Ubuntu Phone Can Get Toasty & Battery Hungry With Browser Video Playback
Particularly if watching any videos from the web browser with an Ubuntu Phone or using WiFi, your phone's battery can drain quite quickly while the device gets rather warm.
One of the newest discussions on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list is about overheating. The Ubuntu Phone user that started the thread warned, "my Nexus 4 (most recent stable version) gave me a burn that almost blistered after 15 minutes of YouTube (wifi), and went from 29% battery to 2% in that time."
Apparently one of the primary reasons for this is that while there is hardware codec / accelerated video playback support implemented in Ubuntu Phone, it's not yet handled by Ubuntu's web-browser. Thus when playing videos from the web browser, it gobbles up the CPU -- thus greater power consumption and excess heat rather than using the more efficient video hardware. Canonical developers are still working out the accelerated video playback support for their phone's web browser.
Ubuntu Phone also doesn't yet have hardware overlay support, but that's reported to be in the works for around the Mir 0.16~0.17 time-frame. Mir 0.16 is the version currently under development.
Another user added on the overheating thread, "I’ve noticed it as well, Wifi is a really battery drainer. With 3G I can get 2 days at least, but only one day with wifi on."
More details via this thread.
Given I haven't run any Ubuntu Phone/Nexus benchmarks since its very early days, I've thought about re-setting up a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10 with the latest builds, but I think I'll hold off until they end up re-basing to Ubuntu 15.10 or 16.04 LTS in hopes of more progress. If you have any other interesting test suggestions, as always, feel free to chime in via the forums or on Twitter or Facebook. If you are an Ubuntu Phone user we'd love to hear your feedback too via those mediums.
One of the newest discussions on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list is about overheating. The Ubuntu Phone user that started the thread warned, "my Nexus 4 (most recent stable version) gave me a burn that almost blistered after 15 minutes of YouTube (wifi), and went from 29% battery to 2% in that time."
Apparently one of the primary reasons for this is that while there is hardware codec / accelerated video playback support implemented in Ubuntu Phone, it's not yet handled by Ubuntu's web-browser. Thus when playing videos from the web browser, it gobbles up the CPU -- thus greater power consumption and excess heat rather than using the more efficient video hardware. Canonical developers are still working out the accelerated video playback support for their phone's web browser.
Ubuntu Phone also doesn't yet have hardware overlay support, but that's reported to be in the works for around the Mir 0.16~0.17 time-frame. Mir 0.16 is the version currently under development.
Another user added on the overheating thread, "I’ve noticed it as well, Wifi is a really battery drainer. With 3G I can get 2 days at least, but only one day with wifi on."
More details via this thread.
Given I haven't run any Ubuntu Phone/Nexus benchmarks since its very early days, I've thought about re-setting up a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10 with the latest builds, but I think I'll hold off until they end up re-basing to Ubuntu 15.10 or 16.04 LTS in hopes of more progress. If you have any other interesting test suggestions, as always, feel free to chime in via the forums or on Twitter or Facebook. If you are an Ubuntu Phone user we'd love to hear your feedback too via those mediums.
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