Learn about Extended Standby Mode, Sony’s new power save feature [video]

Have you heard of our new feature called Extended Standby Mode, which became available for Xperia P earlier this autumn? With Extended Standby Mode, you can increase your standby time with up tofour times. Now it reaches Xperia U, Xperia sola and Xperia go with the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) software upgrade, and we thought we would give you some more details about how Extended Standby Mode really works, and how much power you can save. Read more after the jump!

How it works
Extended standby mode increases the standby time by reducing the background activities when the phone is in standby mode. This is especially useful nowadays, since many popular apps are actually synching in the background all the time, which consumes quite a lot of battery power while your phone is resting in your pocket.

Extended Standby Mode is enabled through the settings in your phone. It’s turned off by default, but you can easily turn it on in the Power management menu.

Turning on Extended Standby Mode on Xperia™ go.

With Extended Standby Mode enabled, most scheduled background activities will be prevented. Fifteen minutes after the screen has been locked, the data is automatically turned off and the background activities will be prevented from waking up since there is no data coming in.

However, you can still receive phone calls, SMS and MMS notifications even though you have enabled Extended Standby Mode. The preinstalled Calendar app and Alarm notifications will work as normal, while the LED will only illuminate to indicate low battery.

When you turn on the screen, the activities will start again. This way, your Xperia™ smartphone will save power by only bringing you notifications when you have time to look at the screen.

Unlike most power save apps available for Android that just turn off data traffic, Extended Standby Mode also prevents your apps from trying to synch data. This is handled in the Android™ AlarmManager, which will not allow apps to schedule wake up alarms during Extended Standby Mode. This method saves more energy than simply turning off data traffic, since it actually pauses all activity in the apps.

How effective is Extended Standby Mode?
Before releasing Extended Standby Mode, we obviously put it through lots of tests – and we found some interesting results. With Extended Standby Mode, stand-by time increased with up to four times. For a heavy user profile, with lots of syncs and downloads, the generic calculated stand-by time is thirteen hours for Xperia™ P, without having Extended Standby Mode enabled.

With Extended Standby Mode enabled, the same user profile as above results in a generic calculated stand-by time of 65 hours for Xperia™ P. This is a substantial increase, which will be clearly notable for you as a user (but please note that these are calculated generic figures that depend heavily on your individual usage).

If we look at some graphs, it’s quite notable that your phone’s CPU is woken up all the time as different apps polls the CPU. The graph below show the power consumption of Xperia™ P in standby mode and Extended Standby Mode disabled. The white spikes represent peaks in the current consumption, which occur for instance when apps are waking up for activities like syncing email, fetching RSS news or publishing location information, just to mention a few examples. Spikes in the current consumption also occur when the modem switches between different base stations on the cellular network, or when it switches between 3G and 2G networks.

Xperia™ P generic power consumption when having Extended Standby Mode disabled.

If we look at the same measurement for an Xperia™ in standby mode, but with Extended Standby Modeenabled, it clearly shows that the power consumption is much reduced as the peaks are much less frequent, since most apps are prevented from waking up. The few spikes that still remain are caused by things like the modem activities mentioned above, and by apps that are allowed to wake up, for example the calendar.

Measurement showing the current consumption for Xperia™ P with Extended Standby Mode turned on.

Now you’ve seen how much power you can save with Extended Standby Mode. So, for all you users of Xperia™ P, Xperia™ U, Xperia™ sola or Xperia™ go, will you turn on Extended Standby Mode? Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments!