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Comment by thefreeman | Hacker News Reader

Curious, do you actively use the power control widget? Turning off wi-fi and GPS when you aren't using them can help a lot with battery life.

Also, if you are using CyanogenMod (or many other custom builds) you can change the performance settings on your cpu governer, etc., to improve it further.

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That's silly. I don't have to manually turn off wi-fi or GPS for my iPhone to last about two days, why should I have to on an Android phone? Automatic management would be fine, but having to think about it is not. Even using cell-towers-only coarse location to set them when I'm at home or work could be OK.

> I don't have to manually turn off wi-fi or GPS for my iPhone to last about two days, why should I have to on an Android phone?

Because an Android phone doesn't assume you have unlimited data and automatically turn Wifi off periodically, thereby downloading things over the cell network.

I've gotten burned this way on the iPhone; luckily I opted for the larger data plan.

Chances are, there is a ketnel wakelock held by a device driver and preventing the phone from sleeping. This is a common issue with poorly written drivers (even Nexus 7 3g suffers from it). Properly functioning Android phone should be managing its radios automatically.

I bought the Nexus 4 and couldn't believe how little runtime I was getting. Even paid $5 for juice defender to turn off wifi / automatic downloading. It's the screen. Went back to my iPhone 4. Sites should really do a better job of reporting battery life, although I guess I should have guessed from the Anandtech table [1]. Gave it to my brother to jailbreak and underclock, to see if it could be saved.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6425/google-nexus-4-and-nexus-...

My cheapo android phone from Virgin had an app installed by default (ICS) that lets you automate power control. My phone goes from 100% to 60% about twice as fast as 60% to 0%, because once it hits 60% it automatically dims the screen (unless you force it bright). And if you ever watch power consumption, by and far it's the screen that uses the most.

While I definitely believe that would help - on the iPhone I don't have to turn anything off (and I typically don't want to).

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