E71 Battery life

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...:icon14:

DervMan wrote:
Meh; on second thoughts, I'll be seeing two days of moderately heavy use to a charge, which is pretty good really...:icon14:

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

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.

...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....)

😡

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...

...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...

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!

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.

...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

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...😊

...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

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!🙄

I had to buy this because it was almost flat .

1 pound. worked but i got tired. wind up !

That is a fantastic little piece of kit but as you say, you'd get tired using it! I wonder if I could train my cat to do this for me...😊

...I see we are going back to those wind up phones of the 1920's......progress???

DervMan wrote: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!🙄

Not really....AND I'm not syncing mail.....I suppose thats on top of everything else (music, surfing etc) It's still about the same as Widows Mobile (Have work Samsung which destroys its battery in 12 hours if on push)

Its all good now though....have been hammering it today and I've got 18hrs so far and 1 "segement" left (download about 300 meg of data, BT headphones for music and podcasts , surfing and emailing and Googlemaps) Lovin it....

That's heavy duty usage heh!

I've been experimenting with my E71 to try to determine how much harder on the battery the 3G radio is compared with 2G / WiFi. My research isn't especially scientific because I've been too lazy to determine the battery capacity beyond the number of battery bars showing � that's mostly because the E71's battery life is more than adequate for my purposes.

I have the E71 set up for push Gmail via the Nokia beta email client, 06:30 to 21:00 every day, and push Exchange email from 08:00 to 19:00 hours. It can't be all that scientific because the email volume varies quite a bit. I also don't shy away using the device to fiddle about with it although I don't use the multimedia functions, but I do use a wireless keyboard and I write a fair bit using QuickOffice (usually one to two hours a day).

So far in 2G mode the battery is at five to six bars after 14 hours of battery time. In 3G mode it's usually three to five bars. So assuming the battery bar status is linear (big assumption) I should see three days 2G usage and two days of 3G usage with no compromise as to how much I want to use the device.

Surfing with WiFi uses noticeably less juice than 3.5G � idling the 2G and 3G radios with an active WiFi connection uses less juice than an idle 2G, busy 3.5G connection. Bluetooth keyboard, processor load, infrared usage seem to make very little difference too.

How many hours of continuous wifi usage can it go for with just web browsing/emails going on? I saw a review online showing it could last for 14 hours with GPS on when stationary, that is really good.

At least I see my battery shares the same birthday with me. Its build date 😊

24-9

I've had my E71 for about 5 weeks now. Until 5 days ago I was more than happy with the battery life.. I normally got 3-4 days use using whatever I needed. In fact I probably used it more than I do now, what with it being new and all.

About 5 days ago I noticed than even though I had fully charged the battery overnight it had one bar left at 6pm. I hardly used the phone during the day. One or two calls, a few SMS's and 2 or 3 emails. A very light day as I was busy. I thought this was just a one off but it can barely make it through the day anymore.

I have uninstalled pretty much everthing from the phone but its making no difference. There are no background apps running and I check my mail manually.

Short of a full reset or going to my local Nokia store is there anything else I should be looking at?

Paul

Pji

Have you had any reason to remove the battery recently cos I think there is an issue with the battery not 'siiting' properly in the case. Albeit I have not had a problem, yet, with battery life mine did not feel as secure as I would like it when i installed it.

If not then your battery is faulty & should be replaced.

Good luck.

Sivart

So I seem to have solved my battery issue and thought i would post in case anyone else has a similiar problem in the future.

It seems to have been some background process that was killing the battery. I pretty much removed all the apps from the phone but this made no difference. I checked that no apps were accessing the net and also that GPS was off.

In the end, I did a factory reset and after 24 hours I have only lost 1 bar. I'll slowly start putting apps back on one by one and see if it happens again.

Is there any apps out there that can show me exactly what processes are running? I dont mean holding down the home key.

Oh, thanks for the advice Sivart but I had not accessed the battery recently so this was not the problem.

Just for the record i get betwen 4 and 5 days at a time, unless i hammer the internet - when i get around 2 days.

in all i am very happy with the battery life of this phone, loads better than E61

i cant get mine to last more then a few hours.

i have two email account checking for new emails every 5 mins (imap, from 6am to 11am)

this e71 is very one (less then a week, nothing else is installed, and i not using gps etc)

i fully charge it last night, at about 10pm time,

this morning 3 bars left, and 9am 1 bar left.

do you think it is the checking every 5 mins?

or a fault battery

Andy

Tasone,

you could always do what I did. Back up the phone and do a reset:

*#7370#

Lock code deafult is 12345

See how it works then. That should give you some idea as to what the problem may be.

Paul

pji wrote:Tasone,

you could always do what I did. Back up the phone and do a reset:

*#7370#

Lock code deafult is 12345

See how it works then. That should give you some idea as to what the problem may be.

Paul

already done that, just the same.

i think the battery may be broken, so i have emailed vodafone to ask.

Andy

tasone wrote:already done that, just the same.

i think the battery may be broken, so i have emailed vodafone to ask.

Andy

well i have fixed it.

it was my gmail account.

i have deleted the gmail email account, (was checking every 15 mins), and my battery life is about 4 days now!

instead of 10 hours!

i still have one account checking every 15mins, but this is ok, and like i said, the battery life is about 4 days now 😊

Andy

tasone wrote:well i have fixed it.

it was my gmail account.

i have deleted the gmail email account, (was checking every 15 mins), and my battery life is about 4 days now!

instead of 10 hours!

i still have one account checking every 15mins, but this is ok, and like i said, the battery life is about 4 days now 😊

Andy

I have my phone checking the mailbox every 30 mins, and I get around 24 hours out of the battery. That's with around 1 hour of calls, 5-10 text messages and some light web browsing.

From what I've read in this thread it seems that connecting to other mailboxes does not drain nearly as much battery as gmail does.

Any ideas?

How else is the device set up? 2G or 3G?

I'm currently using mine in 2G only mode and that makes a big difference; 3G data access, especially 3.5G, is power hungry!

The E71 is configured to use push Gmail via Nokia Email Beta thingie from 07:00 to 21:00 hours. I have an Exchange account set to "always on" for everything it can access, between 09:00 to 17:00. I use the Bluetooth radio to sent stuff to the Nokia. In the evening I usually have an hour of writing using my wireless Bluetooth keyboard. I might have a call or two, usually inside thirty minutes. Any web browsing is usually over WiFi at home, or 3G at lunch.

The battery goes from full to five, maybe four, bars when used like this. Call it two days, perhaps three if I'm careful.