The baseline powerdraw on a Nexus 4 is too high. After very little use, 1-2 google searches, checking the time, over the course of 4 hours, the power on the Nexus 4 went from fully charged to 48% battery. This means the phone would be useless after ~8-9 hours. Also, an area of the Nexus 4 was always warm, which means something is drawing power even though I was doing nothing. A helix device, without being used at all while in a backpack over the same four hours, went down to 55% battery.

After talking with :bkelly, I disabled WiFi and the battery lasts MUCH longer. After 4 hours, I only lost 5% even with mild use. We should change FirefoxOS to disable the wireless chip when not in use / idle to save power. John and Dave, can you measure how often Android devices cycle the wifi chip versus Firefox OS? Thanks!

It would probably be preferable to keep the Wi-Fi connection alive while plugged in, but drop the connection after a certain idle time while locked on battery power.

So, the issues with this are (at least) two-fold: 1 - if the user is streaming music over their wifi connection, they might want that to continue even if the screen is off 2 - all notifications for incoming email/facebook/twitter/etc will stop happening We need to discuss this in much more detail, and figure out a better way of handling it. One option would be to periodically (say, every 15 minutes) have it turn on wifi for a minute, and then turn it back off again. In the meantime, I'll try and get my N4 reflashed with Android so I can use my harness to measure power draw in different scenarios.

Perhaps we could scale back how aggressively we scan for networks when we are disconnected. If we are already connected to wifi, then it seems more reasonable to stay connected for a period of time.

After 9 hours of very light use with wifi disabled on a Nexus 4, my battery only drained 7%.

Helix device after barely any use over, battery went down to 71% instead of 55%.

Helix device after barely any use over 9 hours, battery went down to 71% instead of 55%.

We should probably retest now that 979130 has landed.

This needs to be retested to see if the idle power draw has improved now that Bug 979130 has landed.

waiting on qa, to confirm this is still a problem. lowering priority since it's not a blocker.

(In reply to Dave Huseby [:huseby] from comment #9) > This needs to be retested to see if the idle power draw has improved now > that Bug 979130 has landed. Hi This old dusty bug is still here; I thought I would mention QA-Wanted (Qanalysts) does not have a nexus or helix device. I had hoped another QA dept might pick this up and verify it.

John, is this still and issue? Do we have spare devices to give them or should they not waste their time on this?

I don't have a spare Nexus 4. Personally, I don't think we should bother - even if it is a real problem on a Nexus 4, we're not shipping on this device, and it clearly isn't a problem on Flame or any of our shipping devices, so I would just close with won't fix.

Resolving as WONTFIX per comment 13.