Droid Battery

[susanel]

New Droid-- With minimal use -a few calls, texts only. Battery last about 3-4 hours and phone gets very warm.. Any ideas?? Thanks

 

[vincentp]

See if you can get a replacement battery. Should be lasting at least 3 times that long with minimal use.

 

[BucYouUp68]

You may want to do a search here about Droid Batteries, there are 1000's of reasons why your battery is going dead. Give it a shot and let us know what you find.

 

[droidosis]

Drop the Power control widget on one of your home screens.

Disable WIFI and GPS when you are not using them.

I only pop on WIFI when I'm near a known network. I pop it off when I'm done browsing or whatever. I turn on GPS only when exact location is required for nav, skymap, near me now, etc.

This practice will save you some battery juice. Turn them off when your done. 3G is very efficient.

When you first set up the phone it asks you if you want GPS on or off, if you turned it on it could be burning through your battery searching for satellites. I only enabled network location at all times.

If your in a poor reception area (no 3G, or low bars) it could burn through your battery trying to maintain good connection to a tower.

An app you recently installed might be chewing through the power also.
Check Battery Use in Settings/About phone.

Bluetooth usually only eats juice when its actually paired to a device and that device is in use, otherwise it sleeps and uses hardly any power in a non-paired or non-active state. If you don't use it, disable it of course.

Use the Auto brightness setting in Display. It's more efficient.

If none of the above things give you some more battery life, maybe it really is a bad battery/phone.

-droidosis-

 

[tdjt]

Drop the Power control widget on one of your home screens.

Disable WIFI and GPS when you are not using them.

I only pop on WIFI when I'm near a known network. I pop it off when I'm done browsing or whatever. I turn on GPS only when exact location is required for nav, skymap, near me now, etc.

This practice will save you some battery juice. Turn them off when your done. 3G is very efficient.

When you first set up the phone it asks you if you want GPS on or off, if you turned it on it could be burning through your battery searching for satellites. I only enabled network location at all times.

If your in a poor reception area (no 3G, or low bars) it could burn through your battery trying to maintain good connection to a tower.

An app you recently installed might be chewing through the power also.
Check Battery Use in Settings/About phone.

Bluetooth usually only eats juice when its actually paired to a device and that device is in use, otherwise it sleeps and uses hardly any power in a non-paired or non-active state. If you don't use it, disable it of course.

Use the Auto brightness setting in Display. It's more efficient.

If none of the above things give you some more battery life, maybe it really is a bad battery/phone.

-droidosis-

All good tips. The only I do differently is that I don't use Auto brightness. It seems to set the brightness to be brighter than I need. I use the Power control widget to change the brightness, and usually keep it at low unless I'm outside.

With that, my battery life as been very good lately. I undock it around 7:30am and still have around 50% by 7pm at night.

Funny thing is that when I first got it, battery life wasn't so good. Probably because I played with it all the time, even though it didn't feel like I was doing that much.

 

[tdjt]

One more thing. I don't know how much this helps, but I regularly kill all running apps (I use Home++ which seems to work better than ATK at freeing up memory). I seem to always find running apps that I didn't open. I don't know how much this affects battery life, but if the phone is running 20 apps in the background when it's supposed to be idle, it may drain your battery much more quickly.

 

[droidosis]

Yeah, once the newness wears off a little you won't be on it as much. I tried the manual setting to 30% or so, but noticed auto brightness was a little better. Auto kills the softkeys when they aren't needed, or lowers them a lot saving some juice. Same for the kb backlight. I think when its on manual the softkeys and kb stay lit.

-droidosis-

 

[vzwdroidtech]

New Droid-- With minimal use -a few calls, texts only. Battery last about 3-4 hours and phone gets very warm.. Any ideas?? Thanks

While all of the tips posted are excellent ideas, the main point of your post was missed. If the phone gets 'very warm' when off the charger, I recommend getting the device replaced. That can happen to any cell phone, and while it could be the battery, it is most likely the unit itself. That happened to me with my first Storm I, and once replaced, I never had an issue again. If possible, have both the battery and phone replaced at one time. If no, do either one first, then the other if needed.

Good luck!