I have had my N95 now for a few weeks and like everyone else I am struggling with coping with the poor battery life. This topic has been done to death on this and other forums and quite rightly so... it is by far the N95's biggest point of criticism.
However, I seem to have discovered something that hasn't really been talked about much and that is this: It seems that the battery may last very much longer if the phone is charged when turned off rather than leaving it turned on whilst charging.
I am still checking this out but until now I have charged my phone with it on. I have noticed that it takes ages for the charging indicator to stop flashing but thought nothing of it. I was getting 5-10 hours of my normal use. The day before yesterday I turned it off and charged it overnight. Since then I have had it on 12 hours yesterday and when I turned it on this morning I still have a full charge indication!!! This is unheard of to date.
Given the poor battery life it is natural for us all to put the N95 on charge when ever we can and that means that most people will be charging with the phone turned on.
Considering that the main issue with the N95 is the battery has anyone done any thorough testing to see how to get the most from the battery? There are all kinds of rumours and bit of advice are flying around all over the place (like this one here!!!) but it would be good if a magazine, or All About Symban perhaps, put together a proper study and test of the N95 and it's battery and power usage including best charging practices, best settings for increasing battery life etc with statistics so we can put to bed the rumours and have some hard facts.
Hi Andy,
That sounds interesting. Acutally I have charged my N95 already this night (while switch on). So I have to wait one day, but will test it tomorrow night.
Will see whether there is a different or not.
/Geraner
Dunno about you guys but I've seen very varied reports on the battery life of the N95. Some people say its out of juice after 3hrs, others day all day.
Personally, I find that with 5x 10 min phone calls, 20 or so texts, 15 mins of web browsing per day, by 10pm my N95 has only lost 1 bar. I have the brightness on 50%, power save on 1min with bluetooth off.
Maybe other people's N95s or the battery are faulty?
I've also found that as soon as you play any games, use the WiFi or GPS then that's battery gets a good draining!
What do you guys think?
PharCyder wrote:Dunno about you guys but I've seen very varied reports on the battery life of the N95. Some people say its out of juice after 3hrs, others day all day.Personally, I find that with 5x 10 min phone calls, 20 or so texts, 15 mins of web browsing per day, by 10pm my N95 has only lost 1 bar. I have the brightness on 50%, power save on 1min with bluetooth off.
Maybe other people's N95s or the battery are faulty?
I've also found that as soon as you play any games, use the WiFi or GPS then that's battery gets a good draining!
What do you guys think?
3 hours🙄
Who ever told you that is telling you lies!
Yeah wi-fi and gps does drain the battery.
Mine lasts about 24 hours before it needs a charge on a normal day.
If i'm and about using the camera and making lots of calls and sending lots of texts then it does drain,but not in 3 hours!
Actually I get only 90 minutes battery life when streaming 3MobileTV on a freshly charged phone, so 3 hours battery life is NOT a lie, it just depends under what circumstances.😎
Well, 9 hours into today... low usage today at just a few 3 min calls but even so it is still at 3 bars!!!
More tomorrow when it will, I am sure, finally run out 😊
BTW, I have turned off Truphone. I wonder if that is draining it particularly fast by using the wifi more? Just a though.
Arny wrote:Well, 9 hours into today... low usage today at just a few 3 min calls but even so it is still at 3 bars!!!More tomorrow when it will, I am sure, finally run out 😊
BTW, I have turned off Truphone. I wonder if that is draining it particularly fast by using the wifi more? Just a though.
My experience using truphone through WLAN drains the battery faster than anything else on the phone ! Without making any truphone calls the battery is dead within 3-4 hours, or after 1-2 hours of making truphone calls.
WLAN and USB are the biggest N95 battery-killers.
WiFi will absolutely hammer the battery so I like to keep mine turned off when it's not in use. I do leave the Bluetooth on all the time though.
I have two colleagues with N95s who both have trouble with their battery lasting, but mine seems to last long enough to only need charging every other day with 'normal' use. This has definitely improved since I first got the phone at the beginning of June.
For me wi-fi is the problem. I always leave Bluetooth on and never had any problems. I went through all day, from 7am to 10 pm and always had it half full by 10pm. Then I installed truphone... if I leave on automatic mode, I get battery low indication at 8pm at most. Now I only turn Truphone on when I'm really going to use it.... And got back to my all day use with no extra charging....
Strange. I don't use Truphone but instead have my own voip (run asterisk) and my N95 connects to it. Still, that means my phone is connected to wifi on average 20h every day. I still get about day and half of use between recharges. So I don't think wifi on the phone is to blame for poor battery performance. It might be your wifi router that forces the phone to reply to its requests too often, therefore draining the battery. The phone certainly uses less energy when it only listens to wifi packets....
md27514 wrote:Strange. I don't use Truphone but instead have my own voip (run asterisk) and my N95 connects to it. Still, that means my phone is connected to wifi on average 20h every day. I still get about day and half of use between recharges. So I don't think wifi on the phone is to blame for poor battery performance. It might be your wifi router that forces the phone to reply to its requests too often, therefore draining the battery. The phone certainly uses less energy when it only listens to wifi packets....
What setting would this be on the wifi router ? I have a Sitecom 54G router and if it's possible to change this setting, it would be very interesting to see what happens with N95 battery-life.
I'm not sure this is configurable on user level, in most routers probably not. I can just tell you that I have a very good experience with linksys wrt54g router reflashed with openwrt firmware that I use at home.
After writing my original comment I looked up this NY times article I read a while ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/circuits/05pogue.html?ex=1185163200&en=b3364d48532b51c1&ei=5070
which is interesting by itself (would be nice if T-mobile in the UK would be equally inovative). As you can read there, T-mobile provides its customers with special routers that quote:
Third, T-Mobile’s routers greatly extend the phone’s battery life. The routers say, in gadgetese, “I’m here for you, any time,” just once, rather than requiring the phone to issue little Wi-Fi “Are you there?” pings every couple of minutes.
So the battery life of your phone definitely depends on the router you use.
I have also Truphone all the day on. (on auto-mode) So as soon as I'm at home again, Truphone gets activated and creates a connection to my WiFi.
I have no problems at all, just having my N95 connected to the WiFi all the day and night and have Truphone on as well.
Without doing any calles, just sending some SMS and so on, my phone is running over 24 hours without re-charging.
As a router I have a Dlink DIR-655 set on b/g mode with encryption mode WPA2.
I'm glad, that the N95 supports WPA2 as well. :icon14:
I just realized, as soon as I'm doing any Truphone call, the phone gets really hot and the battery live goes down very fast! Looks like Truphone-calls requires a lot of CPU work for the N95. (But the voice quality is just perfect)
/Geraner
I don't know if it the fact that I have turned off Truphone (only turning on to make a call) or if it is the charging when switched off BUT I left the phone on all night last night (something I've not been able to do before without having a flat battery next day) and it is still running!!! Two blips too!!!
That is 36 hrs of standby and about 10 x 3 min calls. I have synced a few times through Bluetooth but turned off BT afterwards. Last night I took about 10 photos (with flash) and about 3 mins of video and still I am running this morning. It is a bit spooky... as if someone is charging it without me knowing 😊 😊 😊
More when it does finally expire.
My Sitecom WL-173 54G Turbo router has the following settings :
Beacon interval : 1024 (20-1024 ms)
Max data rate : auto
Fragment threshold : 2346 (256-2346)
RTS threshold : 2347 (0-2347)
DTIM period : 3
Preamble type : short
Broadcast SSID : enable
CTS protect : none
TX power : 50%
Turbo mode : disabled
WMM : disabled
The bold ones, I have changed to try and get better battery-life on my N95. Any idea's on this ? I will test the coming days.
EDIT : well after just 2 hours the battery is half empty 😞 So much for a better battery-life using different settings on my router.
48 hours and still going... only one blip now but still going. It has bleeped Low battery once so I am going to put it on charge over night (powered off) and see if I can get another 48+hrs of use.
More in a couple of days.