Xperia 10 + XA2 4G battery consumption

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 :slightly_frowning_face: 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?

It’s been quite a while I saw this the last time. It was on Elisa network though, now on Telia 4G network has been fine without extra power consumption.

So I can confirm others’ experience that the network appears to matter. But I don’t think this happens on other 4G phones, AFAIK.

I also can confirm that the power consumption is higher while 4G is enabled.
Workaround is switching manually to 3G if 4G is not needed. Then battery live is longer.

In my experience, with SailfishOS 3.4 flashed from Android 8, after one night, the battery consumption is 5-6%. And with SailfishOS 3.4 flashed from Android 9, after one night, the battery consumption is 11%. Both using 4G, not running android support. (xa2 plus)

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That is an interesting observation. Maybe I will try to revert to Android 8 in the future and then flash SFOS again and test it out. The battery life of my device (XA2) is pretty bad compared to Android. I usually lose 15-20% on idle during the night, even with Android app support turned off and the phone set to airplane mode.

What vendor binary image are you using, v16 or v17b?

Is there a way to check which binary I have? I think I switched it at some point but don’t remember to which direction. At least switching the binary did not help with this issue.

It would be nice if Jolla tested this and could reproduce the issue with Finnish Elisa 4G network.

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This is how you can check it. https://jolla.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019346354?mobile_site=true

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grep ro.odm.version /odm/build.prop
ro.odm.version=9_4.9_ganges_v9

This is of course on Xperia 10.

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OK. This is my discovery. Maybe it will work for someone else, maybe not. I’ve been using my Xperia XA2 without any issues. My only problem was the battery life, especially on standby. It used to drain at least 20% during the night even with airplane mode turned on, as well as Alien Dalvik turned off. I saw the proposed solution by shalala to try to flash the device via EMMA to Android 8 and then to flash SFOS on it. I’ve tested it out, and it failed. Battery life was the same (tested on both binary images). I’ve flashed it back to v16 and left it like that for some reason. Then, for whatever reason, I’ve decided to turn off the option “Flip to silence calls and alarms” and to test it again (airplane mode turned on, Alien Dalvik turned off, and leaving my device in a drawer), and, voila, it finally worked! Now, for two days already, my device loses between 2 and 5% of juice overnight. I didn’t test it thoroughly, so that it may be just a fluke, but at least I’m confident enough that my device’s battery will not drain completely overnight (which certainly happened in the past). Sorry for the long post. I hope someone will find this helpful. Cheers
p.s. Maybe battery life would be even better on binary image v17, but I’ll have to test it in the future.

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I was having a massive battery drain, which I finally have gotten rid of for the past week. I am not entirely sure what helped (if it was a single thing or a combination), but this is what I did to my Xperia XA2 H3113 on Sailfish 4.4:

  • first and foremost 4G LTE wreaks havoc :slight_smile: Battery might be OK for an hour or two, but I was forced to go 3G/HSPA+ for the majority of the time to get normal battery life. Just to add that my coverage is great. Another interesting thing is that if I reflash there are no problems for about a week, even on 4G

  • I made a habit to restart Android App Support Manually each day when I charge my phone

  • once every 2-3 days i manually reboot the device

  • I have no apps installed from OpenRepos (this is not an advice not to do so, the devs are great)

These things ultimately solved my battery issues (for now), I hope they manage to help hope someone who reads this.

My phone doesn`t have anything fancy going on - MicroG with Aurora and F-droid, no apps from the “Alphabet boys”, mostly open source, with the exception of Viber.