Wow you get an even better battery life than me!
I got 30 hours, ending this evening... not bad! Light to medium use, installing quite a few apps, waking the screen alot, and email pushing all day. A little web. Wi-fi on all day also. Before debrading and upgrading to KE7 I think I got about 22, but it may have been lighter use the last 30hrs, or another change, a particular app or widget or something, I don't know.
I think if I streamed radio for 3 hours I'd be below 70%... Will have to try.
Still i'm happy now
- got all the functionality a phone like this should have, and pretty good battery life for an android phone with a huge screen
Will still carry a charger with all my other shit though - just in case I have a heavy few hours here and there
Matt
Well i'm a heavy user of my phone so regardless of how much battery life i save by controlling background apps and their CPU usage, i will always kill my phones battery at the end of my working day (around 5ish).
But i have a solution in place that is working pretty well, i bought myself a genuine spare battery and a samsung battery charger unit i leave plugged in at work.
I simply swap out the battery when it gets below 5% and throw in the new one and leave the old one charging at work overnight, i then swap over the battery again when i enter work the next day.
This might sound tedious and it is but i read that these new batteries don't like to be plugged in and used at the same time, damages them apparently so if i wish to use mine to listen to web radio all day, i've got no choice but to have a 2nd battery if i want to leave work on time with enough charge to last the evening.
As for my good battery charge, it's all to do with how much CPU is being used on average and my screen brightness / usage.
I managed to find a really great radio app / widget called Andro Radio that only takes around 10% CPU usage while active which is a lot better than my previous radio app (Tunein) which took about 30-40% while active.
Listening to the radio via flash on a browser will take up a whopping 90%+ CPU usage and is not recommended, lol
My idle CPU usage (without the radio) hovers around 1-5% and that's with all these apps running in the background:
*No Lock
*CPU Notify
*Anti-Virus
*Juice Defender
*Perfect Lock
*Imo Messenger
*ZD Box
*Elixir Widget
*Watchdog Lite
*Good Night
*Snowstorm weather widget (sync interval is once every 5 hours)
*Facebook (auto-sync is turned off)
*Go SMS Pro
*Gmail (auto-sync is turned on)
*Auto Killer
*Calculator widget
*Mortplayer widget
*Battery monitor widget
*Swype keyboard (the default Samsung key layout sucks in my opinion)
There are other apps running that i can remove once i get the time on the weekend to root the phone like Yahoo Finance and AP Mobile (what ever that is) but overall i have pretty good control on what my phone is doing now.
I also know how much CPU my phone should be taking during its daily usage so if i see the CPU notify bar go into the half way mark and stay there, i know that the wi-fi sharing is taking 25% again, so go in to Watchdog to kill it off, lol).
I also have my brightness at the lowest setting at 12% while navigating and making calls but have my web browsers set at around 30% and the same setting of brightness on my video playing apps like Moboplayer etc.
I find the screen so good, there is no need to have the brightness above 50%, 100% just hurts my eyes.
I also have my screen time out at 15 seconds whilst listening to the radio as there is no need to have the screen on while listening to music, if i wish to change radio stations i simply hit the button at the bottom as quick and easy way to wake up the screen.
I've removed keylock / standby screen to make things quicker as the Perfect Lock app allows you to set a code entry sequence on individual apps / functions of the phone anyway (you can't do anything with my phone without needing to input a code for all the major functions, only the radio, video and music apps are code entry free, lol)
I change this via an Elixir widget to 1-2 mins while browsing the net, video players stop the time out automatically so don't need to change it from 15 seconds for them.
And lastly, i turn off the mobile internet when i'm connected to wi-fi as i've found that it can knock out the wi-fi connection completely (happened to me every 20 mins) and it consumes battery life for no reason.
I don't know why the mobile internet isn't turned off automatically once you are connected to wi-fi as why would you want your phone to be connected to the internet in 2 different ways at the same time?.
Anyway, summing up, to get the most out of the Galaxy S2, pretty much everything has to be changed about it software wise (the only useful default app that i haven't found a better version of on the marketplace is the gmail app, everything else i've replaced with far better versions (mostly for free).
Bottom line is, leaving the phone with its default Samsung stock setup would be a recipe for terrible battery life as nothing has been done software wise to ensure low CPU / battery usage, so i can see why a lot of people perceive the Galaxy S2 as having just as bad battery if not worse than other smart phones that have come before it.
It's just bad software setup not utilizing the full capabilities of the hardware they are installed on, an age old story that companies like Microsoft, Packard Bell, HP etc have practiced for many years now.
Hell, even big name monitor manufacturers make this mistake, i've recently purchased a 24inch Samsung LCD LED monitor and the default display settings were absolutely awful to the point where if i was a lazy person who just expected everything to be perfect from the get go, i would of returned to the product saying it was a load of crap.
Thankfully a few tweaks later, brought down the brightness from 100% to a more image / eye pleasing 65, changed the colour temp from warm to cold and bob's your uncle, perfect screen quality!
But i'm kinda use to this kind of stupidity as being a PC user for the last 13 years, i've grown a custom to monitoring and controlling pre-installed background apps to ensure that my device is doing exactly what i want it do be doing and not the other way around (lol).
It shouldn't be this way but like Microsoft, Google have left their OS (and i say this loosely for Google since Android is basically Linux with Java Apps) 'too open' in my opinion, it's all one extreme to another in this world, Apple apply way too many limits to their software and Google / Microsoft leave their OS far too open to software miss-use.
Why can't a company just achieve the middle ground instead? (open but with a degree of protection for the user).
The more ideal way of doing things is to have a balance of both control and freedom, no companies seem to understand this.
Anyhoo, i'll be interested to see how much more battery life i can squeeze out of this thing once i have it rooted and removed all the crappy pre-installed bloatware.
Here's a screen capture of my main home screen (now if i could just make the bottom bar half its size, i could fit in another row of useful app icons
)
