How To Improve N80 Battery Life
Battery performance is a recurrent theme in blog posts and discussions about the N80 - see for instance discussions at Nokia and HowardForums. A common experience among users appears to be about one day's usage on a battery charge. This is consistent with my own experience - before I started tweaking settings to improve battery life, I would get about a day or 1.5 days on a charge.
Some users complain about the default BL-5B 820 mAh battery being simply to weak for a capable device like the N80. This may be the case or not - I personally do not think it odd that the N80 battery drains quickly. Running radios like the N80's GSM, 3G, Bluetooth and WiFi simply suck batteries dry whether it is on a PDA, laptop or phone. I am sure the N80's brilliant QVGA screen also takes it toll.
However, there are a few things that can be done to improve the battery life of the N80. Below, I have put together a list of the tweaks I currently use;
- Turn screen brightness down a notch or two (Menu, Tools, Settings, Phone, Display, Light sensor).
- Lower the standby timeout - mine's set to 1 minute (Menu, Tools, Settings, Phone, Display, Power saver time-out).
- Turn WLAN scanning off (Menu, Tools, Settings, Connection, Wireless LAN).
- Turn off 3G (Menu, Tools, Settings, Network).
With these settings, I now get between 3 and 4 days of usage on a battery charge!
Of the above tweaks, turning off 3G contributed most to longer battery life. At the university campus where I work, 3G coverage is pretty sporadic and so my phone keeps searching all day for a network to hook up to. Apparently this really drains the battery.
Maybe it seems a bit odd to turn off 3G on a 3G-phone? The fact is, I currently do not use 3G much - my calls and text messages go through the GSM network and I usually make sure to hook up to a WLAN for data transfer. The ridiculous high cost of 3G (currently $1.75 per Mb!) encourages this type of behavior.
Another tweak - which I have not tried - is to turn down the WLAN transmit power (Menu, Tools, Settings, Connection, Wireless LAN, Options, Advanced settings - say YES to the prompt - scrol down to TX power level choose options/change/ and select 4 mW). In this post at the symbian-freak.com forum, a user reports how turning down the WLAN transmit power seriously improved battery life.
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July 19th, 2007 at 02:26
Thanks mate, really useful info.
My two cents: maybe is a small power save solution, but it’s one more too add. Disable keys sound from the keyboard.
Cheers.
July 30th, 2007 at 09:50
Also it would be better if No Viberation alert , Reduce the ring volume and sleep mode OFF (it will stop the LED on top)
July 30th, 2007 at 11:13
@Jerome: Are you sure about turning sleep mode OFF - is the sleep mode not supposed to conserve battery power?
December 18th, 2007 at 01:16
Wow! Thank you bud! You’re a man! Maybe he meant sleep mode ON? as in making the phone go to sleep?
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:12
i do all that….
but battery extend for 4 hours only …. or maybe 2 hours …my problem is that am using my phone alot [ talk time ] not using wifi or Btooth alot [ just when needed ] but i dont know ,,,, a good phone and i like its future but very stupied battery from nokia[v bad really ] …i dont know how nokia didnt consider that b4 ????
October 23rd, 2008 at 22:49
Hello ahMed,
Are you absolutely sure you do not have some program running in the background? Very often that is the reason the battery drains very quickly…