Phone (3) - Battery life tests and concearns

DaviBarbero 🇮🇹

Hello to yall people!

I’m Davide, I’ve bought the Nothing Phone (3) at the end of July and since then I’ve enjoyed quite a fair bit the whole experience, but this post is not a review of the phone but a discussion about the battery life;

I’ve red many posts on the community of mixed feelings about the battery life and I’ve to say that I fall on the category of people that feel that the battery life could be better, I’ve red multiple times about @CMF1_hacker battery life of about 11 hours but I never managed anything close to it

So i took matters in my own hands, and I’ve recorded some battery insights trough Battery Guru (shoutout to the dev, that app is awesomely designed) with adaptive battery on and a day after with adaptive battery off, and oh boy…

While adaptive battery is on i get this result trough a normal work day (excuse me in advance for the system language, I’ll add the translation where it is necessary)

All tests were performed in same environmental conditions of temperature
I have a 90% charge limit in place so the level of the battery each morning starts from that point
My settings are with bluetooth always on, wifi always on, cellular network always on and location always on
The brightness is set to adaptive
I am using Nothing OS 4.0, recently updated from Nothing OS 3.5
I have a CMF watch 3 pro with 10 minutes scan of heart rate and notifications on
I turned off the google’s services that i deem as “useless”, by that i mean:
- Nearby device scan
- Cross device services
- Google photo’s image synchronization and backup
- Usage and diagnostic data
- Play protect app scan
- Gemini is disabled
- probably more stuff that I don’t remember now

Here you can see the app usage, in all fairness this was a quite “easy” day with not much screen time:

Here it shows the device total usage and battery use, in the first image you can see that in 12 hours the battery dropped roughly 30% but with just 1h 23m of screen on… and the apps that i used were just the one visible in the first 2 screenshot

This second image shows in the bottom left pane the deep sleep time, and it shows close to 8,5 hours, meaning that for about 60% of time the phone was in the super optimized “keep few things alive” state but it shows about 1,6% drain

Here the full insight with the graph of the battery level through time:

Kinda linear and progressive

2 days ago I tried to turn off adaptive battery (just by sheer curiosity) and my result was this:

This day was more intense use, I had quite a fair bit of whatsapp messaging going on, but i never used anything more than regular text (no calls, no video calls)

But now to the “bad” part:

As you can see in the second to last right pane (“Tasso di scarica”, italian for “discharge rate”), the battery dropped almost 3% every hour WITH SCREEN OFF (!!!) for about 7,5hour (4,5hour of deep sleep and 3 hour of “active” sleep); this data left me very surprised, it felt a very high rate to me especially by knowing the services that i use: WhatsApp is the only Meta “service” that I actively use, instagram is even disabled in background and facebook is not even installed!

Now I have again adaptive battery enabled and I tried to disable the location service, but the battery consumption dropped by just a 0,1%/h…

Now I come to you guys, how do you see my battery use? Do you think that there is margin for improvement?
For some reason I feel like the battery should be better, I remember my old OnePlus Nord CE 5G with a smaller battery was fairing batter…

JochieSantiago

DaviBarbero 🇮🇹 so I have a thread I made a while ago about this topic, but with version 3.5

https://nothing.community/d/46335

I still have to do some ADB tests with the new “stable” 4.0 update.

Stereobasic

Why do you need to let everything on ? You don’t need that Bluetooth, location, data when you go the bed ? No ? It’s not that hard to toggle off things when you don’t need them. I need Bluetooth, i toggle on, when i finish i put it off. I go outside to work, i disable wifi and put data on. I’m going back after work at home, i disable data, location etc.

Maybe this can help and seems so easy to do so why not ?

Do you use a dns to erase all adds ? All that adds consume a lot too for nothing. Disable printing option if you never print anything from your phone. Etc.

DaviBarbero 🇮🇹

Stereobasic well, when I go to bed the phone is charging, so in the statistics it doesn’t figure; still this doesn’t addresses the elephant in the room, I had the exact same usage on my old phone and the smaller battery (and 5 years of usage) and older CPU there was fairing better than the bigger battery and more efficient CPU here

Edit: I already disabled the printers

Stereobasic

DaviBarbero 🇮🇹 i have never charged my phone letting it plugged all the night when i go to sleep. Seems bizarre for me when you can fully charge your phone just in 50 minutes anytime. So maybe we are too different in our way of living things to makes my advice helpful to you.

You know it’s like a car, If you let the turn signals, headlights, windshield wipers, interior lights, air conditioning and heating on 24 hours a day to have everything ready if you need, then yes, the battery will last less time.

Anyway do you use 5G ? If yes do you really need 5G ? Honestly here in France 4 G is already so powerful for normal usages, streaming , video, chat, browsing that i never needed more, it’s no use, and 5G consume lot of batteries inefficiency. Do you use wifi or Bluetooth scanning ? Do you need that your phone scan everything all day to find all wifi or Bluetooth device around you ? I write all of that just for you to maybe explore what you really need and then adapt your phone to your very own need and don’t waste anything not useful.

And about you question, you can’t compare 2 different phone at all, they are just not the same in any way, absolutely every part of it are different. The only thing you can do is fine tune your device and apps to help you gaining more battery. And this lead to another kind of philosophycal question : Do you really need to bother about battery if anyway you charge you phone all night every day and your phone last to the moment you go to bed ?

Hope some will help you better than me analysing your datas.

Edit : do you turn off your phone for 5 minutes and turning on again at least every week ?

deralex

Stereobasic Ich hoffe, du hast den Text so gemeint, wie ich ihn lese. Als freundlichen Hinweis und kleine Anregung zu einer achtsameren Nutzung des Telefons.

Dann kann ich dir nur zustimmen.

Ist das nicht auch der Grund, sich für ein Nothing Phone zu entscheiden?

Liebe Grüße!

DaviBarbero 🇮🇹

Stereobasic Sorry for my late answere
I charge it overnight because I use a 5W slow charger intentionally (battery heats up less -> it should mantain good health for longer, and i also have a max charge limit so the battery never reaches those “dangerous” high levels of charge where it could degrade faster overtime)
5G is always off (really, I don’t get how people feel the need of it…), the preferred network is 4G and in my area I have a very good coverage; wifi and bluetooth scanning is off
About the phone compare: Yes I know that they are different devices, but it is still shocking to me… Is it normal for a car with bigger tank and more efficient motor to need to fuel more often than an old one with smaller tank and less efficient motor if they are driven in the same whay through the same road?

No, I very seldom reboot the phone, exactly as I did in the past with the old one

Stereobasic

deralex yes it’s all about kindness, but English is not my first language so maybe it don’t look right. And as i have regularly 9- 13 hours of sot with only charging every 2 days i try to understand what i do differently to have that kind of sot if others struggle to just have 7hours for one charge every day.

In another thread someone have explained that when you go to the network menu then something happens and consume lot of energy and you can’t fix it if you don’t shut down your phone and start it again. There are so much things possible…