compare if it makes a difference when you enforce 3G
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?
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.
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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
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?
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.
As you can see, 3G rule is set when screen is off.
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.
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…
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).
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.
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.
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Sounds like it is terrible compared to the stats/usage you mentioned. However with 4G on in my case (despite I am in the house on WiFi) I have to charge at the end of the day, so it is even worse…
I have added some conditions to the setup in Situations to prevent radio apps or streaming apps as well as phone calls from being interrupted.
From the theory of transmission the different energy consumption of the devices could simply be caused by weaker connections. If you are in a good position to receive and sent your carrier on LTE the transmission should be possible with relatively low energy on the UE (Smartphone) side.
If the connection is bad you need more energy as well for the decoding, but mainly for the transmission. And this makes a huge difference already on the theoretical side. So I would not be surprised, if the connection strength makes a enormous difference in the battery life.
(From here i get some figures: “See 3GPP TS 36.101, §6.3.2 for minimum transmit power of -40 dBm, with maximum transmit power of 23 dBm the power control range is 63 dB.”)
The weaker signal has been suggested many times but I have perfect 4G signal at home (where I spend most of my time atm…). I’m tired of people not suffering from this issue constantly trying to suggest this is not a bug and somehow I’m using my device wrong or I have wrong assumptions about how long the battery should last.
I have had this with three different devices and many versions of Sailfish. The only thing common with these three devices is that all have had the same operator (Finnish Elisa). I have even had the SIM card replaced between the devices. Maybe I should just get a prepaid SIM card from another operator and “prove” this.
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Exactly. As I have pointed out that I also suffer from this even though I live like 50m next to 4G base station and the signal strength is perfectly fine. Also, I did use my XA2 Dual-Sim with the stock Android for couple of months with the same operator and never noticed any battery drain even on 4G. However, this issue exists there even though the phone was just on 4G stand-by without mobile data on. 2-4% per hour even on 4G stand-by is just out of normal. For those who had Jolla 1 and the bug with the Other Half that lead to something like 2% battery consumption per hour, this case is pretty much the same with 4G.
What is also notable is that I have this issue with Elisa operator too. It seems quite weird that some people can reproduce this and some can’t.
I’ve had this problem with my XA2 from beginning. I bought mine only bit later than it was announced. Same time I bought Elisa prepaid for testing, since I had Elisa on my J1 on that time. I even remember having similar behavior on my J1.
In last September I switched my operator to Moi. I switched to XA2 couple weeks ago. I’ve made test using prefer 4G setting with Moi and noticed that when phone is not in use battery consuption does not differentiate much from 3G. IIRC with Elisa prepaid 4G consumed battery significantly even with screen off.
When I’m using phone difference between 3G and 4G is significant but I think thats expected as to my understanding higher data speed requires more transmission power. I’ve also tested if there is difference when 3G is used if screen is off. Currently I’m using prefer 3G setting since it gives me best battery life and I really don’t need faster dowload speed.
So to me this really seems like it is operator dependent. While I was using my J1 and changed to Moi, there appeared occasional problem that mobile data was on limited connection state and I have to switch mobile data off and on to bring back connection. This is was happening with XA2 at first, but currently I don’t remember having it lately.
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Havent noticed any battery consumption using XA2 and operator is Telia.Battery lasts about 2 days.I think that is quite well these days.
On my XA2 Ultra I also have a very high battery consumption since SailfishOS 3.4.
I didn’t noticed it for a while, because phone was most of the times connected to PC via USB when I was in Home Office. Now I am back at work and my battery lasts only 6-8h. It is unused most of the time, no apps running. The phone is unusable as a daily driver for me, because of that.
I tried many things. Remove SD-Card, turn 3G on instead of 4G but nothing helped.
My Provider is German O2.
After trying to do a whole reinstall with the hope to get a solution, I am back to SailfishOS 3.3 now. Here I only have 20% max consumption in 4h. I don’t think that this is a provider problem, this is a bug in the operation system.
Very sad! Hope there will be a solution!
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I also had massive battery drain and looked at the processes with lighthouse and found systemctl running wild. After several reboots, it works now. But now the UI bricks unpredictably 
while the phone still runs.
I can confirm this also, 4G needs more battery power. I suppose that 4G causes permanent higher processor load for the more complex modulation method, even in standby. Therefore I always switch manually to 3G except I really need the high speed internet access for downloading huge amounts of data (e.g. a new Sailfish image).
Has anyone experiences with running 4G or 3G on Xperia 10 under original Android? Is this really better under Android or more a hardware or general issue?