I live in Canada, where we are graced with the most expensive cell phone plans in the developed world. One of the “features” of my plan is something they call “Roam Like Home”. With this feature, I can use my data and time from my plan just like I haven’t gone anywhere, for the low, low price of $15 a day!!!
This is activated automatically the moment that they detect that I am roaming. I cannot opt out of this “feature”, and the only way to avoid it is to put the phone in airplane mode and then activate wifi. There is a cap to the number of days you can be charged, but runs on a calendar month basis, so if you are away across the end of the month, you can get charged more than that maximum.
For me, the answer came in the form of eSIMs. I ditched my old Galaxy S9, and bought a Pixel 7 in May. Then I purchased an eSIM for France for both data and talk (30GB for 30 days for around €45) and went to France for 24 days.
I was really pleased with the Pixel 7 in the week or two that I had it before we left on vacation. The battery life was way better than the S9, and 2 hours at the gym, with YouTube Music on Bluetooth and “Strong” running to track sets and timing left me with close to 90% battery left. It would be closer to 50% on the S9.
No heat issues here in Canada.
When the plane landed in France, the eSIM automatically activated, and I turned it on for both data and voice/SMS. Nothing could be easier, and it works like a charm.
At around this time, the issue with hot Pixels started, and eventually Google found the issue with their servers that was causing this. Hot Pixels with short battery life faded from the news.
But not for me.
Ok, so battery life was still better than my old S9, but not by much. And it got hot, too. It seemed to be particularly bad when I set up a hotspot for my wife - as this was the plan, she would use wifi off the Pixel hotspot since her phone doesn’t support eSIMs. Out and about, I could expect to lose up to 15% in the first hour, and then it would maybe go even faster after it was down below 70%.
Taking pictures seemed to be especially hard on the battery, too. Not surprising, really, as the new camera features use a lot of computing power. We had Android Auto in our rental car, and Google Maps would drain the battery at almost the same rate that the car would charge it.
I was waiting for the new updates to drop, hoping that might have a fix, but as of June 13, we still haven’t seen it. In the meantime, we’ve returned to Canada and I’ve turned off the eSIM.
And now the battery life is back to where it was before we left. I haven’t once noticed the phone getting hot either.
So there you go. Has anyone else noticed this kind of issue with eSIMs?
I am not a telecommucations expert by any means, but with a background in computer science I would be very surprised if this actually had anything to do with physical vs eSIMs. I myself have a Pixel 7 with one physical and one eSIM active and the only abnormal battery drain I have noticed so far was due to the YouTube revanced app staying active for hours in the background for some reason.
I have the same kind of background, and I had guessed perhaps the physical SIM reader had some specialized processer that was integrated with the antenna function. But with an eSIM that is handled by emulation software in the main processor?
Regardless, only two things changed; I was in a different country, and I was using the eSIM. Nothing else. Maybe French broadband does something weird, and I’d get the same drain with a physical SIM in France?
I used an esim recently on a trip and didn’t notice this at all on my pixel 7 pro. Did you buy chance leave the original sim enabled?
Nope. Physical SIM in but turned off for both talk and data.
Odd, sorry you had that experience. I remember the phone got quite warm when I initially set it all up but I chalked that up to the poor signal I was getting.
Usually heat and battery drain occurring while device syncing intensively or some bloated app or os update misbehaving, this issue of overheating with drain occurs on almost all devices doesn’t matter if they have esim or not, to fix issue check your phone for intensively used apps, first and simplest step is to check battery settings, there should be list of apps that used most battery in percentage, next is, check in settings apps that use most traffic in background
Believe me, I did all that. The only difference is turning off the eSIM.
Still, even if it’s esim its probably data sync, because i see the same problem when my phone and tablet syncs manga app and downloads alot of pictures
Hard to say. I didn’t notice the battery usage/heat reduce when sitting in a hotel room with wifi, though.
My phone on SIM and tablet on WiFi only, still same problem, i just set sync only on charger, and those that didn’t have that option sync was turned off/set manually for them
