Since last week I am seeing substantial battery drain on my Xperia M2 and the power management 'app' says that it is almost all (82%) due to bluetooth.It does not say what is requesting the bluetooth. I cannot yet identify the cause, so cannot say that GC is causing it but GC Mobile Android looks like it got updated last week and is my heaviest user of BlueTooth (to my Fenix 3 and VSHR) - is anyone else suffering from serious battery drain since about the end of January?
It might be common but it's not a given. I haven't found that at all with either of my last 2 phones. My current phone is on its 3rd day right now without recharging. I have 48% battery left at the moment.
Until late Jan, I had no problems with using GC and leaving the Bluetooth on. Even now, if GC is disabled, I can use it with other bluetooth devices (e.g. headphones) with no significant drain.
When I switch GC on and leave it on within several hours it is locked up the BT and is draining the battery at a high rate. This isn't immediate, but is guaranteed to have happened within a day.
The whole point of Bluetooth 4.0 is that it supports a mode that is low on power needs.
Battery drain when you use Bluetooth is common for all android handsets.
Total garbage.
This is a problem with holding wakelocks on the device, which is not supposed to happen. It's a code bug, not a design point. If you either know how to look at the various state flags on your handset or have a battery-monitoring app that does (and isn't a pig on its own; some are) you can see quite-clearly what's going on.
Bluetooth, when idle, uses almost zero power. When in actual use it's a very material power consumer like any other transmitting radio, but an idle bluetooth connection only sends and receives heartbeats and has nearly zippo for power consumption impact.
However, wakelocks are another matter. A wakelock is held when a process wants to make sure that the CPU doesn't go into a deep sleep state. This is necessary if you're doing something like playing music (because the music stream has to be continually "refilled" or it stutters), etc. Holding a wakelock at least *triples* standby power consumption (from ~20-60 ma or so on modern Android devices) and can do even more violence to the power budget than that, especially if along with it comes unnecessary CPU activity.
Something in the Connect code is doing this; if I remove Connect entirely, leaving bluetooth turned on (I use it both with my car for integration and headphones), the drain problem disappears. Once reloaded it comes back as soon as the app is opened. On older versions of Connect, after a phone reboot, it does not acquire the wakelock until a sync happens -- on the current rev in the Play Store it not only grabs the wakelock immediately (probably because it also immediately attempts to sync on start) it also spins on the CPU frequently as well under certain conditions (I've not yet nailed down exactly what causes that to start, but once it does it won't stop); the combination of the two is murderously bad for handset battery life.
The worst part of it is that the battery hit isn't charged to Connect in the Android power budget accounting process; most of it gets charged to the Bluetooth interface but not all.
It might be common but it's not a given. I haven't found that at all with either of my last 2 phones. My current phone is on its 3rd day right now without recharging. I have 48% battery left at the moment.
I'm 1.5 days into my last charge on my ZTE with Lollipop. I currently have 59% battery left. When I look at usage, bluetooth doesn't appear on my list and I always have Mobile Connect running, even if it's not on the display. I never force close it. My display consumed 19% so far, Cell radio 16%, WiFi 4%, and then a bunch of 1% for Android System, etc..
Based on this, I would say my phone doesn't appear to suffer from the wakelock. One thing I do at various times during the day is to go into airplane mode. Could that remove the wakelock?
@Phil, what version of Connect Mobile are you running? What Garmin devices are connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting throughout the day? Thanks in advance.
As for devices connecting, my vivoactive is connected at all times than the phone isn't in airplane mode. I could be in airplane mode for a couple of hours during the day and then I put it in airplane mode overnight.
Other than that, I have a set of BT 2.0 headphones that I connect from time-to-time but not really that often. Also, I'm connected to my car when I'm driving but I don't drive that much.
In the end, I would say my vivoactive is connected continuously and almost exclusively most of the time.
Yeah my Nexus 5 is doing the same thing. It's draining about 6%/H now and before it was around 1%/H. In the last 9 hours the bluetooth has kept the phone awake for 1h36m. My fenix3 is the only thing paired.
Hello, I'm a Fenix 3 user. I wear it all the day paired via Bluetooth with my Samsung note 4 with Android 5.1.1
Sometimes ago I noticed that my battery life decrease so quickly.
I was looking for that, and installed "betterbatterystats" app.
The reports shows that a partial wakelock is blocking my phone from going to deep sleep and draining my battery.
This wakelock is produced by "SYNC#u", that is a garmin connect service.
I use the notification app service, but I don't have so many notifications to explain so many wakelocks
@Andresastor, Can you check something for me please? Does the Garmin Devices screen show a progressbar with the text "Sending software update.."? Thanks,- Doug
