Google Now is a all seeing guide in your phone. It knows where you are and where you will be going. It pops up the bus schedule if you are near a bus stop, train schedule if you near a train station.
Google tells you last night scores of your favourite teams. It also keep tracks of your favourite stocks and the weather. A better equivalent is iOS’s Siri. I said better because I feel it is much more tightly integrated. Google remembered my birthday.
Google Now wishes Happy Birthday
All this is accomplish by massive polling of the current WiFi in the area. With Google Maps, the location can be identified and context sensitive information displayed. Does this sounds familiar? Yes another vendor that provides location data via WiFi is Skyhook. This means the battery life is very short. In my first week, I lost about 4 hours off my 11 hour battery life. I could not do much and nearly ran dry a few times, in the end I gave up and turn off Google Now.
After a few weeks and poking around, I found that the big culprit for the battery drain was due to Location Tracking. Since I like the cards, I decided to run Google Now without Location Tracking. Surprisingly the battery life was acceptable after the first two days. People on Samsung phones have reported acceptable battery life.
So it was with much dread when I decided to try Google Now with Location tracking. Let it learn about my travels and habits. Let it learn until it has decided it has enough and go easy on the polling. That started on 2 Nov 12.
Lets see what the future brings.
27 Oct, No Google Now or location tracking. 1.5% of battery per hour.
27 Oct, Google Now without location tracking
4 Nov, I went to sleep with 100% of battery life, WiFi and GPS turned on. Below is a screenshot first thing in the morning. Note blue lines on the Awake bar.
5 Nov 11, overnight
6 Nov Location settings, not automatically updating (was not checked). Have to reset the start of baseline period to day.
10 Nov. The battery graphs are all screwy as I did not have the chance to fully charge the phone before sleeping. From what I can see, the Awake bar is full of CPU activity, even when the device is stationary. I have try to keep both WiFi and GPS on.
12 Nov
12 Nov Overnight
25 Nov
Starting from about 85% overnight to the next morning at 70% over 7.5 hours or 2.14% per hour.
Discharge from 100% 25 Nov
26 Nov
Overnight discharge from 100%, remaining battery was 80%. or 2.6%/hr.
26 Nov 12 Overnight discharge from 100%
In summary, with Google Now turned on, power consumption doubles, draining the battery at ~2-2.5% per hour compared to without at ~1.5% per hour.
Update: 15 Apr 13
Google Now has been upgraded to pull information from Gmail to present more information. The screenshot below shows an alert about flight departure times.
