Thanks to the Preview for Developers program we’ve been playing with Windows Phone 8.1 for more than three days. It’s been very well received by most everyone in the community. Now it’s time to check out how your battery is doing after upgrading from Windows Phone 8.0 to Windows Phone 8.1. Has your battery life improved or taken a turn for the worst? Maybe is it just the same as it was before. Let’s find out.
So why didn’t we run this poll immediately after the release of Windows Phone 8.1? A lot of you wanted us to ask the Windows Phone community how their battery life was being impacted after upgrading to Windows Phone 8.1. We didn’t right away because your usage was going to be abnormal over the first day. You probably spent a lot of time playing with Cortana, poking around with all the new features and downloading apps. Safe to say the first day of Windows Phone 8.1 wasn’t a normal usage day for you.
Now that we’re a few days out your usage should be starting to normalize. Though there are already a few threads in our forums about battery life after upgrading to Windows Phone 8.1:
- Battery life with WP 8.1
- Battery life in WP 8.1 is awful
- Battery draining rapidly after 8.1 dev preview install
- Possible battery life solution and new bug
We here haven’t seen our devices behave worse in regards to battery life. If you have, keep in mind that playing with Cortana nonstop will probably negatively impact your battery life. Also things like OEM specific drivers that come with firmware updates in the future could help alleviate any battery life concerns you might have right now. Firmware, like Nokia’s Lumia Cyan update, will optimize handsets for Windows Phone 8.1. Right now things like Bluetooth LE and SensorCore technology aren’t enabled, but will be with future firmware updates.
Poll time
Reading this in one of our apps? Head to IE11 to take the poll since our apps don’t display it yet. Here’s the mobile link:
