How to get 5 days of battery life with a Fairphone 2

I’m creating this post here to help, instead of asking for help. When the FP2 was released, I read some complaints on the battery life, but it’s easily possible to get 5 days of battery life out of your Fairphone, by being judicious at what you use your phone for. I posted this in another topic, but by reposting the text here, I make it more easily findable to anyone who’s interested:

The key to a 5 day battery life, is what I use my phone for, namely
not to connect to the Internet while I’m not at home (I hardly ever feel
the need to) but to be able to make a phonecall or receive phonecalls
and being able to listen to mp3’s when I’m on the road. Both don’t
happen on a daily base, it’s just a kind of backup option. Most of my
phonecalls happen with my land-line, most of my music listening is done
on my hifi at home and almost all of my internet use is at home on my
desktop or on my tablet using wifi.

The use for my smarthphone is mostly the same as my old dumpphone: I
want to be able to make emergency calls. And then there’s some people
who have the annoying habit of using my mobile phone number when they
need me instead of calling me at home, but luckily there’s only two of
my colleagues who have that habit. And secondly it’s taken the place of
my mp3-player, to be able to listen to music when I’m stressed when away
from home and need some soothing.

The third function is an added one: I always have (e)books with my,
since I have them on my Fairphone and can read a book if I’m somewhere
waiting and feeling bored. Neither standby for phonecalls, nor playing
mp3’s, nor using an ebook or pdf-app are power-hungry functions. What’s
power-hungry, is the sending and receiving of data, which I don’t use
very often with my phone, as I’ll explain below:

So there’s a lot of battery-hungry that can be turned off: everything
that makes the phone use antennae to send or receive data: wifi, mobile
data, bluetooth and gps I have turned off on my phone. If I want to
look at an offline stored map on my phone (I use Maps.me) but I want the
map to know where I am, I turn on gps, if I want to look for an adress
of a restaurant or feel another need to consult internet, I turn on
mobile data, look for what I want, then turn data off again. If I want
to update my phone, I turn on wifi at home, then turn it off once I’m
done.

With the most-used functions of making calls and listening to music
not even happening on a daily basis, my phone is just on standby most of
the time and easily lasts 5 days. That’s how.

Greetings,

Vincent.

6 Likes

I thought the display was the biggest power-drainer.

1 Like

You could be right, the display isn’t very much in use either with me. Most of the time it’s in my pants waiting for a call and when it’s in my pants while listening to mp3’s ‘on the road’, display isn’t in use either.

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