Is there a way to increase the battery life of the PinePhone?

[Avisando]

I would like to know if there is a way to increase the battery life of the PinePhone as it is very difficult to last all day (even when doing almost nothing).

I have already :
- disable wifi/4G/bluetooth
- disable automatic rotation
- adjust the brightness to the strict minimum
- close background applications

And it is enough that during the day I receive two or three calls of barely a minute and that I take ten photos so that I find myself at less than 10% after ten hours.

So if someone would have a solution to this problem I would be grateful for it.

Thanks in advance

[ryo]

10% after 10 hours is actually pretty impressive to be honest.
I barely even use mine, they're just lying on my desk all day unless I travel to a few stations further from my home, and still can't manage to get 4 hours of battery life even.

If you're a heavy user, I suggest you keep it plugged into a wall when you're at a stationary location and have access to a socket.
Or otherwise have a portable battery, I have a ridiculously big one which can charge 2 phones at the same time, charges through solar power, and doubles as a torch too, really great for the occasions when I'm travelling to some remote location for 1 or 2 nights.

[Avisando]

10% after 10 hours is actually pretty impressive to be honest.
I barely even use mine, they're just lying on my desk all day unless I travel to a few stations further from my home, and still can't manage to get 4 hours of battery life even.

If you're a heavy user, I suggest you keep it plugged into a wall when you're at a stationary location and have access to a socket.
Or otherwise have a portable battery, I have a ridiculously big one which can charge 2 phones at the same time, charges through solar power, and doubles as a torch too, really great for the occasions when I'm travelling to some remote location for 1 or 2 nights.

Thanks for your recommendations. 

Looks like my battery life is good (see above average, seeing what you tell me).
In addition I think that in the future the autonomy of the PinePhone will be more important because with a better optimization of the OS and the consequent battery of the PinePhone (3000 mAh), that we can expect progress significant over the next few months and years.

[nelstomlinson]

My PP has been sitting on my desk for about an hour. It has discharged from ~95% to 70%. All it has been doing is turning itself on every 5 minutes, and heating the room. No apps are open, no calls, no nothing. It didn't use to do this - I used to get around 8 to 10 hours on a full charge, same as you. At some point it stopped suspending, and started waking up every 5 minutes, and that has ruined the battery life.

[nelstomlinson]

And one hour on, still doing nothing but waking itself up every 5 minutes, it's down to 43%. I'm lucky to get 4 hours before the low battery shuts it down.

[slomobile]

Is there a way to compile user submitted pinephone battery life benchmarks in terms of configuration so we can zero in on configurations that are effective at conserving power and also meet our individual use requirements?

Spitballing...
We have a large user base of mostly homogeneous hardware and a finite number of distributions.

The benchmark number is hours:minutes starting at the transition from >90% to <=90% until the transition from >10% to <=10%.
Or whatever existing battery benchmark is chosen to standardize on.  Doesn't matter as much as being consistently applied across all test configurations.  

The variable (what would be the ranked list of CPU models in a processor benchmark) is the configuration (hardware version, distribution version, interface version, settings, running programs).   It will be a very long list of different configurations with most ranked configurations being a single test.  Some people may have identical configurations.  The chart would display the average results, but clicking the configuration category would expand the list to show individual tests for that config category.

We would need a script to record the current config, run the benchmark over the better part of a day, watching for invalidating events such as user input, shutdowns, change of config while running the benchmark.  It would stay active throughout the benchmark period to verify no user interaction and no configuration changes mid run.  

I have no experience with this, maybe it is already a thing.  I'd just like a broad picture of how config choices affect battery life.  I think users would be willing to set aside productive use of their pinephones for a single day to contribute their piece of data to the big picture.

[Anna]

And one hour on, still doing nothing but waking itself up every 5 minutes, it's down to 43%. I'm lucky to get 4 hours before the low battery shuts it down.

I don't think that's how it should be.

In the past, my Pinephone (Mobian) could always remain in standby for more than two days before the battery was empty, provided I did not touch it at all. 

Since some time, however, I have the same problem you descibed: Instead of remaining switched off, the screen goes on once in a while showing either the lock screen or a black surface (a backlit black surface, the screen is not switched off).

That's extremely annoying because it brings down battery life to a few hours. I have not found a solution yet, unfortunately, but there must be one since it used to function much better.

[bcnaz]

I think they have been concentrating on just getting everything 'working' so far,

When they make a real power saving 'Break-Thur' it will likely be from system wide improvements.

When using a 'beta' phone it may require extra effort to use.
(Spare battery or power pack ?)

[Avisando]

I think they have been concentrating on just getting everything 'working' so far, 

When they make a real power saving 'Break-Thur'  it will likely be from system wide improvements.

When using a 'beta' phone it may require extra effort to use.
(Spare battery or power pack ?)

Yes, I think you're right, the developers mainly focused on making the PinePhone perform "well" rather than battery life (and so much the better).

[Anna]

My PP has been sitting on my desk for about an hour. It has discharged from ~95% to 70%. All it has been doing is turning itself on every 5 minutes, and heating the room. No apps are open, no calls, no nothing. It didn't use to do this - I used to get around 8 to 10 hours on a full charge, same as you. At some point it stopped suspending, and started waking up every 5 minutes, and that has ruined the battery life.

Removing the SD card might help, as I was told elsewhere.

In my case that indeed was the problem:

Without an inserted SD card the phone sleeps like a baby again.

If you cannot do without an SD card, downgrading to Kernel version 5.13 or 5.10 seems to help.