Tips to help improve battery life...

[ItsHip2BSquare]

Hello everyone!

I am new to the Droid and Android OS... Right now I am getting just under a days worth of usage (7 am - 11 pm) on my device... I have turned the screen brightness down but I don't know what else I can do to help improve the life...

Any tips or trick you can provide me with would be great! I'm assuming that I have applications running in the background but I don't know how to "quit" them...

Thanks for the help!

 

[droid_genesis]

I've had the same issues since I bought the phone on the 6th. From some research I've done, it seems like having too many widgets not only slows your phone down, but also drains the battery quicker.

On top of disabling GPS, WIFI, Bluetooth, and keeping my screen brightness to the minimum, I was still getting about 10 hours of life on the Droid. This was disappointing. So I'm going to try leaving the AutoSync disabled for the night and report back in tomorrow. Also, I removed nearly all of my widgets, with the exception of the Power Management, Calendar, BatteryLife, and my Task app.

Also, something I've done every day so far is leaving my Meebo IM logged into Facebook, Yahoo, and MySpace. I really don't want to have BOTH AutoSync and my IM's disabled, so I'm trying to figure out which one is really draining the beast.

 

[gthrift]

Right now you're probably juts using it really heavily since it's new. I was getting less battery life than that for the first two days since I was constantly on it. Today though I've talked on it for about 2 hours, used Google Nav for about 20 minutes, sent a few text, read some emails, downloaded some apps from the market and browsed the web. In the last 12 hours I still have 60% battery.

Make sure you use the power control widget to turn off gps, bluetooth, and wifi when it's not needed. I've also turned my screen brightness all the way down which made a huge difference since the display always uses about 50% of the battery itself. If I ever need it brighter I use the power control widget to turn on auto brightness.

 

[droid_genesis]

Right now you're probably juts using it really heavily since it's new. I was getting less battery life than that for the first two days since I was constantly on it. Today though I've talked on it for about 2 hours, used Google Nav for about 20 minutes, sent a few text, read some emails, downloaded some apps from the market and browsed the web. In the last 12 hours I still have 60% battery.

Make sure you use the power control widget to turn off gps, bluetooth, and wifi when it's not needed. I've also turned my screen brightness all the way down which made a huge difference since the display always uses about 50% of the battery itself. If I ever need it brighter I use the power control widget to turn on auto brightness.

Yeah, I thought it was the same deal for me. I waited 2 days, and each day, it seems to have gotten worse. The weird part is that the Droid stated that Voice attributed to about 30-40% of my battery drainage within 8 hours, but the calls only lasted ~25 minutes total (Usage stats stated voice consumed >60% of my total battery usage, which was down to about 40% after 8 hours). I think it has a lot more to do with either AutoSync or the IM clients. Either way, I'll know for sure by the end of tomorrow.

 

[quixand]

If you're running Beautiful Widgets...watch your GPS.

Even if geolocation is OFF within the BW app, the GPS stays on non stop.
Go ahead, try it. Set the phone down, come back in 5 mins, and the GPS will be getting nailed.

I currently have the GPS on the phone turned off so I can use BW Home widget. Unfortunately, I've told the author numerous times, and he says it's a bug within the Droid, when clearly, the only time any has this issue is with BW installed.

 

[speedracr13]

Go to Settings -> About phone -> Battery Use. This will give you a break down of where you are using the most power. From there you can decide what to tweak.

 

[droid_genesis]

Go to Settings -> About phone -> Battery Use. This will give you a break down of where you are using the most power. From there you can decide what to tweak.

Unfortunately, this setting does not display power used by background data syncs. I'm pretty sure I've narrowed it down...

The major power consumption issues my Droid has been having for the past few days has almost nothing to do with the IM software (in this case, Meebo IM). With my previous settings (Data Sync ON; Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS OFF; Screen Brightness to Minimum), I was hitting the 90% mark in about an hour or less after a full charge (on standby mode). 7.5 hours later, and I would be down to 40% (after 30 minutes or less of talk; about 10 minutes of web usage).

With my new settings that I put in about an 1.5 hours ago, I'm still at 100%. The phone has been in standby, but that's still a 10% difference from my earlier settings. I disabled Data Sync, Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS, and also kept my Screen Brightness to Minimum. I still kept Meebo IM logged in to Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo. The IM client has nothing to do with the battery drainage.

I'm using Advanced Task Killer now to narrow down which apps are causing the 3G to drain so much power. Right now, my guesses are apps that run with ads (TheWeatherChannel, WeatherBug, etc.) and are left running in the background, or Gmail and its calendar. Gmail and its calendar unfortunately do not have an option for setting the frequency at which it syncs, so that maybe the culprit. I have set almost every application that "feeds" off of the internet to have longer sync times (i.e., sync every 1 hour, sync every 4 hours, etc.), so I can't see how they could be draining 60% of the battery within 7.5 hours.

I'll report my findings tomorrow.

 

[jltung]

I read in the droid forum that the main consumers are screen brightness, gps, bluetooth, and wifi. The Taskiller, Adv Task Killer etc actually drain more battery because they shut down some processes that auto kick in again if not manually shut down or removed. I like Adv Task Manager the best. Actually the OS system is linus derivative which does not need a task killer.
I always leave my droid plugged when home.
I also read that if you drain it down a couple of times the battery gets stronger.
Hope this helps.