So after tons of messing about with the phone, I think the battery life is more or less sorted. Twitter is the main culprit – lose the Twitter app, and the addictive need to keep refreshing constantly (thus taxing the screen and the data connection constantly too) and everything’s fine. Downloading and playing podcasts, some music, mail, Instagram, Wikipedia lookups, what have you – in mixed use without plugging in, I project out to about 10-12 hours mixed use. The last two days at work, I’ve come home with the battery above 50%. <\/p>\n
The key thing is, I haven’t turned off that much. I ditched parallax view and animated wallpaper, and shut off auto-updating of applications, but some background data is still updating and location services are full-tilt including Frequent Locations. Work MDM is enabled, and I’m seeing the “right now it would take you X minutes to drive home” in the Notification Center. So this is more or less full featured…and we’re good. <\/p>\n
The next big test is Saga. I considered Google Now, but if I don’t use Gmail, there’s really nothing it can give me that I don’t already have in the OS, save for transit directions (not that big a deal since I started driving to work every day). Similarly, what Donna does isn’t really necessary with the Today features. But Saga does more comprehensive location-logging and rolls in Dark Sky notifications to boot (saving me downloading Dark Sky itself – all I need is the precip, not the notoriously erratic temps) so it gets the nod. If it works without slaughtering the battery during a normal workday (tomorrow), I dare say our issues are truly licked. And I haven’t even tried the T-Mobile SIM yet…maybe later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So after tons of messing about with the phone, I think the battery life is more or less sorted. Twitter is the main culprit – lose the Twitter app, and the addictive need to keep refreshing constantly (thus taxing the screen and the data connection constantly too) and everything’s fine. Downloading and playing podcasts, some … <\/p>\n