Shooting for 50 hours battery life!!

[IPvFletch]

Check this out!! It's still going!!

Update:
40 hours and it finally died!!
36 hours and 16%!!
33 hours and 27%
28 hours and 48%


I'm rooted (unrevoked) BUT I'm not running this over/under-clocking widget, nor do I run ATK or any other task killer! In fact, here's some of my pertinent settings:

- Disabled 4G (can't get it where I live anyways)
- WiFi HotSpot (android-wifi-tether) is obviously OFF most of the time
- WiFi is ON, weak signal to boot (AP in back of house)
- BlueTooth is ON, but not active/paired
- GPS is ON
- HTC Weather/Time Widget is on
- Turned off FriendStream widget
- Not running any silly MySpace/FaceBook/Twitter widgets
- Push Email (ActiveSync from Exchange, average about 100 emails and 5 appts per day)
- Calendar alerts were on vibrate most of the past 2 days but I turned that off as I don't need it
- Also have K-9 running IMAP with a 5 min poll
- I use speakerphone at least 50% of the time, and I had about 30 calls over the past 2 days
- I've installed a bunch of apps, but nothing to manage the system/cpu
- I'm running a pre-alpha of the security/anti-malware software I'm building
- All of the Sprint/factory/HTC apps continue to run, but I seldom use them
- I turned of all haptic feedback (uses vibrate) but phone/sms still vibrate
- All other settings are factory, I'm "keeping it simple"

I've had the phone a week basically, and let the phone die COMPLETELY on Thursday morningish, and I charged it up and used it that day and let it charge to 100% that night. I unplugged the phone around 1:30am, this was Thursday night.

It was never this good though, I'm really surprised to be honest!

Ok, here's the pics. You'll note a whopping 11 hours of Awake time too.


Below is from early this morning when I woke up - 1 day 4 hours unplugged:

This is from just a moment ago (10am Saturday) - 1 day 8 hours unplugged:

Oh and this morning I did some texts, took a couple of short calls, and 2 videos of my daughter's swim meet races.. Oh I also checked all of my work emails, and I had to send these pics to other email so I could get them onto my computer because I didn't want to plug the phone in yet. I'm going to see how long it makes it before it dies.. Shooting for ~50 hours!!

Again, this was from a full charge and includes 1 day, 2 nights, and now another morning thus far. I plan to do but have not yet done the CDMA-GSM trick, the battery green charge on/off trick, and also monitor my TWS at some point - that will be for the next test though, as I don't want to muck with this test (normal every day use test)!

Edit: I see now if I disabled BlueTooth I'd save the battery even more, as it looks like it's sucking up a lot of battery and for no reason right now since nothing is paired or has been for the past ~24 hours.

I'm happy!

 

[Oridus]

quote removed due to size

While I am happy for you, I cannot help but think you only use your phone sparingly. I wouldn't be able to use it that lightly lol.
________________________________________
Sent from my HTC EVO using Tapatalk.

 

[IPvFletch]

Please don't quote those pics you're making it really big. Thanks. I would say I'm using it how I normally use it. You're right, for Friday I have an office line, but I do get a lot of calls there. Saturday, it's early yet, haven't done too much. Like the pics show, 11 hours per 36-hour period right now, which from what I've seen on the other pics/threads, most people are getting horrible life with < 4 hours "awak time" per 24 hour period, so I'm just a tad above that with ~6 per 24. I think normally esp. if I was travelling, it would be closer to 8 hours awake time per day.

 

[thelobster]

^his phone has been awake for 11 hours i would say thats some pretty good usage.

 

[Oridus]

Please don't quote those pics you're making it really big. Thanks. I would say I'm using it how I normally use it. You're right, for Friday I have an office line, but I do get a lot of calls there. Saturday, it's early yet, haven't done too much. Like the pics show, 11 hours per 36-hour period right now, which from what I've seen on the other pics/threads, most people are getting horrible life with < 4 hours "awak time" per 24 hour period, so I'm just a tad above that with ~6 per 24. I think normally esp. if I was travelling, it would be closer to 8 hours awake time per day.

Doesn't look big on tapatalk so not really paying attention to it.

________________________________________
Sent from my HTC EVO using Tapatalk.

 

[gear.h34d.2012]

How on earth is your Android System running so low? I can't get mine to run under 20% D:


Also: Great work so far, keep it up!

 

[flip603]

the "android system" percentage being that low basically means that the phone is sitting there in sleep mode like 95% of the time. basically this is testing how long the phone can sleep for

 

[zeux6]

I would be most happy if my phone could last at least 8 hours. Don't need it to be more but more is always welcomed.

 

[NeoEVO]

Look the EVO is a pimped out Hummer - bad gas mileage but a bad ass ride. Don't keep it parked in your driveway - watch some videos, enjoy Sprint TV and... surf baby surf.

 

[pgus13]

^his phone has been awake for 11 hours i would say thats some pretty good usage.

His phone being awake isn't anything. Mine is at 13 hours and 15 mins. I unplugged from the charger at 5:45am when I got up for work.

 

[septro]

Someone should crosspost these battery pics over at TechCrunch or Gizmodo lol

 

[IPvFletch]

Quick update - It died at right about 40 hours. I was taking videos at a pool party this afternoon, and it finally quit on me. I waited a bit for it to replenish and turned it back on. It booted up but by the time I got to the home screen and tried to load shootme, it died again. I waited another hour and tried again, same thing. Not enough juice to get another screenshot, sorry.

Charging it up now. Will go to 100% and do the batter on/off green light charge trick tonight after it gets to 100% initially. I think there is merit to this trick and if HTC suggested it, all the better. I might be able to get even more juice out of it.

And to those haters, well, sorry you're not having bad luck, but yes, I AM using my phone. This is NOT a sleep test. I got a good 12.5 hours of awake/use out of a 40 hour cycle. I think that's pretty good usage although I agree a little lighter than what I normally might do.

 

[ogwilson]

So I can't seem to come near these numbers (most I've been able to get was 16 with optimal settings). I read your original post but the fact that you're running MORE than I do just makes me wonder wtf is going on behind the scenes. I don't have ATK installed, but whenever I check usage with Spare Parts, not much is going on.

What freaking gives?

Oh well, 16 hours is enough for me. I get about 10 hours on my normal usage patterns (im not out of the house for more than a few hours a day, but it's nice to not be tethered to the wall and be able to take my phone with me on a whim without worrying about the battery. Especially since the USB cable it ships with is ridiculously short). Planning to get the 3500mAh just for the hell of it, but if you can tell me I don't need to sacrifice the sexiness of my phone, please let me know.

 

[IPvFletch]

I think all of you should WAIT and see what happens. It doesn't hurt for sure. Try the battery + radio tricks posted here and let it go for another week or two. I honestly think a lot of this is your battery getting accustomed to holding a charge. Don't lose hope guys!!

I'll do some more testing after I do the battery tricks, and hopefully I can break 40 hours next time!

Edit: I can't do the GSM trick because my phone was already on CDMA Only (prl). *shrug* Maybe that is part of the difference??

 

[IPvFletch]

Another update on this: So the GSM trick must have already been done on my phone by the factory because I sure didn't do it myself. Also, the battery recharge green light on/off trick also was already fine for my battery. I got green after only 3 mins of charging while off, and then it booted up and was green the whole time. *shrug*

So maybe these 2 combined also helped me sustain a 40hour charge?

 

[rushmore]

No offense to the OP, but this thread is an example to the arbitrary nature of these posts. About as relevant to real correlation of practical use as leaving the device off and turning on when you use it. Funny.

 

[IPvFletch]

No offense to the OP, but this thread is an example to the arbitrary nature of these posts. About as relevant to real correlation of practical use as leaving the device off and turning on when you use it. Funny.

You make no sense. I do agree however that all of these tests are arbitrary and depend on a million variables, or more. There is never any real way to correlate even if we had people factory reset their devices and baseline their batteries. Quality of charge, radio conditions, gps conditions, interference conditions, etc.

It will be NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to boil this down to x, y, and z configuration items, but that is obviously what society wants. Part of the problem with Android is everything is open-source and there's a million permutations and apps which can interfere with other apps, etc.. Race conditions like apps reacting to signals, heat, etc, all can have random effects.

Anyways, now I'm just rambling on too, but my point is, there is hope. I was able to do it, so can you. I'm sure of it. Good luck to everyone!!

 

[IPvFletch]

New test started 2 nights ago after this post began.

I'm down to 40% after 32 hours. It's pretty good but I've hardly used this phone this time around. Only 2.5 hours of awake time. I took a couple of vids and had a couple of calls, but that is it - very light usage. I'm confident in a low-usage/standby model, I could easily hit 50 hours.

 

[mrvirginia]

it's really not hard to get good battery life out of the phone even if you're a heavy user.

 

[Caloy]

While I am happy for you, I cannot help but think you only use your phone sparingly. I wouldn't be able to use it that lightly lol.

Same here. I would tweek the settings but not to the point where regular functionality is affected.

 

[wase4711]

I agree with the OP; I too have implemented all the GSM/Battery Conditioning/ turn off stuff that I dont use tricks, and, with "normal" usage, I was at 60% battery left after 12 hours off the charger yesterday; before doing all this, I could barely get 12 hours of battery life TOTAL.
For all those having major battery issues, its worth trying these tweaks, to see if it helps YOUR situation out, before you condemn them as "silly" or "worthless"...

 

[IPvFletch]

Same here. I would tweek the settings but not to the point where regular functionality is affected.

Yes, this was my goal if you read my very first battery post (other thread I started a week ago or so). Basically, use the phone as I normally would. As I want to. The way I planned to use it when I bought it, damnit!!

That is why I never disabled GPS, WiFi, or Bluetooth. I can't live without those, GPS only because I do a lot of mapping and it would be annoying to turn it on/off each time, and also because of the HTC dynamic weather widget.

If I couldn't be happy with the phone the way I wanted it, it was going back and I was going back to AT&T where I could run 2+ phones, namely my Nexus One 2G and my iPhone 3G.

Anyways, I got it to work and it was seemingly very easy. I think discharging it fully a few times helps, I think turning off haptic feedback helps, I think the battery trick made sense, and I think a lot of phones ended up with GSM enabled, which mine did not, so I didn't need to do that trick, but I did verify I was OK. So I think a mix of issues as I said above, millions of permutations... But unless you really just got unlucky, I would say the battery is not half bad, maybe even getting "better with time" as it may seem. I thought I saw a poll recently saying only 1 in 7 had battery issues..

 

[Dr.Evo]

I have achieved similar results as the OP. With a few differences. 1. I'm rooted running the RvU rom from XDA (it's customized with lower cpu & battery saving tweaks). 2. I AM using Overclock. 3. I'm using a program called SweetDreams which idles down the phone based on various inputs. I have it set to detect motion to wake it up. 4. If WIFI is available, I have it ON.

I think the biggest factor to battery life is the radios. This morning, I used 3g for maps / traffic on my way to work and I lost 10% in the first hour. With WIFI on instead of 3g, I was only losing about 1% an hour unless I started watching youtube videos. I finally plugged it in at 38% and about 24 hours of on and off use.

I would love to see some radio tweeks that automatically idle down 3g unless manually requested by the user.

EDIT: I unknowingly followed the steps at the XDA thread (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=701567) while I was rooting and romming my phone. I believe these steps were the biggest contributor to my battery life..

 

[IPvFletch]

Yes +1 on the battery tricks as I've said in numerous threads now, also I found this setting for Data Network, mine is set to ALWAYS ON which I think is more ideal. One more thing I like w/out sacrificing battery!

 

[IPvFletch]

I'm now leaving 4G enabled for a day or two and seeing how that changes things (I can't get 4G right here at my home, but I get it in the city, and I want to test how much the idle/searching 4G radio gets and how it affects bettery).

After this test, I will disable WiFi and BlueTooth and re-disable 4G if it makes a difference, so I can see how long it lasts in a more stripped down mode (e.g. for travelling).