[Mathias Minetti]

Hi,

i want to share with all of you my settings. They give me from 2-3 days of battery power with normal use.

I only use wifi when home. 3/4G is disabled

Skydrive-sync is also disabled. It reduces quality anyway - waiting for dropbox app

Also all background apps is disabled.

My normal use is surfing the web, playing jewel ½ hour each day and talking some pictures/videos of my cats.

I had horrible battery life before, but then I did a hard-reset and put the shown setting in the phone.. I did the normal drain and fully charged the phone (3 hours). At first after the hard-reset, the phone was draining fast but after it went out and I charged it again it improved.

The change was really amazing:


The phone at the moment has been on for about 24 hours and still got 78% of battery left. And remember I also use the phone.

Also I have been updating all my app individually.

[amarshonarbangla]

Did you reset your phone using About>Reset or the button combination?

[Mathias Minetti]

I did both. The phone was also getting hot before from doing nothing almost. Just having is turned on would get it hot - happily not anymore, now its cold when in use.

I forgot to say that I have a black background and mail/facebook sync is on, so I get all my information when incoming.

[randomscandinavian]

The problem is that most people would probably say that there is little point in having a smart phone if you need to turn all of the smart stuff off. Clearly everything that can be on and running in the background cannot be, but it should be possible to have decent battery life and use it for more than photographing cats. ;)

You should be able to have both 4g and GPS on for instance, as well as a couple of background tasks and have it last all day. I guess the point is that we all need to find a compromise between what we want and what we can have and set our phones accordingly. Good to hear that you have found your ideal setting!

[Mathias Minetti]

granted, there shouldn't even be a battery option, it should just WORK.

the fixes and disabling part is my own conclusion from reading a lot about the battery issue. That said I don't feel or see anything different in the phone. It works and does what I want from it. The eye candy is still there, the important email/facebook sync is still there.. Pictures changing in the phone looks nice.. So summing up this is really not that bad, especially for me :P
I turn on 3/4G when I am outside. The problem is more that it doesn't switch of when connected to wifi. All other phones I had could do this simple function.

[randomscandinavian]

Yes, I agree. 4G should be switched off when on WiFi. I wonder if it's really on tho, when on WiFi. Even though it says so. Here in Norway at least, they cannot use 4G for voice, so the 4G I see on my phone is really just for data traffic, of which there is none when on WiFi. Once tou make a call, the 4G is temporarily disabled. Perhaps the phone still keeps the 4G connection alive and this eats battery, I don't know.

The first day I got 4G, after a week with an old Sim card, the battery life took a real dive. I turned several things off. Since then I have turned most of these things on one by one. One thing every day to see what affects battery life. And nothing has so far. It lasts all day with between 20% and 50% left after a lot of use.

There should have been preset combination toggles that were programmable for different uses. So one could have a set of background options enabled and disabled with one click. When I'm somewhere unfamiliar for instance, I would like GPS on and 4G on. Then I could find the bus to take and surf fast when I'm on it. But when I am in my neighborhood, I don't need positioning. And maybe not 4G either since I'm mostly in local cafes that have WiFi.

[Kebero]

Just a side note: you can set SkyDrive uploads to be at full quality. Doing so will force it to WiFi only for the uploads.

[jdhooghe]

I wonder how many times it checks for new photos though

[falcon304]

I wonder how many times it checks for new photos though

Every time you take a new photo it is automatically queued to be synced if you're not on wifi.

[randomscandinavian]

You also need to set upload quality to full within settings of the Skydrive app itself it seems. Not just in the phone's backup settings. I noticed that after having had backup set to wifi only, this separete setting in Skydrive was still set to "resized". This was not mentioned in any of the tutorial/review videos I saw about cloud backup of photos. One of several WP8 settings that are confusingly in two separate places.

[peachy001]

I am getting a healthy day and a half or more out of mine. It has to be said that most of the stuff is turned off but I used my HTC Desire the same and it has roughly the same battery performance as that. Possibly a little better.