/pixelphone/?hl=en
Michelle NYC
11/22/17
Expert - Google Employee
Michelle NYC

Smart battery on Pixel


Hi Pixel People,


I’m Michelle, a Product Manager in the NYC office. I want to let you know about some changes we just rolled out that will make your battery life estimates more accurate on Pixel!


Previously, your phone would estimate your battery loss with simple assumptions. If you’ve used about 10% per hour over the past few hours, we would guess you will keep using 10% per hour. As you might expect, this wasn’t always very accurate.


To fix this, we built an on-device model that evaluates how you use your phone’s battery over time. Your phone looks at your battery usage on similar days and times, and uses that to predict your battery life in a personalized way.


This means that if you’re like me and love to binge-watch YouTube on your way home, your phone will include that extra battery drain from Corgi videos in your estimate! I hope you will find this feature as helpful as I have; I can now appreciate my favorite fluffy creatures and still know whether my phone will last through dinner with friends.


To see these predictions for yourself, visit Settings on your phone. Under the “Battery” section will be your personalized battery estimate, which tells you both what percent of battery you have left and how many hours your phone will last. Here’s what mine looked like when I unplugged my phone earlier today:



You can also click on Battery, and then click on the big battery icon, to see the estimate represented graphically over time, where you may notice certain periods of estimated high and low usage that should correspond to your typical behavior. Here’s what my graph looks like right now:



Let us know how you like these changes! Have you had moments where your estimate was particularly good (or bad)? We’re continually working on improving these estimates, and making the battery experience on Pixel great.


Finally, tell us if you have more ideas about how you would like your phone to inform you or warn you about battery. Now that we have these personalized estimates, we’re interested in exploring new ways of proactively helping you manage your battery to make it through the day.


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VoltaicShock
11/22/17
VoltaicShock
This is a great feature and I was wondering how it worked.  So far it seems to work as I expect.  What would be nice is if we could see previous days instead of it being reset every time we unplug the device.
AfKi
11/22/17
AfKi
I'd really love to get back the visualizations of GPS active and camera active indicators in the battery graph.  It really helps me to correlate the behaviors of these against my usage.
Hsiang-Fu Jan
11/22/17
Hsiang-Fu Jan
I've noticed this change on my Pixel a few days ago and wondered what it was all about! Now it makes more sense. Thank you for the explanation. By no means is this 100% accurate, but now the graph is way more useful than before where the battery stats and usage was linearly correlated. Great post!
f00sion
11/22/17
f00sion
This is great!

Something you might look into: sometimes the battery will show 100% for an extended period, then drop quickly to show a more believable usage. There are numerous reports on reddit and XDA, including some people whose indicator is at 100% for hours, despite some use.
Arjun G
11/22/17
Arjun G
How to make things better:
Add a battery quick tile in the quick settings list that actually takes you to battery settings - currently only toggles battery saver
28 MORE
Claudiu Apostol
1/24/18
Claudiu Apostol
I actually like the orange bars at the top and bottom when battery saver is on. Don't mind it at all. Also this is not a pixel issue per se, Nexus phones had this feature waaaaay before the pixels existed.
 

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