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Source of poor battery life (not let's fix it)

First of all, I turned off everything I didnt use all the time like GPS, WIFI, and Bluetooth. I just made shortcuts and added them to my homescreen. I left email and and most other things on, however I also turned off the Always-ON feature. I downloaded Handcent from the market to get around the dialer glitch. So as of now, i recieve emails up to date, all notifications and pretty much everything else. My phone has been on for 20 hours now and it hasnt gone above 5%!! I think thats a major improvement from 98% all the time!

I killed the resident SMS program and installed Chomp...killed GPS, IM, WIFI...made sure to turn off message notifications from resident program and now Im at 14%!!! So..works like a charm....:)
 
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Well I had some bad up / awake times (99% for both) so my phone was not sleeping at all. I went with Handcent SMS, rebooted phone and had a full charge today at 11am. Lots of texting, talked for at least 40 minutes, 30 minutes of non-wi-fi web surfing, IM'd for a good hour.

New Results:

Up Time: 10:12:20

Awake Time: 1:55:09 (19%)

I also have vizBattery installed and its reporting 60% charge, so IMO this is a million times better battery life than before.
 
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I've installed Handcent and then went into the "Messages" program settings and turned everything off. No notifications, no sounds, nothing. I then rebooted and sent a few SMS messages. When I run Advanced Task Killer later I see that "Messages" is running and able to be killed, why is that? Do I need to disable something else to make it really go away?

Haven't played with it enough yet but folks here seem jazzed about the increase in battery life so I'm getting excited myself! Love the phone....
 
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This post may be a lil long, but read it thru. I may not have the answer, but my questions and concerns may spark a thought from someone else.








I'm no novice, I understand the basics and well beyond on this phone. So this is very frustrating for me.


#1, Not being able to uninstall factory installed apps..."Messages" specifically is just plain dumb. No reason the user shouldnt be able to delete anything they want as long as it doesnt effect the system itself.


#2, from day one I started using Handcent and strongly suggest that to everyone. I checked it off to be my default Messenger. Before I force closed "messages" I unchecked the automatically check, and unchecked notify. Beyond that I have double checked to make sure "messages" app was down, and even did a Force close on it.


#3, this really shouldnt be surprising me. Ive been with sprint 9yrs, its never simple.



Problem is, occasionally for no reason, an incoming text will show up in my notifications ( twice ). once from handcent and once from 'messages'. regardless of which I click on, they both bring me to handcent. My worry here (brings me back to #1) is that "messages" is never really completely off. And this very well may be why the "dialer" fix works, but only for a short amount of time.


Dammit..let me delete what I want!
 
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Problem is, occasionally for no reason, an incoming text will show up in my notifications ( twice ). once from handcent and once from 'messages'. regardless of which I click on, they both bring me to handcent. My worry here (brings me back to #1) is that "messages" is never really completely off. And this very well may be why the "dialer" fix works, but only for a short amount of time.

Go back and double-check your notification settings in Messages. Getting double notifications from both Messages & Handcent is exactly what happens when notifications are not disabled in Messages.

You shouldn't have to force kill the Messages program to avoid the battery drain bug. And killing it is futile because it just starts back up again. I'm only guessing, but it may be part of the core system that handles text messages. If you're using something like Auto Task Killer to keep shutting it down, you're going to have similar battery drain issues since you're forcing it into a kill loop.
 
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After downloading handcent I went back and turned everything back on except for gps, wifi, and Bluetooth. I only use those as needed. And after constant texting and talking and surfing the web,and posting this via my hero, all my notifications coming in almost instantly my awake time over a 30 hour period is 11%! So I think now the constant testing and rechecking awake time can stop. The hero has finally made me a believer! Best phone so far!
 
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First off, awesome job on tracking down the source of this problem. I noticed that my Awake time was oddly high (85%+), but haven't had time to look into it. Thankfully there is a work around.



I installed Locale a couple of days ago and haven't noticed much difference (keeping in mind that my battery life was poor to begin with), but I LOVE the app. Might have to do some more testing and see how it impacts battery life. Anyone have experience with it?

Yes, I applied the SMS fix and was still getting 100% awake time. I noticed via Taskiller that there were two Locale processes running. (one if the Locale service was 'disabled' in the app)

I've been trying to save battery for a couple days by disabling WiFi and GPS, etc. without any luck. So I removed Locale and the three plugins and my phone sleeps as expected with the screen off.

It seems like an awesome app but I just can't have it running the processor all the time.
 
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So Locale is the issue ??? I love that app....

It looks like it can compound into an issue. I just posted some more details on another thread about why Locale might cause the processor to go crazy. I think Archon's Google Code link is right on the money.

Long story short, there was a bug in location services of Cupcake that can spin out of control. Its sposed to be fixed in Donut, so hopefully we can use Locale again soon.

All I know is my awake time is much more reasonable since I removed it. Haven't tested with a full charge yet, but it looks like I'm on the right track.
 
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i found the fix it is....




realizing that any higher end pda phone will NOT have good battery life


because us ( as consumers) want the fastest phones with the best battery life but we dont want it to be thick, we have to compensate somewhere.

sure the sms fix will help your battery life a little bit but in the end run you want a device to do a bunch of things? battery life will suffer
 
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