I have a rant, and it’s not going to be pretty. So brace yourselves. The Snapdragon 820 is killing my battery life, and it needs help.

The Snapdragon 820 is the latest chip in 2016 for all the new flagships (and some non-flagships under $300). I love the speed of it, don’t get me wrong. It’s fast and fluid most of the time. I just can’t understand why in the world it’s killing my battery life on all of my phones that include it.

I’ll admit, I’m a power user. I will be until the day I die. No amount of battery, that manufacturers are willing to put in phones, will ever get me through a whole day of use without barely making it to the end. The HTC 10, Galaxy S7/S7 Edge, LG G5 (untested personally, but I think it’s also an issue), and anything else with an Snapdragon 820 chip inside are suffering battery drain that didn’t occur with the 810.

For example, my Nexus 6P with the SD 320 lasts me all day with some left over. This isn’t because the battery is bigger, it’s because the chip is better optimised than the 820. The SD 810 was not even the best chip. They had a horrible time with it; but it still didn’t touch the battery life aspect of the phones it was inside.

Battery Draining

I honestly think, and I’m not expert, that this is an optimisation issue with the Snapdragon 820. The Galaxy S7 Edge with the Exynos chip from Samsung has better battery life than the one with the SD 820. This has been tested and confirmed. I got amazing battery life on the Note 5 with the Exynos Processor; and that was only at 3,000mAh battery capacity! The Galaxy S7 Edge has 3,600mAh, and doesn’t get me as far through my day. It really blows my mind that Qualcomm could let this happen. They should’ve taken more time to refine their chip before they launched it.

I’m not saying that phone companies aren’t partially to blame for this. They can optimize software; but they can only do so much to improve a chip on their end. I might not know how the full process works of updating the chip software, but someone needs to figure out that they have a serious battery drain issue. Doze isn’t even working correctly on several of my devices; yet it works perfectly on my Nexus 6P running the SD 810.

SD 810 To 820 %22Improvments%22
SD 810 To 820 “Improvements”

Correct me if any of this is wrong. If you disagree, please tell me why. I’m not an expert at this, and I’m not claiming to be. I just am upset at the fact that my battery is dying much faster with this “new and improved” chip they’re holding in such high regard. I don’t see how phone manufacturers don’t see this issue. Maybe they will try to fix it sometime this Fall, and try to do their best to work with Qualcomm to fix the issues. Who knows if this will ever be truly fixed, though.

Let us know in the comments what you think.

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