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Help YABQ (Yet Another Battery Question) - My situation

ionizer

Member
May 12, 2010
56
10
So first off, yes, I've read many threads about battery life, etc and things to do to to prolong etc.

What I was hoping to do is break down what I've done, explain what I have and someone can tell me if what I am still experiencing is 'within the range of normal'

Experiencing:
-6:45am remove fully charged battery
-Ride bus to work, surf web for 5-10 mins
-Fall asleep with phone not in use
-8:15am (1 hr 30 mins later) check phone and it is down to about 81% with no additional usage.

  • Stock battery
  • Brightness set to auto adjust
  • GPS & Bluetooth disabled. Only data/phone enabled.
  • Removed flickr account
  • Revised any programs and updates to be no more often than 1 hr
  • HAVE NOT changed the setting "Enable always-on mobile data" - I am still not clear what this does or doesn't do, so I've left it as checked.
  • Disabled the "show animations" - not sure what this does because I still see animations for my weather/clock combination with the clouds and/or rain.
  • Performed that "charge, disconnect, charge again till green, disconnect, repeat" and didn't notice anything significant
  • Verified that the "awake" and "active" times do not match up, meaning the phone is not constantly awake doing stuff
  • I have a program batterytime lite running as a widget to display actual battery %. Not sure if that could in itself be causing excess battery usage
  • Programs I have downloaded:
    • Advanced Task Killer (not actively running in top or anything though)
    • AndChat - irc client
    • Astro
    • BatteryTime Lite
    • Cellfire
    • ebay
    • facebook (pre-installed)
    • Key Ring
    • Layar
    • Live Scores
    • Meebo IM
    • Moviesfone
    • Movies
    • Pandora
    • Scanner Radio
    • Shazam
    • Shopper
    • SportsTap
    • Talk To Me
    • The Weather Channel
    • USA Today
    • Wapedia
    • yxFlash
So:
(A) Is what I am experiencing normal expectations?
(B) Did I miss something I should be trying to increase battery life outside of an extended battery?

Thanks in advance!
 
I am in the same boat as you. I have similar apps installed on mine and have the same charging pattern as you. I get around the same battery life as what you described. In fact, a few days ago I disabled all widgets and the only app I left running was gmail. My battery life did not change. Disabling everything, however, made the phone boring. I have just accepted the fact that the battery drains rather fast and as a result I simply take my charger to work with me. I also re-enabled all of my widgets and apps and am back to loving my phone again (minus the battery, of course). I will purchase the Verizon extended battery when it comes out. I plan on using the bodyglove case even with the larger battery by dremeling the back of the case. The case was the only one I saw that protects the huge camera on our phones. So back to your original question, yes your battery life sounds to be par for the course.

On a side note, I came from the iphone 3g and was always frustrated with its abysmal battery life. But we have an awesome option that no iphoner ever had-- we can buy another battery or a much larger capacity battery!
 
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today was my first time ever running the battery down to where the phone had to shut down

left house at 330 from full charge
watched about 22 mins of 30 rock
watched about 22 mins of the office
watched about 15 mins of house

proceeded to use the web off and on over 1.5-2 hrs
used google navigation w/ gps for 2-5 mins at a time about 3-4 times.

took 2 pictures

....by 11pm (7.5 hrs of off and on usage, heavy for initial 2 hrs w/ video watching + Bluetooth) the phone was dead

when i checked the android battery usage program, it said 79% was a result of the camera application. now i know i didnt really have the camera on that long and for much use...i could guesstimate that maybe the camera woulda occupied 20% of total battery usage and even that would be a high guesstimate.

so is that program simply at fault with displaying the right info?
i use batterytime lite at the moment for just seeing my battery amt to the nearest %....

whats a better program to monitor where most of my REAL usage of power went to?
 
Upvote 0
So first off, yes, I've read many threads about battery life, etc and things to do to to prolong etc.

What I was hoping to do is break down what I've done, explain what I have and someone can tell me if what I am still experiencing is 'within the range of normal'

Experiencing:
-6:45am remove fully charged battery
-Ride bus to work, surf web for 5-10 mins
-Fall asleep with phone not in use
-8:15am (1 hr 30 mins later) check phone and it is down to about 81% with no additional usage.

  • Stock battery
  • Brightness set to auto adjust
  • GPS & Bluetooth disabled. Only data/phone enabled.
  • Removed flickr account
  • Revised any programs and updates to be no more often than 1 hr
  • HAVE NOT changed the setting "Enable always-on mobile data" - I am still not clear what this does or doesn't do, so I've left it as checked.
  • Disabled the "show animations" - not sure what this does because I still see animations for my weather/clock combination with the clouds and/or rain.
  • Performed that "charge, disconnect, charge again till green, disconnect, repeat" and didn't notice anything significant
  • Verified that the "awake" and "active" times do not match up, meaning the phone is not constantly awake doing stuff
  • I have a program batterytime lite running as a widget to display actual battery %. Not sure if that could in itself be causing excess battery usage
  • Programs I have downloaded:
    • Advanced Task Killer (not actively running in top or anything though)
    • AndChat - irc client
    • Astro
    • BatteryTime Lite
    • Cellfire
    • ebay
    • facebook (pre-installed)
    • Key Ring
    • Layar
    • Live Scores
    • Meebo IM
    • Moviesfone
    • Movies
    • Pandora
    • Scanner Radio
    • Shazam
    • Shopper
    • SportsTap
    • Talk To Me
    • The Weather Channel
    • USA Today
    • Wapedia
    • yxFlash
So:
(A) Is what I am experiencing normal expectations?
(B) Did I miss something I should be trying to increase battery life outside of an extended battery?

Thanks in advance!

Meebo is rumored to drain the battery. Using the stock battery yesterday with no change in my habits I got an astounding 14 hours on one charge. This is coming from where I was only getting about 6-8 hours. I did nothing different in how I used the phone. I think maybe...just maybe the battery is finally calibrating to the charging system/reporting system.
 
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meebo drains the battery even if your not signed in?

i wasn't signed into Meebo at all during this time period.

I don't know about if not signed in, I would *think* not. What I read, and I think it was in this forum, was that this particular app polls continuously to check for incoming IM's. I don't think it would do that if it were not signed in. But if you didn't explicitly log out, it may still be signed in and running in the background without you being aware of it.
 
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The kiss of death. Get rid of it. Did you power down the phone on the second charge?

yeah i think so, i'm not sure if it was the 2nd or 3rd, but i basically did that 'trick' to charge when fully off and then pull plug, charge again, repeat a few times, etc.

so if i remove this battery program, whats the best way to determine actual % of battery left?
 
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i'm not sure if you are cursing at me or telling me a sequence of phone commands to determine the battery usage

heh

at the dialing-pad when you're about to make a phone call, press the buttons:

*#*#4636#*#*

this brings you to page titled "testing" with detailed information on your phone... supposedly many of the apps that pull detailed battery information is obtaining it from this source essentially...

at the "testing" page, press "battery information"... the "battery level" is the level of your battery out of the "battery scale" of 100... so whatever it says under battery level is the percentage of your battery left...

regarding the awake vs up times, even if it doesnt completely match up, it could still be running more than it should. as an example, i actually recorded my awake and up time before and after using the phone each time for a few days. i calculated the amount of time the "awake time" increased between uses and divided it by the total amount of time elapsed between uses. on the day where i had ebuddy running constantly in the background, my phone was awake approximately 20% of the time i wasn't using it... on a day where i did not have ebuddy running, it was about 3%.

it was hard for me to translate this to actual battery usage, but all i can say is the day i ran ebuddy my phone didnt last 19 hours while the day i did not run ebuddy the phone lasted about 36 hours... i am not going to say whether this was light/medium/heavy usage since that's all relative, but i will say the phone was configured the same way in both cases (except for ebuddy) and i used the phone more on the day i had ebuddy off than the day i had ebuddy on.
 
Upvote 0

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