Battery Life

[maerlim]

Hoo boy, I brought the Captivate to work and I've been playing with it all day and showing it to people (including recording and playing back lots of HD videos) and my poor battery just hit 15%. And here I am, having forgotten to bring the charger to work. Good thing I have a charger in my car.

 

[Surfer]

Congrats on your phone! I just wanted to know if reception is good and how exactly is the battery life? With all that work, about how long did it last you?

 

[maerlim]

Reception is fine so far. I've had between 3-5 bars wherever I go. Battery started at 6:30am and told me it had 15% left at 2:00pm. But I've been hammering it pretty hard, showing benchmarks to people, showing people asphalt 5, videos, etc. Phone's still running, but I've stopped demos. I'm expecting it to last till I can get in the car and plug it into my car charger.

 

[Ambictus]

Ha... I'm sure your battery life will be fine once you get over the wow factor.

 

[maerlim]

By the way, I don't know if this is a new fangled Android 2.1 thing, a TouchWiz thing, or what (I know my Wife's Backflip doesn't have it), but, if you go to Settings->About Phone->Battery Use you get a nice graph. As of now, 3:20pm, I have only a small sliver of battery, probably 5% or less. So far for me today:

7h 48m 3s since unplugged
Display: 65%
Voice Calls: 14%
Cell Standby: 6%
Android Live Wallpapers: 4%
Phone Idle: 3%
Android System: 3%
Earth: 2%

 

[Ambictus]

It's a 2.1 thing(maybe 2.0). I have it on my Aria as well

 

[Jofaba]

You know you have to break the battery in right?

 

[maerlim]

I don't think I was omplaining. As I said, I hammered the phone pretty hard. Just reporting the facts.

 

[MrTony]

So far for me today:

7h 48m 3s since unplugged
Display: 65%
Voice Calls: 14%
Cell Standby: 6%
Android Live Wallpapers: 4%
Phone Idle: 3%
Android System: 3%
Earth: 2%

Idle time 3%? That's friggin' hilarious! That'll be me on Sunday for sure!

 

[ChaoticKinesis]

So with what I consider to be an excessive amount of tinkering for this purpose, I've managed to sort out my battery woes for everything except voice calls. Just got off my first call of the day.

System battery: 38%
Voice calls: 59%
Time on: 1h 1m 49s

This is actually pretty good compared to what I had before. Yesterday, when my battery was at 4% toward the end of the day, I had 12m of voice calls that used up 19%!

I almost can't believe I'm asking this question, but is there something one can do to maximize battery life for calls?

 

[EricKit]

I use JuicePlotter and JuiceDefender (Both free). They allow me to graph my battery life, and juicedefender limits applications from using excessive data while you are in idle etc. It's great on saving battery life, check it out.

 

[ChaoticKinesis]

I use JuicePlotter and JuiceDefender (Both free). They allow me to graph my battery life, and juicedefender limits applications from using excessive data while you are in idle etc. It's great on saving battery life, check it out.

Thanks but I already have both installed and my battery life graph shows me that voice calls use a ridiculous amount of battery.

 

[baddress]

You know you have to break the battery in right?

Anything special for this phone or just the standard charge til full, run til empty, for a week?

 

[Jofaba]

Anything special for this phone or just the standard charge til full, run til empty, for a week?

I don't even know if that's true anymore. There seems to be an ongoing debate of "battery technology" vs "real world experience" regarding break-in. Some people are saying this kind of battery doesn't have "memory". I've also read that you SHOULDN'T let it drain completely; as that can DESTROY it. So... chalk the battery tech up to yet another geek issue for the Captivate to overcome in debate.

My experience with the battery life has been fine. I'm surprised how low my numbers are some evenings, but I've yet experienced a day where my "average use" was an issue. Maybe I'll stream pandora over wifi all day tomorrow and see how long it lasts.

 

[baddress]

I'm asking because mine is basically stock Captivate, except I have exchange push email on, but I don't run anything else on it and if I pull it off the charger at 6am it's dead by noon or 1pm. If I put it in airplane mode (which of course negates the purpose of having it) i got it to last until ~9pm. That's pretty horrible considering we have blackberries that can go for 5-6 days easy.

 

[Regalicious]

So far I've gotten roughly 9 hours of use on average. I just hit 15% from 83% today (I didn't charge it all the way before heading out) and I've been unplugged for 8h 38 min. I listened to Pandora for about an hour straight and did intermittent web browsing, messaging, and GChatting. I was in an area with good signal today.

I usually unplug at 7:30 or so in the morning and I'm down to 15%ish by 2 or 3PM at work (~7 hrs), where signal is absolutely terrible -- which would make sense.

So 9 hrs or so normally, 7 hrs or so in areas with bad signal.

 

[CaCHooKa Man]

i didnt do much except text and use google talk over this period

 

[Jofaba]

Okay, so this is hardly scientific but I did a half an hour stress test:

wifi on
gsp on
brightness full
screen dim set at 30 minutes
streaming pandora over wifi
have "jumpy ball 3d lite" playing a constant level restart (both to protect the screen and to have a game running as "30 minutes of play")

started at 97%
ended at 89%

so 8% over 30 minutes
approx 0.267% every minute
100 / 0.267 = 374.5 minutes = 6.24 hours

considering the load, that seems pretty reasonable for battery life expectations. Now I'm going to see how long it takes to charge back that 8%

update: took about 32 minutes.

 

[jackson5]

I've been using the captivate for 5 days now. The battery has definately improved for voice calls(1hr using 60% vs. 2hrs. using 40%). However, I'm still running out of charge sooner than seems warranted. I had a hunch the GPS eats a lot of battery, so I ran my Google Navigator for 1/2hr and it ate 40% of the battery. This is unnacceptable. What's up Samsung?

 

[Regalicious]

GPS sucks a lot of power but I've never had it suck that much power. I used it for 20 minutes and it dropped 15-20%

 

[DontMindMe]

my little graph goes
Display- 63%
Cell Standby- 13%
Phone Idle- 7%
Android System- 5%
AT&T maps (which i have yet to click on, other than the longclick to delete it off the homescreen)- 3%
Weather Channel- 3%
Swype- 2%
Sensorservor_ya (anyone know what this is?)- 2%
Android OS- 2%

And its been unplugged for 8h 42m. Id say thats pretty good, ive only dropped two little sections and ive been texting/using apps and whatnot pretty constantly.

 

[Infinite-t]

I can confirm the battery "break in" works!

The first two days I had the phone I was very worried about battery life (among other things) Withing just a few hours of constant use I was killing over 50% of the battery.

But for two days in a row, I burned the battery down to zero, so the phone shut itself off, then charged it to full. I did that twice. Then yesterday I took it off the charger. Had it out all day long, with only the gps off, with mild use, a short call or two, a few minuts of web here and there, facebook check, etc, that night I was at 81% It sat in standby all night, connected to my wifi and updating and checking for mail every half hour. Woke up at 72%. Now its 7pm on day two. Ive made a few short calls, played a game for a half hour, read up on the news, did a google map search,and messed with a few other things and I am at 31%.

Not to shabby at all. I do admit I havent been fiddling with it for hours on end like before but this is fairly regular use for me, and I am going on 2 days!

 

[lilo]

GPS sucks a lot of power but I've never had it suck that much power. I used it for 20 minutes and it dropped 15-20%

What percentage is that? The phone shows the percent of charge spent on the given feature (in this case, it's GPS) compared to overall usage. So, it's 20% of the charge used by everything (display, CPU etc.) and not 20% of battery.

 

[Regalicious]

I don't mean it consumed 15% as per the battery use page I mean I lost about 15% of charge (i.e. from 65% to 50%)

 

[lilo]

I don't mean it consumed 15% as per the battery use page I mean I lost about 15% of charge (i.e. from 65% to 50%)

OK, then it's not a GPS. I read today on another thread that Galaxy S uses the latest GPS chip from Broadcom which was designed to consume less power but it requires that more functions are performed by CPU (this probably explains why these phones have some problems with GPS - software needs some work). Also In my experience, while GPS is a power hungry feature it's not that hungry. Just go to Setup -> Phone Info -> Battery Usage and check what consumed your battery. It might be display or something else. Also, your battery might require calibration (just allow the battery to go down to 0% couple of times)