I couldn’t put a precise tome on it, but at some point in the late summer or early autumn, the battery performance of my Nexus 5 fell off a cliff.<\/p>\n
I’m not an unreasonable phone user. My phone tends to get a bit of action on the commute to work, as I listen to some audio – music or podcasts depending on whether I’m reading – and clear through some email. I might check train times, and browse social media.<\/p>\n
Once I’m at work, the phone tends to take a back seat, with texts and Twitter alerts making up most of its usage. <\/p>\n
The commute home mirrors earlier on, and then it gets used less in the evenings aside from actual phone calls. I have laptops and tablets that are better suited by then. <\/p>\n
I never had to use a charger during the day unless I’d been particularly heavy in battery usage – maybe using the phone a lot on a long train journey. But that was about it. The only reason I bought a portable battery charger was for those exceptional days when you know you’ll be hammering the phone a lot and won’t have anywhere to plug in.<\/p>\n
But the battery performance of my Nexus 5 has utterly failed in recent weeks. I’d hoped that the rollout of Android 5.0 – Lollipop – would sort it out. <\/p>\n
But it hasn’t. It came to the point that I couldn’t leave the house unless I was carrying both a plug-in charger (for work, coffee shops etc), and portable battery charger (for all those other times). Everything caused the power to fail.<\/p>\n
Now I realise that battery life is heavily affected by things like the ability to get a signal. If you spend a lot of time in a poor signal area, the phone is expending a lot of power pinging those distant masts. But that’s not really a problem for me either at work or at home.<\/p>\n
It all came to a head on Friday when I left work with a fully charged phone, and went to a two-hour film screening at the BFI. My phone was on silent in my pocket – unused of course. When I looked at it afterwards, it was at 47% – in TWO HOURS! Not only that, but the phone was pretty damn hot. <\/p>\n
So on Saturday, I bit the bullet, and switched my SIM to a Moto G (4G) that I bought for convoluted Tour de France related reasons earlier in the year. It’s not on Lollipop yet – but that’s reportedly coming soon. The difference is that this phone is easily making it through the day. 40%+ charge left at the end of Saturday and Sunday. As I write this, it’s lunchtime, and it still has 85% charge. <\/p>\n
In the meantime, I’m still carrying the Nexus 5 around because it has a work email account on it (which I can still use via WiFi) and various apps that I’m not moved across to the Moto G (which only has 16GB of memory – I’m getting a 32GB micro-SD card later today to sort out that problem). <\/p>\n
But here’s the thing. Without a 4G network to worry about, the Nexus 5 is sailing through the day. It’s currently at 94% charged! And it finished both Saturday and Sunday with ~80% left.<\/p>\n
I had been thinking about replacing the battery on the Nexus – there are YouTube videos to help you – but it seems to me that it’s not the battery that’s the problem, but the power management of the phone. Maybe there’s a fault with one of the radios? A factory reset might be another option too – I went through that painful procedure previously, and it sorted it out – for a while.<\/p>\n
So do I?<\/p>\n
a) Reset the Nexus and see if I can sort out the issues? It’s only just over a year old after all.
\nb) Stick with the Moto G and not worry about shortcomings like lack of NFC (which I do find useful), and a relatively poor camera?
\nc) Look to a new phone such as the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact which looks to be the best Android phone out there?<\/p>\n
Or some combination of the above?<\/p>\n