Okay, so I know the Eris battery life is supposed to suck, but should I really only be getting 5-6 hours of very minimal use out of it? I mean I don't have a million apps on it, I hardly browse the internet... I have done everything the battery optimization thread suggests. What else can possibly be wrong? I don't think a better battery would even fix the problem. Please help, because I feel like I can't even use my phone for texting any more... what is the purpose of my phone if I can't use it? Thanks.
If I were to rewrite the OP in that
Battery Life Tips thread, I would:
- Omit Item #1. Things may have changed since it was written (2 OTA updates ago), but the native SMS app does not "Prevent the device from sleeping". That might have been the case originally, but it is certainly not true any longer.
- Change the order of items 2-5 according to which radios use more juice:
- Mobile Network (can be up to 2 Watts during transmit!)
- Wifi
- Bluetooth
- GPS
None of the suggestions in that post are particularly bad however.
If you have Wifi available, use that in preference to the Mobile Network (cellular radio).
Streaming music (or video) across the Mobile network is almost the same thing as being on a voice call continuously - and the battery will be drained in the same amount of time as the "Talk Time" - a little bit over 3 hours. Use WiFi for streaming music if you are going to do that on battery power only.
Remember that all smartphones are designed to operate as quickly as possible when you are "using them", and extremely slowly (low power) when you are not using them.
That means that if you add an application which either keeps the phone awake continuously, or initiates internet connections frequently, your phone will drain the battery rather quickly. This could be something as innocent as visiting a web page that does frequent refreshes or ad banner rotations - and then leaving your browser running... or installing an app that constantly talks to the internet even when the phone is supposed to be "sleeping".
Note that Verizon has no control over this at all - they don't quality control any of the applications available in the Market.
You can keep an eye on this by monitoring the "Awake Time"
Settings -> About phone -> Status -> (scroll to bottom of page)
If you make a note of the elapsed time, sleep the phone for (say) 10 minutes (=600 secs), and then look at the Awake Time after waking the phone up again - if you see the amount of Awake Time has increased by more than 60 seconds (10% of the elapsed time), then you probably have a problem of this nature.
The other thing you can do which is along these lines is to use the "Spare Parts" app, and view the "Battery history" or "Usage Statistics" to try and figure out which apps are keeping the phone awake.
If your awake time is reasonable, then the problem could be that the phone is sitting in a weak signal area, and is constantly transmitting to try and find new networks - or it could be a defective unit.
Whatever it is, you have to do a little bit of detective work to try and figure things out.
Good luck
eu1
PS I use my phone "moderately", and I never need to put it on the charger before the end of the day.
