Help Battery Life and Live Wallpapers

I use the weather live wallpaper and I haven't noticed a hit at all in battery life.

The impact of live wallpapers on battery life is supposed to be pretty small from what I understand. It never seemed to even hurt my 4G that much. When it comes to screens, what normally eats up batteries is a really bright screen.

Not to cause flame... but, just wanted to add my $.02

There are a HOST of issues and/or apps that will contribute to battery drain. LIVE wallpapers, which uses the processor will draw power all the time (while screen is on), it's not a sleep state, is a pretty big screen and requires feeding a 2nd processor for the graphics function as well, etc...

Also, unless you do a true comparative of battery life between two units, one with ONLY live wallpapers, no other apps and another, there really is no way to say, it's just due to the wallpapers. The extended time for recharge has to do with the larger capacity battery as well. All in all people tend to discount that the live wallpapers DOES require processing and when that happens power is consumed, I mean, come on...

All in all, for the amount of time I PLAY with stuff such as the wallpapers (which coincidentally is nothing more than a novelty to me), browsing, mail, text, music, etc., the battery life -vs- use is on par with what I would expect... just my humble opinion.

SporkLover said:

I use the weather live wallpaper and I haven't noticed a hit at all in battery life.

Click to expand...

Does the weather live wall paper tend to be static and not move for you too? if it does move it's only for like 10 seconds then it stops, to me live wallpaper should be moving continuously.

Is there a good widget/app to monitor battery usage so we can compare the two?

I had that problem as well where I would plug my phone in over night, and then within 10 minutes of me unplugging it... went down to 90% battery, so what I did was turn my phone off and charge it overnight while shut off...

doesn't go straight to 90% in 10 minutes after I did that... Let me know if that works for you.

FYI: It might not be as bad as you think. jdsingle posted a link to a great article about your battery meter:

http://androidforums.com/htc-evo-3d/361569-phone-wont-charge-100-capacity.html#post2869367

It's a good read.

My battery life has been far from terrible, even using all my phones features to my satisfaction. I haven't been turning anything off, I use live wallpapers all the time, play games, stream music and video, etc etc...

But yes, my phone also takes up to about 10-12 hours to charge. And before you tell me about all the increased capacity stuff, let me remind you, the Evo charged in under 2 hours, and had a battery that had about 85% of the capacity of the 3vo's.

axisofoil said:

My battery life has been far from terrible, even using all my phones features to my satisfaction. I haven't been turning anything off, I use live wallpapers all the time, play games, stream music and video, etc etc...

But yes, my phone also takes up to about 10-12 hours to charge. And before you tell me about all the increased capacity stuff, let me remind you, the Evo charged in under 2 hours, and had a battery that had about 85% of the capacity of the 3vo's.

Click to expand...

I'm curious; are you charging via a PC or via the AC adapter that's included in the box. Using the adapter, it only takes a 2 hours or so to charge my 3vo. A PC's 500mA USB port takes a lot longer.

SuperC142 said:

I'm curious; are you charging via a PC or via the AC adapter that's included in the box. Using the adapter, it only takes a 2 hours or so to charge my 3vo. A PC's 500mA USB port takes a lot longer.

Click to expand...

Both. As well as a different AC charger (1200mA).

Using a 500mA port, and an estimated conversion loss of 30% (this is very high for lithium batteries, it's close to the estimate for nicad), for a 1730 mAh battery, it should take 4.94 hours to charge from fully drained to fully charged, if the phone is off. Now, the phone is still sucking power, so we have to take that into account. I get about 20-28 hours of battery life from a full charge with my general usage. So, let's say it pulls an additional 30% of the full charge in the amount of time it takes to charge it (there's a lot of math to get here, so bear with me), it should take about 7.5 hours to charge to 100% from 0%, while plugged into a 500mA USB port, assuming that gigantic loss coefficient.

Now, if I were charging on a 1000mA port, like the HTC AC Adapter, using the same 30% charging loss coefficient, should take 2.47 hours to charge while off, so about 12% battery use while charging, giving a total charge time of less than 3 hours from fully dead to 100% while running.

Using my 1200mA charger, it should be right around 2 hours.

Mind you, I'm not charging from 0%-100% (my battery life lasts 20-28 hours if I let it go and use it normally, 60ish projected hours if I just let it sit around). So it should take even less time.

My problem is, the phone seems to be charging at about 400mA (with a more reasonable lithium charging loss of 10%) no matter what I plug it into.

axisofoil said:

But yes, my phone also takes up to about 10-12 hours to charge. And before you tell me about all the increased capacity stuff, let me remind you, the Evo charged in under 2 hours, and had a battery that had about 85% of the capacity of the 3vo's.

Click to expand...

I moved from my EVO 4G to the EVO 3D yesterday and this was one of my biggest concerns. The stock battery on the 4G would charge in about 2 hours (from about 30-35% charge remaining). On the 3D, I was happy to find that it charged in about the same duration. If your phone is taking 10-12 hours, I'd suggest taking it to Sprint for a fix/replacement. 10-12 hours charging time would drive me insane

Lozer_Kid said:

I hate it when they say your phone is supposed to last up to so many hours, but what they don't tell you is that that's only if you pretty much don't use [the full features on] your phone... u_u. Maybe it's just me, I haven't kept track on how long my battery lasts, but it seems like whenever I have a live wallpaper running on my phone, they battery drains way too fast. I say this because I had my phone fully charged and in like 10 mins after unplugging it, it went to 90% of battery charge. So, now I decided that live wallpapers are kind of a no-no for this phone, plus with some live wallpapers, the phone gets a little laggy, not to the point of bothering me, but HTC Sense skips just a little bit. I thought the battery was supposed to last more than what it's lasting right now. My friends has an Epic 4G, also has live wallpapers running in the background and it's not loosing charge as fast as my EVO 3D or getting kinda laggy like my does... Anyone else sharing this same experience?

Click to expand...

FYI, the fact that your battery drops a bit after unplugging has nothing to do with live wallpapers, and everything to do with a charging algorithm designed to maximize the lifespan of the battery. It's called "float charging" and it's good for the battery.