N95 battery life

No, not really. It can be extended if you dont use various things and turn them off, like bluetooth, wifi scanning etc. But generally, a day is all you will get especially if you talk on it a lot.

You can counter this by charing it at work, or using a car charger to and from wherever.

There are alternatives.

For long battery and wifi, get the E51. Out very soon and has a massive battery life. No GPS and only a 2MP camera.

For GPS get the 6110 navigator. No wifi and again, only 2MP camera.

The N95 8GB is due out soon (or already depending where you are), which has a more powerful battery. It also has a bigger screen, and there are not any proper figures out so no-one knows what the battery life is like on that yet.

When I first got this phone I was noticing that the battery was draining very quickly. Of course back then I was letting the battery completely drain before recharging. Through these forums I was shown the light. With the Li-ion batteries used to charge this device, you should constantly be topping up the battery whenever you can. This way the battery can "learn" it's full potential.

My average day consists of heavy internet browsing at home and at work over WiFi with heavy downloading, occasional use of the gps on most days because so many people ask to see my phone and it's feature set. I don't have a home phone so all calls are through my cell, I don't get an over abundance of calls. I use texting more than the average person through the afternoon/evening hours as everyone is getting off work.

A few days of the week at work I'll watch a full 1.5 to 2 hour movie on my phone (but these days I'll bring my charger just in case). Then I'll go home and play some music from my phone through my stereo. Most nights I'll even play Quake through my flat screen tv before my roommate comes home.

After an average day I'll have four bars on the battery indicator before I put my phone on the charger as I goto bed. I take my phone off the charger around 5:10am every day and it's back on around 10:00pm each night.

Now I don't carry a charger with me unless I know I'll be using my phone more frequently than normal just to be safe.

With all that being said, I really don't understand what the big fuss is with the battery life. I'd rather have the convenience of one device and it's charger for my everyday functions (plus more) rather than carrying four or five devices.

Thanks..

Getting a new phone isnt realy what i want as i have only had the N95 for a week now, but its lack of battery has caught me out.

I am often out in the field with out any power supply and i often need the use of maps and info which i can load off the net.

The N95 has the perfect spec for what i require but having it go flat in 4 hours or so of what i call proper use is very anouying.

Its nice to have all the bits and bobs i need in my pocket as said above rather than having half a dozen large bits kit kist with me (diary, laptop, maps, and mobile phone.)

If Nokia cant come up with a better battery its still looking as if it might be going back.

Buy another two batteries and keep them in your pocket. And a car charger - or maybe one of those Proporta mobile device chargers as well

You won't find anything as compact with as much capacity and ability - think of the other junk you can leave behind!

s.

Space constraints prevent a bigger battery fitting in the same slot - the BL-6F that comes with the new N95 8GB won't fit in the standard N95 (at least, not if you want the battery cover to still work). Your only option if you choose to stick with the N95 is probably to carry spare batteries; unfortunately although it means you don't have to carry around several pieces of equipment, it's replacing them with one device that you use significantly more than any of the others individually, but the battery isn't several times the capacity of an ordinary phone.

Just been trawling the interweb and managed to find somthing im gonna try.

Amazon show a 1400mha battery which comes with a new cover. OK it will loose its nice logo and look a little chunkier. But it should still fit in my pocket and your right there realy isnt anything out there that will pack the same features in such a small space.

Fingres crossed it works.

I think Amazon are "out of stock" of the 1400mAh batteries. According to the Nokia forum most of these larger batteries are useless and will either fail after a couple of days - or just not give any more power than the original. With the added bonus that if they leak or explode, you have no warranty.

I think I would go for a spare standard battery or two - giving 1900 or 2850 mAh total with all fully charged. There is a thing called PowerMonkey that offers 96 hours of charge too. might be worth a go?

s.

If you r using GPS with any phone on the market ( including a PDA with a separate Bluetooth Receiver ) then your going to get only a few hours usage out of your phone. The constant screen usage, light, GPS power just rape the hell out of even the hardened PDA systems.

Most phones only have a few hours talk time because there is radio usage to receive signals.... well with GPS your doing pretty much the same thing.

If you need to use GPS then get a car charger and keep it plugged in while your using it.

As usual Nokia have designed something good and implemented it in a piss poor manor, in this case by 1) using a weak GPS chipset, 2) putting the receiver under the sliding keypad ( way to go Nokia ) so you have to keep the phone at an abnormal position while driving and simply hiding there bumbling design issues by saying "The phone GPS system was designed with walkers in mind and not drivers" ummm hmmm well done! only prob 95% of sat nav usage is done by car niice research 🙄 and 3) Not linking the internal GPS into a virtual com port using standard commands and GPS emulation so that it can be used with any GPS software with minimal to no changes.

Also what makes me laugh is they even quote in similar words "The GPS receiver is a heavy resource on the battery and its recommended to charge the device while its in use"...... so I'm going to find a portable power station in the mountains when I go rambling am I?

my advice for battery life is switch off 3G and bluetooth if you arent using them , get an in car charger and a couple of spare batteries!!

Battery arrived in the post today.

Its larger than the stock Nokia one (about the double the thickness of the Nokia battery) And come with its own cover.

Its not as nice to look at or is it made a slickly at the Nokia cover but its serves a purpose and isnt too bad.(the whole lot derlivered cost �13)

Battety was a tight push fit, i think this was mainly due to the tight connections now its been in and out a few times it slots in just like the Nokia battery.

So far so good had it on its 1st charge for a few hours now and it holds charge and isnt red hot/leaking or exploding.

Gonna give it a good test run to morrow and see how long it lasts

hi, im new here, im about to get my N95, ive read already what are its flaws and i have had about an hr play time with it, I know the battery is one of its main problems, its a pity nokia or any aftermarket company hasn't released anything that can work with the factory cover, ill be looking at this thread to see if the original poster had better luck with his new battery!

While the phones develope at an almost alarming speed, the batteries don't. They are still using about the same technology as 5 years ago. This means that the battery is fine for regular phone use, especially considering the big screen and fast cpu. But if you want to use it as a camera, GPS navigator or media player, the battery technology really shows how antiquated it is and a charger is needed. It's not just a N95 thing, but the many possibillities of the N95 makes it painfully clear.

Does a bigger battery help? Not much. If you get 2 hours of movie playback on the standard 950mAh battery, you'd get 2h30min out of the BL-6F for the N95-3 or 8GB, which really isn't that interesting.

Try to stack the batteries of your GPS, digicam, MP3/media player and a 3G phone with bt and wifi and see how much space it takes. Do you want a battery that size in your N95? And do they really last that much longer than the N95 to make it worth the size?

What are the options then for the mobile manufacturers? They can provide smaller screens, lower level of backlight, slower cpu's (HTC went that way), fewer built-in gadget so we won't use the device that much or double the size of the phone to make room for a gigantic battery. Neither of these options are really appealing and considering a major breakthrough in battery technology don't seem to be coming any day soon, frequent charging looks to be the only option.

If you don't use the N95 as the 'small computer' device it is, but just as a phone, the battery goes a long way. With a bit of emailing and sms'ing plus a few calls, my battery has now lasted for 4 full days of usage and I still have 2 bars left. I think that is ok, all things considered...

sbc wrote:While the phones develope at an almost alarming speed, the batteries don't. They are still using about the same technology as 5 years ago...

Hi SBC,

Thanks! Your post is probably the best thought out and informative posts on the subject of N-Series battery performance that I have read on the AAS forums over the last 2 years!

The important point of all this is that there's no better alternative to Li-Ion technology at the present time, so we will have to accept the need to charge our smart phones at least once a day (more frequently for heavy users) or carry spare batteries. I think it's amazing what a smartphone can do these days when we consider that the computer that navigated Apollo austronauts to the moon had 1Mb of memory and was the size of a small bedroom.

I hope forum users will concentrate in sharing tips on extending standby time on our phones instead of posting complaints about short battery life.

Nokia deserve great praise for the features and capabilities of the N-Series handsets, but if they deserve one criticism, it is that they publish unrealistic figures for battery standby time and lead buyers into unachievable expectations.

I completely agree with the above two posts.

I just started to wonder if some of the battery complaints could arise from the strange behavior of the N95 charge indicator? Mine displays all its bars and then suddenly drops like a stone. NSysInfo also reports the same thing - still 100% when its been in use for hours. (I know kontraband has the same thing too)

If you weren't in the habit of charging every day until you hear the N95 fully charged beep, you could mistake the indicator display of all the bars for the true, partially discharged state - then run out of battery fairly fast.

I tend to think of my N95 as a mini laptop/camera/gps substitute. I wouldn't expect too many hours of use from a laptop battery, I'd expect to have to plug it in at any opportunity.

s.

Quick update on the battery.

1 full charge from new so far 24 hours of use with GPS maps running, web and cammera.

I have also done about an hour or so of talking and about 20 texts.

This afternoon tho after using it as an MP3 via an amp and speekers the battery faultered from 4 dash's to 2.

So was the �13 worth , yes at the moment i think so it means that i can go away for a weekend and not worry.

As for just using it as a phone , well thats just silly in my opinion why by a mini computer/gps mappy thing filiofax,piky taking thingy if all you want it for is to make a few shrt phone calls and a couple of texts.

I bought it for its features which i need so i expect to be able to use them. If i wanted a wire hooked up all teh time i would stay at home or use a bloody long cable on my laptop !

@waveydave
I don't think anyone is suggesting we shouldn't use the N95 to the max? But when comparing standby time, we must be fair and compare under the same conditions. So when comparing to a standard phone, the N95 must also be used as a standard phone. We could also measure the standby time when using it as MP3 player or GPS navigator, but then it should either be done as that option alone, or a fixed time set aside for each option.

@dez_borders
Thanks for the kind words. As a follow up, here's the result of my standby test, which I concluded just minutes ago.

Everyone knows that the first battery indicator bar lasts the longest. I was under the impression that once that bar is gone, the rest goes very quickly. In reality there's still a LOT of standby time left...

First I 'prepped' the N95 for max battery performance. For example the 3-branded Danish settings keep a constant logon to the data network, so I have debranded my device. Next everything 'auto' had to go. No auto update of emails, weather or whatever. During this test that was all done manually and only when needed. I also used the standard screensaver, even though I like the Handy Weather a lot. 3G network with full bars on the indicator most of the time.

The test ran for five days, so even though I refrained from using the nice extras on this phone, I still used email, weather updates, sms'ing and made a few short phonecalls.

The result:

1 bar lasted 26 hours = 1/3 of total
2 bar 7 hours
3 bar 14 hours
4 bar 9 hours
5 bar 4 hours
6 bar 2 hours
7 and last bar lasted for 13 hours. During this time a warning popped up from time to time, indicating that the battery was low.

I have found no logic in the standby time of each bar. I wonder if the result would be comparable for each bar if tested again? I am not about to do it, though, because it takes a lot of resources to keep checking the meter for such a long period.

All in all this adds up to 75 hours of standby time of which 49 hours is AFTER the first bar is gone. This is so much more than I expected and means that I no longer have to panic if the first bar drops at 6pm, which is actually nice to know 😊

yup nice to know the last bar has quiet a lot of stand by left.

the problem i am having isnt with standby nor is with the amount of life it has as a normal phone. Its the fact it cant handle the usage that it was designed for.

I am finding that the larger battery i have purchased seams to forfill this.

I am not after a week long battery life but i would expect a minumum of 24 hours would be deamed closer to what would be expected.The fact i have just gone 48 hours with out a charge whilst not trying to economic with power usage would be a positive result.

Its a pity Nokia can build such a nice peace of hardware and not fit it with the right power supplie.

After all would you be happy with a Ferrari being powered by a 1000cc A series mini engine ?

Its obviosly an issue Nokia reconise this issue as they would rather stay quiet on the issue of the wrong power suppley, and they have released the up graded N95 with a larger battery. Just woundering what they are going to do about us who aready have the older N95 ?

waveydave, in this case its more like you have a Ferrari engine in a mini and you are complaining that you can only drive 20 miles before you are out of juice.

You can't get blood out of a stone. Your N95 may well be replacing your Sat Nav, Mp3 player, Laptop, Camera etc and acting as your phone as well.

Think of all the batteries that lot need !

As sbc says, battery technology is way behind the rest of mobile phone development. That is the main problem.

s.

I understand this. And yes i might have the analagy the wrong way round (oops not too good at spelling sorry).

What i am saying now thos with the 1400mha battery so far its derlivering what i would expect. I fitted the battery on thursday night and put it back on charge this afternoon, after quiet a lot of use.

I would call that a success.

Im not so sure battery technology thats the problem more like the manufactures have skimped on the battery for some reason. And i dont belive its all down to the size issue.

This is the first time i have ever had an issue with a Nokia. Had many other phones and always come back i am very happy with Nokias. Just this time i feel i have maybee been short changed.

waveydave wrote:This afternoon tho after using it as an MP3 via an amp and speekers the battery faultered from 4 dash's to 2.
...
I bought it for its features which i need so i expect to be able to use them. If i wanted a wire hooked up all teh time i would stay at home or use a bloody long cable on my laptop !

Try comparing like with like. 😉

Play a set of MP3's on your laptop (on battery power fully charged and via the internal speakers) until the battery goes flat and the OS shuts down.
Repeat this test on a fully charged N95 and give us the times for both devices.

I am interested to read your findings, (particularly bearing in mind that a Laptop battery is 20 to 40 times the size of a mobile handset battery).

Sorry but my point isnt about how much the N95 drains power its all about why didnt Nokia fit a battery that can provide what the device requires for what would be considered to be a reasonable service life.

On the old battery the service life for its core features was 4 hours. My laptop runs for 3-4 hours running on battery.

With the new battery i purchsed from amazon my N95 is running for 48 hours with out watching how i use it features. The only battery saving messures i am taking is having features such as WIFI switched to use as required.

This prooves the N95 isnt too hungry for power for current battery technlogy as it is now running on a battery that is comercialy avalble with satifactory results.

There fore i can only assume that t was fitted with a unsatifactory power suppley from the out set. Nokia have made a fab phone i love it. Its the cheep skate way that have powerd it that is the problem IMHO.

Something odd about this. Your original N95 battery was 950mAh. The new one is 1400mAh, so a 50% increase in capacity.

You say "On the old battery the service life for its core features was 4 hours" and "With the new battery i purchsed from amazon my N95 is running for 48 hours with out watching how i use it features"

Sounds like a 50% increase in battery capacity has given you a 1200% increase in its uptime.

Maybe your original N95 battery was a duffer?

s.

Quiet possably. All i have hurd is they are poor. And all i know is mine was poor, unusably poor.

Had a few other issues with it such as Wifi never wanted to hook up and the pseeker was distorting bad enough to need my hands free to make a call.

So i took it back today. Spoke to the nice girls at o2 and exchanged it for a new one.

New phone dose every thing i it should so im a very happy bunny.

I have yet to remove the genuine battery from its wraper and give it a charge so have no idea how it performs.

The bigger one though is still going strong.on my second charge now and 1 day of use setting up the new phone its still showing all 7 bars, i love it and the N95 is doing every thing i dreamed it would as well.

waveydave wrote:Quiet possably. All i have hurd is they are poor. And all i know is mine was poor, unusably poor.

Had a few other issues with it such as Wifi never wanted to hook up and the pseeker was distorting bad enough to need my hands free to make a call.

So i took it back today. Spoke to the nice girls at o2 and exchanged it for a new one.

New phone dose every thing i it should so im a very happy bunny.

I have yet to remove the genuine battery from its wraper and give it a charge so have no idea how it performs.

The bigger one though is still going strong.on my second charge now and 1 day of use setting up the new phone its still showing all 7 bars, i love it and the N95 is doing every thing i dreamed it would as well.

Thanks for the warning pa49.

I am keeping a close eye on the battery as i have been warned and understand there may be a danger.

The phone is often with me and at teh moment its getting charged where i can see/touch it ie not when i am alseep. Just in case.

so far its always been cold even when charging. The costruction of the battery appears well made all the joins and edges are correctly formed and it dosnt have china or tiwan any where on it.

Hoping i have made a good purchase, so far so good.made about 3 hours of phone calls and used wifi for most of the day (buying a house and solicitor isnt doing his job😡 ) and i came home with 4 bars on it after a 12 hours day. I know that the Nokia battery wouldnt have lasted the morning.

Info added to my posting above, #17. The first battery indicator bar = 26 hours = 1/3 of total standby time, which is 75 hours.

During heavy load the cpu easily burns off 20-30 hours of standby time in just one hour, so it looks like the cpu is the real sinner, not the battery.

As a rough guide, you can consider the first indicator bar as being as durable as the next two, and as the last four. I think that's a bit easier to remember than all those odd numbers, which are bound to change each time anyway.

As sbc mentioned in this thread, he debranded his phone. I noticed debranding made a huge difference. My N95 was a raped Orange one and I was lucky to get three quarters of a day out the battery (I am an extremely heavy texter, maybe 75-100 a day), but after debranding, Im getting a day and a half to 2 days no problems. Even then when I go to recharge, its still got maybe 1 or 2 bars left. I just charge it overnight at that point coz I dont think that'll get me through another day.

So short story is, debranding improved my battery life vastly :icon14:

I was thinking of debranding my phone buy to be completly honest my provider ( t-mobile UK ) have done hardlay anything to the phone to warrent me bothering.

Its got to be the least unbranded nokia I have broght from a nework in years no custom themes and the only difference I can see is they have appeared to rename"services" to "web n walk"

In fact I would say having the extra settings preinstalled makes it worth not debranding until I come and sell it.

truscotsman72 wrote:(I am an extremely heavy texter, maybe 75-100 a day)

@Unplugged
Check if your N95 has a constant data connection open. This is what makes the big difference between the branded and unbranded devices and is my only issue with the Danish 3-branding. Otherwise it is fine.