Xperia 10 + XA2 4G battery consumption

Bug Reports
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#1

REPRODUCIBILITY (% or how often): 100
BUILD ID = OS VERSION (Settings > About product): 3.4.0.24
HARDWARE (Jolla1, Tablet, XA2,…): Xperia 10, Xperia XA2
UI LANGUAGE: Finnish
REGRESSION: (compared to previous public release: Yes, No, ?): No

DESCRIPTION:

If mobile network is set to 4G, battery does not last a full day (Xperia 10) or barely lasts a day (XA2) even if the phone is idle. If set to 3G, the consumption is normal: Xperia 10 last a day of use and XA2 two days.

From the old forum I have the understanding that this might have something to do with the mobile operator. All my testing has been done on Finnish Elisa network.

PRECONDITIONS:

Finnish Elisa network?

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

  1. Network mode 4G
  2. use the device as usual
  3. after some time start swearing because this is still not fixed :slight_smile:

EXPECTED RESULT:

Battery life the same or maybe slightly worse than on 3G network

ACTUAL RESULT:

Battery life so poor that 4G is unusable

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Hopefully there is a fix soon as 3G network will end in 2023.

4 Likes
#2

I can confirm. I’m suffering the same issue, using a Xperia XA2 with actual sailfish. Network is german 4G congstar. Battery consumption is only usable if using 3G network.

1 Like
#3

Xperia X has the same issue. 4G half to one day avg. use - 3G 1 to 2 days avg. use. I do not use internet at all.

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#4

I do not know if it’ll help, but with my French 4G network and a moderate usage of my XA2 (email syncing each 5 minutes, listening hardly music in FLAC 0, browsing some stuff from applications), it lasts 1.5 days.

#5

Same with normal Telekom (okay, uses same Network as cong star). 4G only lasts from early Morning until evening, even without any use. For testing I switched to 2G at the weekend, and battery is long lasting with that. I just had 30 % consumption in 24 hours right now (with low usage at all). It’s definitely a 4G/LTE problem (and was there from the beginning of Sailfish for XA2).

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#6

Strange, I’ve noticed no significant battery drain on my Xperia 10 using Telia 4G in Finland.

#7

I’m using finnish DNA 4G with light usage (I’m not heave user of apps or call a lot), my Xperia 10 has about 20-30% battery left after about 40-48h.

#8

This is strange.

Can everybody post some more details on the phone - might be a factory batch for Finland and France does better with 4G?
I’m just wondering how controversial the reports are.

1 Like
#9

I’m in America on an XA2 Plus Dual Sim. Battery consumption has increased so much, it’s hard to charge now and I’m concerned.

#10

I am using 10 plus i4293, i do reflash the device, tried idle at night with AD off, the battery drop from 100 to 60 for few hours, that is vey abnomal, Check the process in background, look like is normal, maybe kernel problem or my battery is worn? Really dont know

#11

compare if it makes a difference when you enforce 3G

#12

XA2 Dual Sim Pallas Ylästunturi, Vodafone, Germany,
Mostly city environment and some road travel. That means 90% 4G even in Germany. We have severe lacks of 4G service outside dense populated areas even on highways)

No problems so far with this device and the Xperia X before. A friend of mine had issues with his Xperia XA2 for at least a year. He did not reflash as I suggested at that time and problems prevailed. Hard and software of our devices were the same at that time.

  • I would suggest that without further analysis this does not seem to be a common problem.
  • It is not directly dependant on OS-Version and device.
  • It might have something to do with signal strength (?) Where do you keep your phones esp. long term e.g. at night?
#13

I made a test: My XA2 is on just 2G/EDGE right now, data connection active, WiFi on, Bluetooth on, GPS on (with the most accurate setting which is said to be the must battery consumpting option). NFC is off.
Phone was fully charged, and as its my secondary device I just let it laying idle and nearly didn’t use it. Now over 70 (!) hours later I still have 16% battery!

I’ll do another test like that with 3G/UMTS soon - but the main problem for battery consumption seems to be 4G/LTE active.

1 Like
#14

There have been quite a lot discussion about the 4G battery consumption at least when it comes to XA2. For instance on this question https://together.jolla.com/question/212227/battery-life-xa2-dual-sim-h4113-31011-seitseminen/ where I have posted too. It’s also suggested that this issue could lay on AOSP drivers which are not likely to be fixed.

I myself own XA2 Dual-Sim and use Finnish operator Elisa and 4G is really draining battery 2-4% per hour even on stand-by. For example, If I have the battery on 90%, it jumps directly to 88% skipping 89% when 4G is on. This have been the case ever since I flashed the first version of Sailfish on XA2. Before that I used it with stock Android with no issues and I had the same operator so the issue came out right after flashing Sailfish OS. I have also tried to re-flash with other vendor binaries but it didn’t do the trick. If I switch 4G to 3G, I have instantly significantly better battery life, like 2% per 6 hours or something like that. Signal strengths etc. are just fine and I live like 100m to 4G base station.

My workaround to this have been the Situations app (available on Jolla store) which I use to configure 3G when screen is off and 4G when it’s on. This works quite fluently

#15

Okay, I’ll try 3G now.

But I don’t get how you use situations app. I tried that, but found nothing to get that working. Reading your post it sounds like it’s possible to get this settings switched automatically, but I didn’t find anything similar in situations app. This would need some kind of trigger in the app like “display on/off” or “phone locked/unlocked”. So I would be pleased how you set that up. Manually switch does not really solve the thing to my mind…

BTW reflashing: I did severely resets of my XA2 cause of problems with 3. 4 first and always ended up on 3.1 (or 3.0) as system delivery status so I always had to update in steps until 3.4. Would perhaps a complete reflash solve the driver problems?

#16

Not sure if this thread can help also [How-To] Situations App but I can try to describe breafly. And FYI, you want to make sure that the app is opened after every reboot etc. since it can’t start those background processes automatically.

So first of all, in Situations app you’ll need to have some features / properties (not sure what the navigation title is in English) downloaded and installed. These features are screen, mobile data / network and you might also want to have the phone call status.

Here I have my 4G mode when the screen is on. There’s also the check for “Network on” but that was only for debugging reasons when I had some issues so it’s not necessary.

Näyttökuva_20201103_001
Näyttökuva_20201103_0011080×1920 466 KB

As you can see, 3G rule is set when screen is off.

Näyttökuva_20201103_002
Näyttökuva_20201103_0021080×1920 465 KB

As you might have spotted there’s the rule for not having a phone call since I experienced some issues with phone calls in general when it changed the network during a call. Not sure if it was related to that but no issues any longer with those rules.

#17

Thanks, that’s the part that was missing. I didn’t recognise (and couldn’t imagine) that there would be additional downloads. Now it’s getting clearer, I’ll try again…

#18

Got it now, thanks again. Is there any way for using wildcards - so that I can set a situation based on any active WiFi connection and don’t need implement every Wi-Fi network by name?

Autostart should be possible with the matching app from Storeman/Openrepos (but sure needs to run in background).

#19

To add to this, I can also confirm that switching to 3G (XA2 -Dual SIM - 3.4.0.x) without changes in the usage pattern results in consuming 30% battery over 13+hrs while before I would have to charge at the end of the day. So a definite improvement. With 3.3.x phone battery lasted 2 days easily. I don’t know if it is the AOSP driver since in my case the battery drain was introduced with 3.4. I have upgraded to 3.4 from 3.3 didn’t do a clean install.

#20

30% battery over 13+hrs sounds terrible battery life so you definitely have something else going on there too. For example, I’m running on latest Sailfish 3.4 version and during a night approximately +10h maximum of 10% is consumed. This 10% is usually due to something being a little bit “wrong”. Usually more like 5% is consumed during the night. And to add, I have always android support, mobile data etc. the “basic stuff” on.

1 Like