Some Google Pixel devices shutting down at 30% battery
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery, which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.
I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it. I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7 has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top bulletpoint.
What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries, keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the hardware vendors.
I'm baffled.
Someone downvoted me, I guess the phone landscape really is a fantastic one and I was wrong.
But yeah, it's something worth thinking about. The major appeal of a phone like the Pixel is less the hardware than the vanilla aspect of the Android OS.
All another hardware vendor has to do is attempt to stay up to date, and minimize their own bloatware if that's a bottleneck in their time allocation allotment. I'm surprised no one sees that a lot of Android users clamor for a vanilla, up-to-date Android OS phone.
I think I have come to the temporary conclusion that phones will always have problems even after several replacements. So all I can do is shrug, and ask why they cannot make phones like they used to.
We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).
But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.
BTW. I currently have 5X and have no problems with it.
I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.
My nexus 6 hasn't shown any slow downs etc.. I'm on 6.0.1 and using T mobile. You can pick them up now $260 refurbished or $330 old-new-in-box stock.
What I've done so far is join the Android beta program (yesterday) so I get newer versions of the OS, just in case there's a known issue that's been fixed. I've nothing to loose but my pains.
I found on the Moto X that a Google service was chewing up a lot of power/battery. Upon rebooting, that service would return to being a very minor component of battery use.
The first time my 5x started discharging in similar fashion, I had a look at battery use and found the same thing. Turning the phone fully off and back on, as with the Moto X, seemed to "fix" this.
I'm not saying this is your problem. Unless you never restarted your phone after such an update -- waiting and charging my Moto X overnight was not enough to make it go away. But even if not, maybe this comment will help out someone else.
During the work day, I generally only use it to check headlines at lunch. I also use it to play back mp3s over bluetooth to my motorycle helmet. The screen is typically on during the day for less than an hour.
The 5X is slower than the Nexus 5 it replaced - 50% more cores but they run slower and most apps take longer to start up. It's a mediocre device and the battery life is not good at all.
Right now, the biggest drains, after screen at 12%, are Google Play services, Android System, Android OS and Mobile standby.
I have a theory that it's Google's appetite for data that kills battery life. They make it hard to use the phone with location services turned off or in battery saving mode except when you want a location in Maps. When you want your location, it gets turned on and stays on. There's no easy way to keep it on to a minimum. I think it's a strategic goal of Google to use customer data for everything from location popularity to traffic, and they're willing to sacrifice customer batteries with nudging defaults to get there.
Except that when I first bought the device, in December 2015, it had GOOD battery life. I don't play games, I don't do anything but browse, use a couple of social media apps (as in, two) sometimes, try to keep the display below 40% brightness.
It rotted over time, like fruit left out on a hot day. The battery life became too gruesome to last the day.
It could very well be the massive data needing to be funneled about your commute, which Amazon product you glanced at, which jailed AMP news article you read, which restaurant you just walked out of, and all that other stuff that inspires modern dystopian fiction books and shows, that's draining the battery life.
Our dystopian information-centralized existence killed the battery life on my 5X. I'll take it.
[0] "okay" yes, but if people at Spotify would spend more time on battery and network issues than moving menus to weird places, I would be happier. Alternatives are worst, so it's just a matter of giving them money until they work on something you consider useful. As a consumer, this is infuriating.
As a tech professional who can afford to be a little fiscally irresponsible once in a while... the Pixel has been by far the best phone I've ever owned.
This is the first Android phone I feel has really challenged Apple's obsessively airtight design. I have never noticed a stutter, the camera is absurdly fast and shoots great photos, and the battery lasts nearly twice as long as my 5X.
Google has historically provided the cheaper, higher-barrier phones, but they're attempting to catch up while users are becoming lukewarm on Apple. I think they nailed it.
And that's out of the box. Batteries degrade. This time next year expect to be recharging these flagship devices twice a day.
Apple's obsession with thin has probably hurt us all here. Or is there another explanation why phones don't come with large batteries?
So I bought a secondhand Galaxy J1 for AU$75. It's annoyingly slow for doing anything other than sms / email / HN, so I tend not to use it for much else. But the battery like is awesome. I can get through a whole 24hr period without charging it, get to work the next before I noticed it's down to 15%.
That's just the thing though, even I've come to accept that 30hr battery life is awesome.
The iPhone 7 is 7.1mm thick, the Pixel is 8.5mm.
Who cares? I wish some manufacturer would give us a 12mm thick phone with a battery that lasted 48hrs +
Pretty simple:
1) Not everyone wants to constantly [think about] having to recharge their mobile device, or having it constantly connected. If you go hiking for a few days, you still want to be able to call 911.
2) Applications become heavier and heavier (yay all the ads, embedded browser, 3D stuff, cloud, crypto, etc). If you're on a plane and say play a game because you're bored you may end up easily using for example 40% of your total battery power.
3) The more you need to charge the phone, the quicker the battery degrades (LiOn generally keep working for 1000 recharges). Over their lifetime (that's roughly 3 years of daily recharging) the battery will degrade to less juice within a full cycle [1].
4) Batteries are not user replaceable anymore, so require a third party to perform the swap, at premium price and without full control of the user.
5) There's enough waste as it is, and having to swap phone every 2 years or so creates even more.
6) It also is quite a task deciding which phone to buy, and if you made a mistake or don't have that much money to burn you may end up with a phone not so well supported.
7) Finally, one has to swap their settings and data to their new phone. Sure, you can use clouds. They're free at the cost of your privacy...
A powerbank mitigates some of the above problems, but only so much, and they also suffer from degrading performance by age.
[1] Anecdotal example: my MBP 2010's battery had 740 cycles and is at ~88% capacity when fully charged.
I've had it for a few months now. It is annoyingly aggressive about shutting down apps (which makes my lastpass autofill not work, among other things).
But I paid ~$180 with no contract and though it definitely stutters at times, for my use it's been great.
It's good but I am surprised at the things it lacks. I had hoped it would support wireless charging because my last three Google phone (all nexuses) and my 2012 nexus tablet all had major problems with the power connector be oming loose after a year of use.
I also hoped it was at least minimally waterproof like most of the similarly-priced phone but, alas, it's not.
I'm very happy with the speed of the camera though.
But I still switched back to my old iPhone 5. So make sure you don't find Android frustrating. (e.g. be prepared that security updates take far longer than on Nexus')
The price isn't even the biggest problem. Google ships the newest phone that gets Android security updates to only 5 countries: https://support.google.com/store/answer/2462844?hl=en
And no, it's not about lack of basic presence. (See Chromecast countries.)
And no, it's not about shipping batteries. (See Pixel C countries.)
My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to the battery by shutting down.
Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
Assuming you have an extra removable battery charged and on your person at the time, and you still need to shutdown your device to do it.
And assuming you want to either juggle charging multiple batteries in the phone, or you get an external charger.
From only being able to provide power to a single device, handling a battery which is not meant to be handled that way (don't puncture or bend that, or have it touch anything which could cause a short), and charging it outside what it was designed to be charged in (i'd be extremely wary of using a few-dollar external battery charger...), carrying extra internal batteries is a much worse experience.
IMO modern fast-charging is significantly better (at least to me). Being able to charge up 50% in like 15 minutes is huge. And if that's not available, external battery packs are not only safer to carry, but can hold more juice, work on multiple devices (even at once), and are easier to recharge.
That being said, I think manufacturers could make it easier to change out batteries in phones even with non-removable batteries (in other words, make one-time replacements easier to do on your own). But I just don't see having to carry multiple batteries with you as a good solution.
Next time perhaps you should actually try out the alternatives before criticizing things you haven't used yourself and don't understand.
And I also know that the OEM samsung external battery chargers are $40+ which is quite a long ways away from "a few dollars", and there are MANY fakes and dangerous counterfeits out there not only for the chargers but for the batteries themselves.
And even if they were safe and external chargers were as cheap as you say, i'd still prefer fast-charging and/or external battery packs over them.
It's cheaper, more versatile, safer, and more convenient to use for me.
Basically, you can think of it as a 5L bucket of water with a hole in the bottom. The first liter will have a much higher pressure than the last. Running energy intensive features (GPS, 3D, camera, cell modem, etc) increases the minimum needed pressure, causing the device to shutdown when lower power features would operate just fine. As you keep using the bucket, the mound of dirt its on gets washed away, reducing the maximum pressure you can get out of it.
Building a good battery gauge is non-trivial as you have to factor in how much people use high energy features when the battery is nearing end of charge. Better low power modes would help with this, but nobody has found a good way of indicating to the user the battery has X% power left at current use vs the battery has Y% of its fully charged capacity remaining.
A capacitor that can store enough charge to send/receive a SMS would allow this to work as the capacitor can be charged slowly, but it would take up valuable room inside the phone (a few mm^3). Some embedded cell/sat radios where size isn't very important already do this to reduce demands on the hosts electrical system (eg: solar powered parking meters that take credit cards).
If it is software, I'd strongly suspect something at kernel level, since quite a few times in my experience, the shutdown is too quick for a safe shutdown. Userspace seems to get a notification that battery is low because it usually gives the "shutting down" alert, but then just shuts off in a suspiciously short amount of time.
I'd be more likely to think it's probably something in the battery/power stack that's not managing or reporting the power well. Discharge/voltage curves are not at all linear, [1] [2], so it's logical that issues with immediately available voltage might start to affect the device around the 30% level. Additionally, as another commenter has mentioned, the discharge curve is dependent upon temperature [3], so a sudden drop in ambient temperature will eventually have a direct effect on the reported voltage.
I'm not exactly sure what kind of metrics are commonly used for reporting battery percentage, but I am about to read a few (okay, maybe half of one) Arxiv papers that came up in a search. [4] Presumably, it's strongly based on some voltage modeling and I can imagine that would have a hard time coping with external factors beyond its measurement capacity, like ambient temperature drops. I don't suppose a user would be happy to see their reported battery percentage drop like a rock immediately upon stepping outside.
I really don't know where I was going with all that, except I guess to say that my gut says Battery "percentage" is a bit more an art than a science. That is to say, there are psychological reasons not to report based on voltage directly (it may go up if you step into a warmer room; "Wat?"), and I can imagine any metric is going to have its strengths and weaknesses, because you really can't account as much for user behavior that changes important physical conditions of the battery.
[1] http://www.powerstream.com/AA-tests.htm
[2] http://www.ibt-power.com/Battery_packs/Li_Ion/Lithium_ion_te...
[3] http://www.ibt-power.com/Battery_packs/Li_Ion/Li_Ion_DiscTGp...
[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=battery%20percent%20site%3Aa...
Literally fluctuates between 40%, 1%, 31%, off and don't get me started on how it changes when it gets cold outside.
https://www.apple.com/uk/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown...
To prepare your iPhone 6s for the battery replacement process, please follow the steps below:
Back up your data to iTunes or iCloud.
Turn off Find my iPhone
Erase data and settings in Settings > General > Reset > Erase all Content and Settings
But this is just the nature of batteries.
And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable battery to avoid these problems.
More generally, this season's phones are also cheap-looking and cheap-feeling. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me, looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).
2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.
I went from a Note 4 to a Note 5, and ended up dropping my Note 5 causing the screen/LCD to break and not turn on. It looks like it costs about $300-400 to replace everything after asking a couple of local places, because the parts for this are expensive/out of stock. You might want to see if it's the same thing for the Note 4.
At that price, I'd probably just want to buy a new one.. but as you said, there's not a lot of good smartphones out right now.
I'm using the Note 4 again for now, which is actually a refurb/replacement because the original one's screen died randomly one day (without dropping it this time.)
Now, why this happens in a brand new phone like the Pixel is another matter...
One thing that really bothers me about a lot of the new phones is the slippery glass backs. The Note 4 has a textured plastic back with quite a bit of grip to it. I tried a friend's Galaxy S6 and it nearly slid out of my hand!
I suppose a silicone case would fix that, but I like being able to use the Note 4 without a case and not have to worry that it will slip away.
Anyways, I did what most people do not do and unlocked bootloader, installed TWRP and Pure Nexus Project 7.1.1 ROM and am happy to report that issue is now completely gone (I did stress-test it several times in below zero temperatures) !
So, no - it does not seem to be a hardware issue.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone-shu...
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/12/02/sony-is-trying-to-pu...
On the devices I've worked with, that button handling is done by the power management silicon and not by software at all.
I don't know how much stuff you carry with you, but with my 5'5" phone doesn't reboot with my keys on my pocket.
I guess they are extending support for it.
It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.
Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.
Microsoft is aware of it and has made many changes to help. For instance there is an official interface to remove an unwanted program or to turn off a process that starts when you log in. Similarly there was a time when windows machines were not at all adequately patched and Microsoft has come out with a solution that (i) worked and (ii) improved the performance steadily since then.
I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.
While most people run Android the same way people run Apple, you can run Android and get your apps from f-droid, and you can run CM (and, if your into these things, Xprivacy), so while Google may still be getting your private data, random apps won't.
At this point, as much as I like Android, the UI, the open nature, etc. etc., I can't justify sticking with it for the next phone I buy.
Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again.
It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey.
As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.
My iPad Air on the other hand has severly dimished usability from the various iOS updates. Orientation change no longer works reliably. The idiotic change from swipe to unlock via double tap of home tremedously increased the frustration in UX (Try a double tap while the tablet is barely upright via Apple's magnetic cover.)
The Moto G was never a fast phone, but a new thing it started to do towards the end of its life was OOM kill the mp3 player if you backgrounded it. At first it was if you did something heavyweight, like start a game. Then it was browsing an ad-heavy site. Then it was if you opened the web browser at all. This, plus the usual Android lag, bad battery life, intrusive Google Botnet stuff.
The tipping point was this. I walk to the coffee shop with music playing. I order, sit down, start reading. There's an amusing line in the book, so I take out the phone to take a picture of it, which kills the music player. Then a Google Maps notification pops up asking me to add the photo to the coffee shop's Maps page.
I think, why the fuck am I still using Android? I know Google tracks me everywhere I go, but do they have to be so obvious about it?
I recently updated the OS to CyanogenMod though, mainly because the phone stopped receiving security updates. I wouldn't say the phone performs better running CM, but it's no worse than when I first bought the phone. I really hope CynogenMod can keep the ball rolling. I wouldn't want to run the stock image after it's fallen this far behind security updates.
Why spend $800 for this? Really? Really? Is there a point to spend $800 on a device that in a showroom or a friend's hand was not feeling ok and needing to charge four times per day?
Decent camera (would have been called world-class 2 years ago), battery charged once every 3 days, stock Android, 2 SIM card sockets, 64GB SD card, 5.x sized screen.
But there are still things the camera phone can't do: Longer range/landscape photos. Interesting to see which manufacturer is able to put a quality detachable lens on a cameraphone, or when Nikon/Canon put SIM cards and telephony in their already Android-enabled equipment.
The Nexus phones were a great value, but if the Pixel is going to be priced as a flagship phone then I see little reason to buy it over an iPhone.
There are MANY options to choose from both paid and free that all prioritize different things.
Take a look around and see if any of them are nicer for you, and if it is you can set it as your default dialer in a second or 2.
One of the biggest benefits of android is being able to replace the built-in apps with 3rd part ones that act as default handlers.
Over at Facebook people had to be ordered to carry Android devices because their app was lagging behind the iOS version.
The Pixel line of devices seems like Google's attempt at dogfooding their own platforms.
After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.
My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself (there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.
I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon batteries.
Seriously, looks like battery management isn't exactly the strength of today's device manufacturers -.-