How do you use your phones and also what types of things do you have running on your phones at all times? Such as location services, or bluetooth? And how do these affect your phone charge? What do you try to do instead to lower charge usage? Or do you just tend to use portable chargers more? Personally I use location services as well as Low Power Mode but I want to find better ways of saving charge. Any ideas?
How do you guys use your phones?
So I use my phone “how I want to” but in the case of power management:
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I use power charging “defensively” in that I am keep charging tech with me and use it all the time, to me I aim to keep phone 100% charged or near to. That means for when I cannot charge, I’m dropping from 100% not from lower.
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I use BT headphones and Android Wear - these add to drain
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I use custom ROMs, custom kernels to up the battery life.
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The defaults of custom ROMs have the most major affect. Goes to what you asked about GPS etc.
I never, ever, get a flat mobile with nothing to do about it. Never.
Ok. That helps a lot. Thanks!
I try to be efficient. I use Android and always have location services on, but appropriate to the situation, I.e., if I’m not outside, the GPS will be off. I only turn on Bluetooth when I need to use it. Power management is always kept to balanced and screen brightness relatively low.
I use my phone how it was intended to be used mostly.
Auto brightness is always set to on.
Location is set to fine, so every so often GPS will turn itself on to get a location if the phone is not sure where it is. It will however use Wifi or cellular network to do this too.
WiFi and Bluetooth are normally always on, as I use work wifi as well as my home wifi. Bluetooth connects to various devices I use each day, so turning it off and on was just annoying. - NFC tags helped with older phones where the power drain was too much, Nexus 5 was fine leaving all the above always on. So is the Pixel.
I do not actively try to conserve power most days. I always have a large PowerCore battery in my bag so I don’t see the need to conserve phone battery.
The Nexus 5 would be charged over night and generally needed a top up about 5-6pm. The Pixel gets charged for about an hour around 9-11pm and normally lasts through to the next day with no issues. Sometimes I will give it a quick top up (30min max) around 5pm when I am driving home. Screen time averages around 4hrs each 24hrs.
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I use it for the right and necessary, search information on the Internet, send messages, make calls, video calls, and other simple questions
everything always running, except wifi. i don’t use wifi as i have unlimited data
Does using data drain your charge more?
definitely saves my battery. my phone isn’t searching for wifi all the time, and when connected to wifi, ill also be texting which uses cell anyway. might as well use cell for everything since i get 4G
I always have wifi running at home, when I’m out I turn it off but I’m home 80% of the time so its almost always on. Also have location & sync on at all times, though not bluetooth since I have no use for it really.
To lower the battery usage I have the brightness turned down to about a quarter or less on the bar which seems to help a bit. Otherwise I just keep an eye on the battery & use my portable chargers or plug it into my wall charger to utilize the fast charging feature on my Galaxy S6 to quickly charge it up to 50% or more.
As for what types of things or apps I have running at all times, definitely Google Chrome as my main internet browser & then Podcast Addict because I listen to a lot of podcasts. Then a mobile game or 2.
Low power mode is a good idea to use though, along with disabling any apps you don’t really use or stock apps so they’re not running in the background using your battery.
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I use my iPhone for work, but it uses a good bit of data. It’s incredibly easy to blow through 1gb on any device on 4G … anyways, when you share a data plan with 30-40 techs, and the plan has 100GB … it reaches 80-90 within 20 days of the monthly cycle and everyone flips out. So if you guys have some tips on data reduction I’d appreciate it.
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Turn on all compression options, but honestly 100GB between that many people is a ridiculously low cap. I use 15-20GB a month personally without any effort.
I agree with Craig, 100GB for 30 people is way too low. When I wasn’t on wifi at work I’d easily go through 10-15GB myself a month. Now with using wifi at work and home, I get through about 8-10GB each month. I do have a 20GB plan however.
If you cannot up the plan. If you use a MDM system you should be able to see which devices and/or apps that are using the most data. If they are not business apps, then it is then a line management issue to enforce users to use devices in the way they were meant to be used.
Supposedly, before this plan with Verizon, we were on some sort of plan with Sprint where data was almost unlimited, not sure if that’s true or not, but the coverage and performance was awful, our hotspots didn’t work when syncing with the servers (took a long time to figure out they had lowered the speeds when downloading/uploading). Anyway, we changed to Verizon a few months ago. At first our limit was 100 GB, well that went up within two weeks and they upped it to 150 GB to compensate for the overage that month. Then they did it again when one tech decided it’d be a good idea to let his child stream movies and videos and music over a weekend with the hotspot, well obviously that jacked our data up and we upped it to 150 GB. To them this “upping” to make up for techs’ usage is a penalty. Anyway … I haven’t used my hotspot but at a very minimal amount, but my iPhone is around 4 GB. I download podcasts over wi-fi before hitting the road but I’m sure there are moments I’m downloading new podcasts over 4g. Sometimes I’ll stream a radio station talk show off and on, some videos here and there, nothing crazy. In this day and age, can data usage stop being a THING? I feel like I’m in some huge family with a cellphone plan where someone has to play house and make sure we’re not abusing the data. Back in the day it was all about text messages … as in 5 years ago.
But anyway, we’re all currently being “wasteful” by using our phones and laptops outside the normal intentions of emails, updating our server, you know.
Here in USA I have a T-mobile family plan with 4 lines 10GB each (I think) and use of youtube hulu netflix etc is ontop so none of us have a problem, I have dual-SIM oneplus2 with an UK giffgaff to receive online banking texts for free when in USA and when I land in UK I just roam for free on T-mobile and use Giffgaff for local calls/texts. A foot each in 2 countries
I just switched to a Moto G4 Play with a 64GB and moved the work ATT SIM to it and the OP2 is my spare/bag.
I was in Las Vegas last month and the hotel Wifi was awful so I stuck the OP2 on the window ledge and Wifi tethered to my other phone from the bed to get online. Worked well no bars in the room became 3 bars on the window ledge.
I hate the crap out of battery saver mode, it just makes the phone sluggish and the screen super dim. It’s a compromise I hate to make, in fact I feel like my phone freaks out and uses more power in that mode. I always leave it in Balanced mode.