t looking for another phone, but my Sony Z3c has great battery life in Stamina mode, and I understand that the Z5c (better camera) has good battery life, too.
Thanks, folks, for the ideas. The screen per se is supposedly consuming only about 10 percent of the total power. So I don’t think that we can blame the OLED.
I have had all odd number galaxy’s and the note 2 and by far my s7 edge has the best battery life. I can usually use my phone all day when it comes off the charger at around 6:45 every morning. All I do is make sure my location is off and I can use for about a day and half give or take.
Samsung tech service said it was my fault…..
For breathing. Whenever something breaks it is always somehow not the fault of the manufacturer for one reason or another.
Once the phone is fully charged it is supposed to stop charging. Leaving it on the charger should have no effect on battery life.
Jamil: I don’t want to turn location off. I use Google Maps to navigate! I want a phone that is smart enough to turn on GPS when it is needed and turn it off when not needed!
At what point did you turn the Bluetooth on?
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can be a major consumer of battery power.
I’d recommend you install these two apps (requires root):
Amplify
Greenify
They ensure that when you are not actually using the phone, all background processes don’t use up battery. For example with my S5 I’m using only 2.5% per hour when the phone is not being actively used (see https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ekx8cx75mkd7v6/Screenshot_2016-04-15-15-47-45.png?dl=0)
Supposedly stock Android 6 already has this feature – but they’re clearly not working for you
Phil,
The Facebook app is a terrible drain; good call. To continue using FB on your phone, try “Tinfoil for Facebook” which is an app that wraps the mobile version of the site. Equally good UX, perhaps better, and doesn’t drain your battery.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco.fbwrapper&hl=en
Cheers,
Douglas