I keep waking up to slurping sounds… And today finally figured out where they came from.
The Nexus 7 is sucking the battery dry in less than a day. I’ve had it for almost a week now and have been using it a fair bit ofcourse. But typically no more than 2-3 hours a day. About half that time was spent browsing menu’s trying out options. Setting background images and throwing widgets around. The other half involved streaming movies and tv shows via Wifi. I realize this is taking a lot of power. But the promised 9 hours battery life to watch movies in HD or 10 hours web browsing? Not even close.
Maybe 4 hours of video, this is h264 compressed video in 720p coming in at a maximum of 3mbit/sec. Sound is usually stereo or 5.1. All AAC or AC3 encoded. I stream this via Plex Media Server. So the actual video decoding is done on the server and not by the Nexus 7. I see a same draining effect when I’m on Youtube. 4-5 hours and Android tells me that it will power down.
Even when just letting it lie around doing nothing, screen off for most of the day, when I pick it up to go to bed and watch a movie i lost around 10-20% of battery sometimes. By just being on my desk. Doing nothing.
Am I doing something wrong here? Or is Android and it’s multitasking just being weird? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s the charger… Or lack of it. Since I had the Nexus shipped to me from the UK it came with a UK charger. I can’t find a compatible plug for it that suits my house. However, iPad chargers have exactly the same specs so I use that one instead. It charges just fine I think. Electrics is electrics after all.
Thoughts?
Power management with my Kindle Fire is similary iffy. There are sometimes when everything is fine but lately the battery is nearly dead after sitting overnight with the device off. I think it might have been a misbehaving app and one of the few apps I added to the KF before experiencing these power issues was the NBC Olympics apps (both the web extra and normal one). I deleted the two apps and although it’s difficult to tell since it’s been less than 24 hours the KF appears to be holding a charge better. I deleted some other apps too so it’s possible to have been one of those.
It gives me more appreciation on how iOS manages power. On the Kindle Fire I installed GSam Battery Monitor (formerly Bad Ass Battery Monitor) and it showed a straight line drop in battery power overnight so something was running at a constant rate and depleting the battery. Try GSam Battery Monitor as it may show you what app or process is sucking down the battery, there’s a free version that should work for you.
I’ve now set it to disabled Wifi when the screen is off/locked.
This seems to help immensely.
Not sure what changed with that though since I have only Google+ and Plex in use.