Increasing battery life

[slondr]

Hi, my PinePhone on average gets about 1 hour battery life with the keyboard add-on - before I had the keyboard it was about 20 minutes of battery life on average. This is pretty low, but I thought it was expected due to common reports of users talking about low battery life. However I recently read on social media some people saying they're getting closer to 1 day out of the base hardware!

What tips are there to increase battery life? Is there software I can install which will help?

If it makes a difference I use sxmo on arch.

[alaraajavamma]

Hi, my PinePhone on average gets about 1 hour battery life with the keyboard add-on - before I had the keyboard it was about 20 minutes of battery life on average. This is pretty low, but I thought it was expected due to common reports of users talking about low battery life. However I recently read on social media some people saying they're getting closer to 1 day out of the base hardware!

What tips are there to increase battery life? Is there software I can install which will help?

If it makes a difference I use sxmo on arch.

That sound super strange.
Do you have Pinephone or Pinephone Pro?

As a battery life pro tip with PP/PPP number 1,2,3,4 and 5 things are to suspend as often, as fast and as much as possible.
Both PP and PPP will drain battery quite quickly when the phone is not suspended.
How ever your story sounds like that your phone battery almost empty because with PP you should survive like 1-8 hours without suspend depending how you use it. And with PPP maybe 45 minutes - 6 hours without suspend.

With fully suspended PP/PPP you can get like 24-56 hours depending from your modem settings.

[zetabeta]

now it sound you have hardware or possibly software issue going on. 20 minutes is way low, even with already low battery life.

in my experience, pp pro and pp regular are similar. maybe battery life is little lower for pp pro.

if no keyboard case, no suspend and no usage of mobile data: 4-6 hours
if no keybaord case, no suspend and using mobile data: 2-3 hours
if no keybaord case, using suspend: ~1 day (guess based on other's comments)
if keyboard case, no suspend: maybe 12 hours

however, software for keyboard case is buggy, charging may not work as intended.

[slondr]

Hi, my PinePhone on average gets about 1 hour battery life with the keyboard add-on - before I had the keyboard it was about 20 minutes of battery life on average. This is pretty low, but I thought it was expected due to common reports of users talking about low battery life. However I recently read on social media some people saying they're getting closer to 1 day out of the base hardware!

What tips are there to increase battery life? Is there software I can install which will help?

If it makes a difference I use sxmo on arch.

That sound super strange.
Do you have Pinephone or Pinephone Pro?

As a battery life pro tip with PP/PPP number 1,2,3,4 and 5 things are to suspend as often, as fast and as much as possible.
Both PP and PPP will drain battery quite quickly when the phone is not suspended.
How ever your story sounds like that your phone battery almost empty because with PP you should survive like 1-8 hours without suspend depending how you use it. And with PPP maybe 45 minutes - 6 hours without suspend.

With fully suspended PP/PPP you can get like 24-56 hours depending from your modem settings.

This is an original PinePhone - SXMO at least sleeps the screen after a few minutes, I'm not sure if it's suspending or not.

If it's suspending, while I still receive texts/phone calls?

[Kevin Kofler]

Some known power sinks:
* the flashlight on the back. Use that feature only when you really need it, it is extremely power-hungry. If you are going for a long walk in the dark, better bring a real flashlight with you.
* the LCD backlight. Tone down the brightness as much as possible without the display becoming unreadable (unfortunately, bright daylight conditions need the maximum brightness, all the more if you are wearing sunglasses, but in darker settings, you can need much less, even down to the minimum). It makes a huge difference for power consumption.
* the WiFi chipset. Using WiFi drains a lot of power. Scanning for WiFi networks even more so.

[alaraajavamma]

This is an original PinePhone - SXMO at least sleeps the screen after a few minutes, I'm not sure if it's suspending or not.

If it's suspending, while I still receive texts/phone calls?

Yes when suspended you will receive SMS/MMS and Calls. But not internet notifications like emails etc.

I am not sure but some distros will use "do not suspend if charger is connected" by default and maybe keyboard case is in the inhibitor?
How ever that 1 hours sounds still too short period so maybe try to charge your phone and keyboard full once.
If that does not help I suggest to try another distro

[PineFone]

I use Arch as my OS and battery lasts a few days at a time as long as I keep it to Phone and Text only, but am looking forward to the August release of Genode OS which is a microkernel specifically designed to maximize battery life of the PinePhone. Suggest you check it out as an option if you can't get around your current battery draw issues:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14780

[jakfish]

If I'm not mistaken, PP batteries are easy to find, easy to replace. Dunno about the kb battery, but I can' imagine it's that hard to find/replace one of those, either.

[aular]

maybe try redownloading the kernal only aside from the regular pacman update, then power cycle the device and see how that works