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Any way to improve battery life of a tablet?


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Old 05-02-2015, 12:18
Si_Crewe
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We have 2 Android tablets in our house. One has an 8ah battery and the other has a 10ah battery.

Thing is, the one with the 8ah battery lasts roughly a day between charges and, importantly, the battery continues to drain even if it's just lying around in standby mode.

I thought this was just "normal" until we got the new tablet which barely uses any power when it's in standby mode.

When I look at the battery-usage graphs I can see that the power level just drops almost continuously on one, even when it's in standby mode.
On the other one you can clearly see that the battery level drops while it's in use but then it just remains constant when it's in standby mode.

Both tablets are set up roughly the same way so it's not like one is trying to access GPS or bluetooth all the time while the other isn't.
Both are left with wifi on all the time, and both receive emails and updates when they're in standby mode.

So, anybody got any ideas why one is draining the battery continuously while the other isn't?

I should say, the older one is running Jellybean while the new one has Kitkat.
Is it just that Kitkat uses MUCH less power when it's in standby mode, perhaps?
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Old 05-02-2015, 12:53
oilman
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Many factors:

Do you really need wifi on all the time?

You will get you emails etc as soon as you power up.

Have you set tablet to auto update everything etc. This can use significant power.

Do you sync email every few minutes - again more use. Once every 30 mins is probably ok for most users, but if you are expecting one urgently, you can always increase frequency on an as needs basis?

When running, screen brightness is a big factor. On one tablet I dimmed the screen and got 2+ hrs extra time.

I undertand kit-kat is supposed to be more power efficient, but hard to prove as on my current (phone), it came with kitkat.

Batteries draining when not in use could be an early sign of battery failure. Not easy to change though on most tablets?

The battery app should give a breakdown of where power is used. On my moto g, standby is only 5%, screen 52%, phone idle (not in standby) 3%, wifi 3% etc.
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Old 05-02-2015, 13:33
Si_Crewe
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Thing is, the older tablet has been doing this since it was new. I haven't noticed any particular reduction in useful battery life since we've had it.

I probably could twiddle with things to improve the battery life but, regardless of that, it's the fact that one does seem to use battery power while it's on standby while the other one doesn't that I found curious.

Incidentally, the thing that made me wonder about this was that the new, Kitkat, tablet doesn't seem to have a "power control" widget that easily allows you to turn stuff like wifi, bt, GPS etc on and off from the home-screen.
I went to the app store to see if I could find something similar (the missus is used to turning stuff on and off like that rather than using the pull-down system menu) and a lot of the reviews for "power control" widgets suggest that they ruin battery life.

Course, as I write this, it occurs to me that, perhaps, the "power control" widget that's bundled with Jellybean (on the old tablet) might be causing the problem.
Be funny if, after the best part of 2 years, all I needed to do was remove that to improve the battery life.
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Old 05-02-2015, 18:56
gavo360
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If the older tablet isnt a well branded one it could be just inefficient hardware inside that doesnt pay much attention to stand by.
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