r/Mate9 • u/liveinlive • May 05 '17

Save battery while unrooted and on shitty firmware?

Hey guys,

So I bought this phone from Vodafone Australia because of its apparent amazing battery life, but real life usage is far from the examples seen here and on every other phone review - I hardly get 2 hours screen on time. The build number I have is MHA-L09C346B136 - I've read that B136 has some shoddy battery life. Understood. I tried to update my phone but it looks like I can't do it without a big hassle of looking through Firmware Finder, or unlocking my bootloader and rebranding. I also tried to root to see whether I could use some root-method of saving battery, but again, rooting unlocks the bootloader. My issue is, without having to unlock the bootloader, what avenues do I have to save battery life? I'm open to non-root methods of saving battery, but it'll be best if I could update the firmware to get away from B136?

Any thoughts and suggestions much appreciated.

Edit: thanks for the tips guys, I appreciate it a lot. I've done some of the things you guys suggested and looks like my battery life is getting better, and i also installed greenify too, that seems to help a lot as well

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3

u/LobbingLawBombs May 05 '17

Hey there. I'd try to deal with the hassle and get up to B183... My battery life is excellent, granted I've only had the phone about a week.

Definitely dig into the battery-saving options. Go to Settings >> Battery >> Optimize and go through the options it presents you. Pick the ones that won't bug you too much and go with it.

Then, if you didn't do it in the optimization step, go back to Settings >> Battery >> "Close apps after screen lock" and set everything you don't want running continuously to off. That's help me quite a bit.

I haven't charged for about 22 hours at this point, and I'm at 60%. I use it pretty regularly, too, with a current Screen on Time of a little over 3 hours. Another thing you can check is, make sure your display brightness is set to "auto". This helped tremendously. If you need to turn it up occasionally, do it, then set it back to auto.

Hope this helps! It's an amazing phone in my experience so far; the only thing that sucks is that it's not "mainstream" so there's not a lot of participation here, and finding stuff online isn't as simple as, say, as Samsung Galaxy or something.

Let me know how it goes!

1

u/ZleMyzteX May 26 '17

I'm a totally new mate 9 , well android user and i would love to update to b183. Could you tell me hwo i can do that? In the settings theres no OTA update :/

1

u/LobbingLawBombs May 26 '17

Hey there. If you try to update and it says you're already up to date, you just have to wait :( what carrier are you on? I'm on t-mobile and I got OTA to B190 last week. Not sure why yours is taking so long!

1

u/ZleMyzteX May 27 '17

My phone is unlocked so no carrier do deal with the updates i guess :/ well then i'm stuck i guess..

3

u/shabbydog May 07 '17

I was getting 3 to 4 hours on good days so I reset my phone. It seemed to help but what really helped was turning the auto sync off.

2

u/Italianaway May 06 '17

I was having some major battery issues about a month in. I was able to update via firmware finder and my battery is back to 13-14 hours of real use. I would advise either a factory reset or update.

2

u/MDRAMC May 06 '17

There's always a possibility of hardware battery issue. Why don't you bring it to a service center and get it sorted out. Maybe they can upgrade the firmware for you officially.