Help Testing video playback battery results + input requested

[makewayhomer]

This morning I started a test:

• Made sure my DINC was charged to 100%
• Turned on airplane mode
• Powered off all power control widgets (gps, bluetooth, etc)
• live wallpapers were off
• set screen brightness to 43%
• began playing a .mp4 video (using tunewiki) taken from my itunes library and put onto my sd card
• when the movie finished, I would start it over

The idea is to test the battery in as controlled environment as possible, so others can replicate it. also, so I can compare to other devices.

The battery drained very consistently. about 50 minutes of video playback killed 15% of the battery. this ratio kept very constant until I just stopped it with 20% life left, so I'm pretty confident in saying that under these conditions - which are pretty ideal - I can eak out about 5.5 hours of video playback.

this jives with my suspicion that the battery drained about twice as fast as my old Iphone. Iphone 3gs claims 10 hours of video playback, which they probably got under conditions similar to what I described above.

I would love if other people ran similar tests. this would help confirm or deny whether or not there are "bad" batteries out there.

if you want to keep it simple, just note what % your battery is at (using the battery widget), play 50 minutes of video under the conditions described above, then report back what % of the battery you lost.

 

[FlyPenFly]

I think this is assuming that the battery % is equal among everyone which I don't think is the case. Some people will have better calibrated batteries than other people.

I've already noticed even after my third calibration, that the battery % is much, much higher than the first time it ran down with roughly the same amount of use.

 

[makewayhomer]

I think this is assuming that the battery % is equal among everyone which I don't think is the case. Some people will have better calibrated batteries than other people.

I've already noticed even after my third calibration, that the battery % is much, much higher than the first time it ran down with roughly the same amount of use.

ok, fair enough. I should add that I pre-ordered the phone, got it the first day, and am on my 6th or 7th cycle by now. I suspect many people are in the same boat. from what I understand, there really isn't gonna be much difference between the 5th full cycle vs the 6th vs the 7th, etc.

 

[Puppa]

Just to be clear, exactly which video were you playing? It makes a difference. Different videos require different levels of decoding and CPU usage.

I'd be very careful comparing actual playback vs a competitors "claimed" playback: take them with a grain of salt. We've all seen the flash videos on webpages thrown into various Apple ads.

 

[FlyPenFly]

By cycle, do you let them run down all the way to the phone shutting down?

 

[makewayhomer]

Just to be clear, exactly which video were you playing? It makes a difference. Different videos require different levels of decoding and CPU usage.

it's an .mp4 that I had previously encoded for iphone use. (1 episode of The Wire which had been converted from hd). if you could let me know how to get any other details I would appreciate it.

I'd be very careful comparing actual playback vs a competitors "claimed" playback: take them with a grain of salt. We've all seen the flash videos on webpages thrown into various Apple ads.

I've tested against Apple claims (I have had various Apple devices) and have found them pretty accurate.

again, this really isn't about Iphone vs Incredible, it's about some people claiming 15 hours w/ "moderate" usage vs others saying 7 hours or 30 hours. I'm trying to control for variables to see if there is really a QA problem with batteries, or if people just lie/have definitions that aren't exactly accurate. I would expect some natural variance, if somebody gets 5 hours and 1 other person gets 5.5 hours, I would expect that. but I'm really trying to find out if some people can get 10 and others can get 2, b/c that is the type of spread I see being thrown around

 

[makewayhomer]

By cycle, do you let them run down all the way to the phone shutting down?

the phone has died a few times, a few others it was down to 15% - 30% before I recharged for the night

 

[makewayhomer]

bump

 

[makewayhomer]

bump for the morning crowd. anybody want to contribute to this little project? very easy to do

 

[makewayhomer]

I just received the Seido 1750 battery this morning. I will be testing this using the same procedure as outlined above over the next week to compare performance vs the stock battery. once I get to 6 or 7 full cycles on the Seido, it will be a fair apples:apples comparison with my test above.

today, I recieved the Seido. it arrived 67% charged. I charged it to 100%, then left it plugged in for an additional hour.

using the same exact video test as described above, I played video for 2.5 hours and the battery was down to 65%. this indicates I could get just over 7 hours of video on the Seido, a 30% improvement over stock.

again, I will update this as I continue to condition my battery over the next week.

 

[alancorp]

The problem with your test is you are stopping at 20% battery life. From my experience the last 20% of the battery lasts much longer than any other time which means it's not truly calibrated. So that last 20% could actually give you even longer playback. You really need to keep on running the video until your phone dies. That's the only way to see how long the battery is lasting.

 

[makewayhomer]

The problem with your test is you are stopping at 20% battery life. From my experience the last 20% of the battery lasts much longer than any other time which means it's not truly calibrated. So that last 20% could actually give you even longer playback. You really need to keep on running the video until your phone dies. That's the only way to see how long the battery is lasting.

when my Seido is full calibrated I will run it down completely. then I will do the same with the stock battery

however, I have no reason to believe 0-20% lasts longer than 20% - 40% or 60% - 80%, etc.

when I ran my tests I noted that 50 minutes of video play consistently took 15% off the battery, I would just expect this to continue.

and I still encourage anyone out there to do a similar test and contribute results

 

[alancorp]

when my Seido is full calibrated I will run it down completely. then I will do the same with the stock battery

however, I have no reason to believe 0-20% lasts longer than 20% - 40% or 60% - 80%, etc.

Well it's not that the last 20% lasts longer. It just means that it could be saying there's 20% left but actually there is more battery left, i.e. 30% lets say. You are relying on the battery percentage which could be inaccurate.

I'm not claiming that the percentage reading is wrong, but it COULD be wrong and the only way to truly test it is to run it down until the battery is dead and measure how long it lasted.

 

[alancorp]

And in order for us to perform the same test as you, we would need the exact same video you are running. That is the only way to control the environment. Maybe my video is more intense on the cpu, i.e. different format or higher resolution.

 

[makewayhomer]

And in order for us to perform the same test as you, we would need the exact same video you are running. That is the only way to control the environment. Maybe my video is more intense on the cpu, i.e. different format or higher resolution.

all that is possible - but the more data, or any data, would be interesting.

play an .mp4 for 50 minutes, report what happened to your battery. if it is significantly different from what I reported above, then either our batteries are different or the file is way different. the latter could be figured out pretty easily. my hypothesis is that most people won't report significantly different results anyways, but that's what I'm trying to figure out, sourcing the huge user group here.

alternatively, I could put a video file somewhere, but judging from the response so far most people don't seem really interested in testing...just complaining.

except you!

 

[dcesq06]

They have done extensive tests on a number of batteries on XDA using special battery equipment, etc. Although they haven't tested the Incredbile's battery specifically, there is a lot of good information in the thread. At a minimum, you will get a better sense of some of the variables that they considered in conducting a uniform test.

[April 26] Awesome investigation of battery capacity claims. -- htc 2150 scores 100% - xda-developers

 

[makewayhomer]

doing a mini test on my Seido after 3 cycles. getting nearly identical performance as I got on Day 1. I extrapolate I could get a little over 7 hours of video, or about 30% more video playback time than i got on the stock battery after 7 full cycles. I will do a complete test in a few more days, but I don't expect it to improve much. my brief testing has shown that "cycling" doesn't add much and the battery improvement is good, but still not great.