Help CONFIRMED! Reason for instant drop in BATTERY LIFE

[broncophil]

SD card!!!!!

Ever since launch, once I unplugged the phone, it would drop to 93% within 10 minutes with me doing nothing..

so i did everything suggested and nothing worked.. HTC charge trick, format SD card in reader, in phone, in computer.. nothing. before and after the firmware update.. same thing..

so i got fed up a couple days ago and took the SD out of the phone and left it out..

with the SD card out of the phone, it stays at drops only about 100% for at least two hours.. as a matter of fact, it still shows 97% after unplugging before going to bed last nigh..

I have a SAMSUNG branded micro SD card, my hardware is v3.

 

[marctronixx]

with the SD card out of the phone, it stays at drops only about 100% for at least two hours..

what does that statement mean?

its not a secret the SD card in the handset is being read by the OS and for the OS to know the card is there they have to communicate. this takes a tiny amount of battery current.

so what are you advising, remove the card and dont use it?

 

[bossxii]

If I turn on wifi, turn off mobile data. 10pm until 6am, battery drops from 100 to 95/94 range overnite. If there are no tasks running aside from clock, calendar and mail. The SD card should have little effect on the phone if there are no apps accessing the card constantly.

Using the system monitor and shutting down active, non essential apps made my battery life go from 5 or 6 hours of med use to literally 12 to 16 hours of calls, text, wifi tethering, email and surfing. If I don't use it but a few hours if been well over 24 hours in between needing charging.

 

[broncophil]

from what I understand, this does not affect all EVO users.. but many..

yes.. i took the SD card completed out of the phone..

I said that I confirmed what is causing the instant battery drain, I never said that I came up with a remedy..

my next test tonight, will be "UNMOUNTING" the microSD card before charging..

 

[broncophil]

its not a secret the SD card in the handset is being read by the OS and for the OS to know the card is there they have to communicate. this takes a tiny amount of battery current.

a tiny amount of battery i can deal with...

not 7% instantaneously!! plus, why does it need to communicate everytime i unplug the charger.. its not like i rebooted..

 

[kaisies]

from what I understand, this does not affect all EVO users.. but many..

yes.. i took the SD card completed out of the phone..

I said that I confirmed what is causing the instant battery drain, I never said that I came up with a remedy..

my next test tonight, will be "UNMOUNTING" the microSD card before charging..

you have confirmed nothing.

 

[heavychevy]

What truly sucks is that I can unplug my phone once the light has been green with no charge symbol. Leave it for a couple minutes, put it back on the charger and it take 30 minutes for the charge symbol to go back off. Meaning the phone wasn't even close to fully charged when I pulled it off the first time.

 

[iamtybaby]

you have confirmed nothing.

Stop hating..That rapid drop is very ignoring. He figured out something that may be the reason why... Thank the man

 

[woofermazing]

Have you read this?
http://androidforums.com/tips-tricks-evo-4g/99223-possible-battery-fix-htc.html

Also need to calibrate the battery...
With the phone in the on position.

Fully charge the battery with the phone on... (until the led turns green.)

Once the led turns green, unplug the charger until the led goes off.

After the led goes off, plug the charger back in. When the led turns green , power off the phone.

now.... with the phone fully powered off...

1. Unplug the charger.

2. Wait until led goes off.

3. Plug charger back in until the led turns green. When it turns green, unplug the charger again and go to step 1.

4. repeat steps 1 and 3, 10 times. This may take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 mins per cycle. Typically only about 1 minute. though.

op, you might have unintentionally calibrated the battery.

 

[broncophil]

Have you read this?
http://androidforums.com/tips-tricks-evo-4g/99223-possible-battery-fix-htc.html



op, you might have unintentionally calibrated the battery.

yeah.. as mentioned in my post.. i did all this.. still nothing worked till removing sd card.

 

[Androidalltheway]

To me the battery drain are games, I mean I can be on a call for over an hour, and my battery stays the same, but if I play a few games of homerun battle, it will drain, or if I play maybe for 30-60 min straight, it seems to drain 20-30 percent, also when you instantly use wifi, it drains considerably. The most I ever got with the battery was 47 hours, and thats with light to moderate use, dloading 5-10 apps and games, playing games for 30 min, checking and responding to emails, texting, a few calls, surfing the net, but when I use it heavily, I get maybe 12-16 hours, all depends on what you use it for, with anything if you use a device continuously for hours, it will drain quick, for the most part, battery life has been pretty good

 

[bvbull200]

Stop hating..That rapid drop is very ignoring. He figured out something that may be the reason why... Thank the man

You mean to tell me your battery is giving you the cold shoulder?

 

[dzar]

If you have battery life concerns, please search and see there are many other threads on this. I believe the "no trickle charge" thread has the answer. Yes, SD cards might cause faster drain and such, but the reason for the instant drop is that once the phone gets to 100% charge, it stops charging even if the adapter is plugged in (at least until it drops back to some low number... 90% is NOT that number as I've seen a drop to 89%, personally). I'm not sure what "calibrating the battery" has to do with anything. It doesn't matter how many times you do that procedure, you will still have the instant drop problem.

I unplug my phone in the morning (it has 90-93% charge, typically), check my email, then plug it back in for 15-20 minutes at which point I see the green light, again. At that point I have 100% charge and it does not drop, instantly, because it's really fully charged. I have lots of things "on" and my SD card is always plugged in.

 

[axisofoil]

I just now started having some barry life issues... So I tried this. I have been having stellar battery life up until now (15-20 hours of moderate to heavy use on a single charge), but am now down to 4-5 hours of not even touching it.

My battery does not drain right away with my sd card out, and acts like it is going to last the same 15-20 hours. I used thee different bayteries all charged in the phone and on a separate charger with the same results... Hu ge drop and short battery life with the samsung memory card in... And great barry life like I have been getting for there last month while it is out. The bad battery life started when I let windows scan the sd card for errors.

 

[woofermazing]

I'm confused. Are you guys taking it out and leaving it out the whole day? Of course its going to be improved, you are taking out a component. Removing the screen would also give you awesome battery life!

Are you taking it out and putting it in a couple minutes later and getting improved battery life?

BTW, don't panic so much about the percentage, it's an estimate by the OS, it's not absolute. I had a similar problem with my first laptop, occasionally it would drop 5-7% in the first few seconds after charging. I spent a ton of time discharging the battery in identical conditions because I thought something was wrong. There was basically no difference in battery life when it stayed at 100% or dropped right after charging.

 

[84guy]

ive tested this multiple times. the drop to 93% is caused (imo) by leaving it on the charger. last couple nights i took it off the charger right when it was done charging then restarted the phone. 99% in the morning. last night i left the charger on and didnt restart the phone. 93% in the morning

the combo of taking it off the charger and restarting the phone after its done charging works for me.

i agree with woofermazing that it does not effect battery life, seems like its the os is reading the battery wrong.

 

[Caloy]

Off topic but I have to give my 2 cents in: I don't get it, all this attention and trouble for an extra 10-15 minutes in battery life? You guys should just bring a charger and/or extra battery with you. The battery responds better to small and frequent recharging then draining the battery all the way.

 

[linzgeneral]

To me the battery drain are games, I mean I can be on a call for over an hour, and my battery stays the same, but if I play a few games of homerun battle, it will drain, or if I play maybe for 30-60 min straight, it seems to drain 20-30 percent, also when you instantly use wifi, it drains considerably. The most I ever got with the battery was 47 hours, and thats with light to moderate use, dloading 5-10 apps and games, playing games for 30 min, checking and responding to emails, texting, a few calls, surfing the net, but when I use it heavily, I get maybe 12-16 hours, all depends on what you use it for, with anything if you use a device continuously for hours, it will drain quick, for the most part, battery life has been pretty good

I love my Evo, its relatively problem free BUT will get 12-16 hrs if I plug it out after a full charge and don't turn it back on for the rest of the day. The battery life is herendous and I have tried most of the tips. 4 to 6 hrs max for me with moderate use.

 

[Vincent Law]

If your SD card is having that massive an effect on your EVO and there is absolutely no other explanation, then you need to get that EVO exchanged, because that should not be a battery killer.

It is FAR, FAR more likely that it is not the SD card, but some app that USES the SD card, and thus when the card is removed, the app stops functioning and stops eating battery.

That said, I got 14 hours of battery life yesterday with full sync services/IMAP push mail and I took over 30 photos and ~30 minutes of 720p video, plus some browsing, a call and some texts. Obviously my SD card was inserted the whole time.

Battery life issues are user error.

 

[ktulu909]

My battery got up and cooked me breakfast this morning and only use 5% to do so.

 

[EarlyMon]

Vincent's absolutely correct. First place I'd look is if you also picked up a music player that always wants to run just to do ringtones - or facebook - or something like that.

I'm getting even better life with the new upgrade - last night, finally gave up live wallpapers. Put the phone next to me at bedtime, wifi on, phone on - battery was at 80% - got up - battery was at 80%. (I've turned off auto-syncing because I just don't care about it, but that's me.)

I think it's also important to pass on what I learned in this forum, maybe you didn't see it when looking around at other battery posts:

• When your phone's on and charging and the light goes green: it starts running off of the battery
• This is some high tech safety feature
• Sure enough, my laptop is the same way but I never listened before when others tried to explain that
• The battery calibration feature therefore requires you babysit it and when it's charging when on and it goes green, you have to swap to the off part immediately

Because of that feature, it's supposed to not be at 100% if it went green while on and you left it running that way for a while.

Let's see - also remember to Update PRL.

Also - HTC News is a babbler and it uses a hidden folder on your SD card.

Some people swore by doing an external SD card format as a battery saver - I think that was either a placebo or they had some corrupted files out there that the format wiped (this will especially cause trouble with a music player running or crashing or any of that - even Sense crashing) - or some wonderful bloatware you might have tried just once might have been sensing its need to be used by the existence of some of its data in yet another SD card hidden folder (a total guess on my part, but not necessarily an unfounded one because devs will do all sorts of things if it strikes their fancy).

When you think about the fact that SD cards are designed to maintain state when your device is powered down - or even removed from the device entirely - it becomes obvious that anything related to the SD card drawing unusual power has to be pathological.

Here's your procedure to fix any possibility of bad files you've acquired:

1. Hook up your phone to a laptop or PC - avoid using the front USB ports if you can, I've been told that some of them won't output sufficient power (same for my keyboard usb ports, in my case)
2. Mount it - if you've never done this before, you'll find you can pull down your notification bar and select if it's charging-only to get the usb storage option (Disk Drive)
3. IGNORING any hidden folders, select all folders you see and copy them to your PC - use common sense and create a SAVE_EVO_SD folder or something to put your folders into
4. You've just ignored your Bookmark widget folder, so if that's important to you (really? does anyone use that thing?), then you'll need to either go over to the mounted volume via a command line tool and copy that folder to your PC or expose hidden files in your file browser and grab it that way.
5. On the PC, erase any LOST+FOUND folder from your backup
6. On your PC, browse into any obvious folder like Downloads and ensure that your desktop app can play whatever media files you've sucked in there - obliterate any that are hosed
7. Format the SD card from your PC (right click, as I recall, on the mounted drive for Win, Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility on Mac, and Linux guys I don't have to tell how (format for FAT or FAT32, I think either will work, I can't remember everything and you have a backup so you should be ok)
8. Copy your saved folders back to the SD card
9. Unmount (eject) the SD card from your PC
10. On the phone notification bar, select usb storage, choose charge only - and WAIT for the SD card to mount

Try that procedure - or if you already have - and it's still not right, do as Vincent says, take it back - because there's nothing in the SD card control circuitry or the SD card itself that should be sucking power on a working device.

And - I cannot stress this enough for those that don't know - you can corrupt or damage an SD card from EOS/ESD (electrostatic overstress/electrostatic dischage) (read: those shocks you get rubbing your feet on carpet) even if you don't feel yourself giving off a shock, so at least touch metal/grounded like a stove or fridge before removing/replacing one - but - that's just me.

Hope this helps, some.

 

[EarlyMon]

I love my Evo, its relatively problem free BUT will get 12-16 hrs if I plug it out after a full charge and don't turn it back on for the rest of the day. The battery life is herendous and I have tried most of the tips. 4 to 6 hrs max for me with moderate use.

I devote one of the desktop to my handy system widgets. Your Evo came with a few of these, next to that lame Favorites widget (lose it, it's a tab over your dialer if you really think you need it).

On that screen, first add Widget -> Power Control (Android)

Next, add, from Widget->Setings: 4G, Mobile Network and Airplane Mode

Turn off your GPS radio (Power Control) and Bluetooth (Power Control) if you're not really using them. It's not that hard to turn on GPS when you need it for Maps or something. Use Wifi when you can, and turn off Mobile Network radio - that's a power saver. (You can turn off both and still get calls and SMS by the way.)

Go to Menu -> Settings -> Sound&display->Brightness and turn off automatic brightness - use your Power Control brightness switch for that.

Unless you're really using social networking functions, wipe their data and don't worry about them - or - at least set them up to not start automatically and always run - start them up and exit them whenever that's convenient for you.

Social apps constantly babbling and blathering, I'm here! Are you there? I'm here! Are you there? I'm here!... are real battery hogs.

Try as many of those suggestions that make sense to you, as well as my above post, and see how you make out.

Oh - and there's a handy little app in your drawer called Setup (magician's hat) that can save you hunting around your configs - bring that up and when it gets to the screen that has two checkmarks to always be blathering your location data to the outside world, via 3G of wifi any chance an app gets - turn both of those off. Leave Background Data on a following screen on, the Market needs that.

Many good lucks.

 

[axisofoil]

I have wiped and formatted my SD card several times. I'm going to scrounge around for another card and see if there is just damage to the card, and if not, I will return this evo... again.

Otherwise I will just see if I can get the card itself replaced.

Hmm... this is interesting. I just charged via a USB port on the BACK of my computer (directly hardwired into the mobo and power supply) instead of a front mount port... and VOILA, the problem was fixed immediately.

 

[kkwus74]

@earlymom.....great post bro.....or to the OP.....you could also save all the trouble at get the 3500 mah battery from seidio which will be out in a few days

 

[WaSTeLaNd]

Stop hating..That rapid drop is very ignoring. He figured out something that may be the reason why... Thank the man

Thats what's up