Let's talk about the battery

My battery went from 70% to 40 % in 1 1/2 hours?? All i did was browse for about 20 minutes straight and send a couple of text messages...should i go to verizon to replace my battery?

thebarbrr said:

My battery went from 70% to 40 % in 1 1/2 hours?? All i did was browse for about 20 minutes straight and send a couple of text messages...should i go to verizon to replace my battery?

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I've found that any browsing--especially with flash--sucks the life out of these batteries. Neither my OG Droid, nor this Droid 3, could handle much surfing without external power connections.

Ricochet said:

I've found that any browsing--especially with flash--sucks the life out of these batteries. Neither my OG Droid, nor this Droid 3, could handle much surfing without external power connections.

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Well when i browse the net on my phone, its either phandroid or android forums 80% of the time..so maybe they are the power suckers ..really though can it be it? krazykrivdia was streaming music and using gps and he was down to 80% at 4 hours?

My phone is fully charged when I go to sleep like at 2am and at 7 was in the 80% it was locked and in sleep mode

dco717 said:

My phone is fully charged when I go to sleep like at 2am and at 7 was in the 80% it was locked and in sleep mode

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oh man you got it bad..lol...my phone does not go down one bit overnight..i went to sleep at 70% and woke up with 70%..hope somebody finds

dco717:

Was display off, or were u actually in sleep mode? Sleep mode I speak of is accessed via LONG PRESS on power button then SLEEP option. I would expect much better battery life on sleep mode then normal screen off (phone idle).

thebarbrr:

displays on phone, at least from my experience, is a huge battery killer. If you plan on doing a lot of web surfing, I do ON DEMAND option for flash, lower screen brightness if possible and a few other things just to keep battery use as low as I can. Also I tend to open only a few pages and spend more time reading, then hoping from link to link <-- assuming the loading of data will consume significant amounts of battery.


Based on MY % lost total and the % each process used (and time it was on) I got a few basic pieces of info:

• Cell Standby = 1.5% of battery/hr
• Phone Idle = 1.5% of battery/hr
• Display (set to LOW, but not LOWEST setting) = 2.5% of battery/hr
• Voice Calls = 15% of battery/ hr
• Display time on + Phone Idle time on = Full time since charge (may be different if you use SLEEP)

*NOTE: the above is not FACT just observation/calculations based on my personal experience. General formula I'm using is..

(TOTAL % LOST) * (% FOR PROCESS) / (LENGTH PROCESS ON) * 60 min = %/hr

If you feel you have craptastic battery, this may be of use. Compare %/hr for each process, and keep in mind things that may cause variance.. for example BRIGHTNESS of display and such.

Something interesting happened to me today. I determined that I had a bad Wifi chip because hotspot flat out would not allow device connections and if a connection was made it was immediately dropped. I brought the phone in with my extended battery and we swapped the extended battery onto my new phone, and the new phone showed the same charge as the old one had. Well, then I asked them if we could wipe my old phone and they said sure and popped the regular battery onto that.. it wouldn't allow the wipe because the regular battery only had 10% charge. Well after giving it a while to charge and it only going to 15% (wipe wants 25%), we decided to just pull my extended battery from the new one real quick and pop it on the old one to do the wipe. We unplugged and popped the regular battery off the old phone and popped the extended battery on it.. turned it on.. the old phone registered my extended battery as only having 10% charge instead of 90%!! We both just looked at each other like wtf?? Popped it off and put it back on the new phone.. back to registering 90% charge. Wow. So then we said screw it we'll just wait, and popped the regular battery on the old phone.. now it registered 60%!! We went in and did the wipe, which it now allowed, powered that phone off and I just left the store with both of us scratching our heads.

Purpose of this story - I'm wondering if the phone isn't always reading the charge correctly. Maybe when the phone says the battery is almost dead, some of us should start pulling and reseating the battery and see if it reports the same charge still on the reboot.

Thats very similar to the problem im having with my extended battery( called support and they are sending me a new battery) but today took it off the charger and then it dropped to 90 % at one point, put it in my pocket and an hour later it said it was at 100%. Then streamed 3 straight hours of music using zumocast....still at 100% streamed 45 minutes of netflix on my drive home( not watching just wanted to see what it would do) still 100 %

Finally let it sit for another hour and it dropped to 90%...then it dropped from 90 to 50 in like 2 minutes....this is the second time this has happened

Display was off and no apps were running

ekyle said:

I can definitely say that the case fits with the extended battery as I won them both. Just trying to say that it will fit

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Which case are you using that fits with the extended battery? Is it the official one from Verizon?

aostang said:

Purpose of this story - I'm wondering if the phone isn't always reading the charge correctly. Maybe when the phone says the battery is almost dead, some of us should start pulling and reseating the battery and see if it reports the same charge still on the reboot.

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I had a similar experience, but didn't pay attention to it at the time.

When I popped the battery into my newly arrived phone--it showed 10%. So, I plugged in the charger & played with the interface for a few, then it spontaneously rebooted. After which the battery showed 60%.

They don't charge that fast when shut down!

timworksjon said:

Which case are you using that fits with the extended battery? Is it the official one from Verizon?

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Yea, the blue hard case. I figured that was my best chance. This one I believe. VZW's site is a PITA to search when you're not logged in haha

On wednesday I installed juice defender, turned off my gps radio, and installed a new battery widget because I wasn't happy with the battery life on my week-old d3. The next day my battery life was notably worse and I was very aggravated.

While I don't think juice defender caused any problems with battery life I think it made some apps less responsive so I deleted it.

Then I landed on a couple other changes and my battery life has greatly improved.

• I turned off all location based services. I had figured that they'd be no problem since I had already turned off gps, but now I don't think so.

• Go SMS Pro had encouraged me to enable a background service when I installed it. A couple days ago I turned this off. (Still have GSP, just not the background service.)

As said, battery life jumped way up after making these changes. On wednesday I was at 15% left after 9 hours. On thursday, after these changes, I was at 70% remaining after 9 hours.

One more blip: from 70% it dropped to 50% in about an hour. An investigation showed that some of my battery was used by Flight Tracker. This was surprising because, though I had installed Flight Tracker a few days earlier, I had never run it. I uninstalled FT.

After that by battery drain returned to how it had been earlier in the day. The next day, after 6 hours off the charger I still had 80% remaining with moderate use. Today I had 90% left after 6 hours; less use today but that is still a verifiable improvement.

-boster

boster said:

I've had my phone for about a week, and I'm less than thrilled with the battery life. There are things I can try, and I will. But it's not lasting as long as it did on my D1, with the same usage. As it stands now it's livable, but I'll normally have to charge during the day unless I can get some improvement. I rarely needed that with my D1.

I've been leaving my GPS radio on. I did on my D1 and it seemed to be okay. Maybe that's a problem. I'll start turning it off.

I'll try Juice Defender, which was recommended up above.

-boster

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Juice Defender in the standard (default) setting hasn't done much for me. I haven't really noticed any benefits from it. I noticed it has an "aggressive" mode, so I'll probably give that a shot eventually, but haven't yet. But battery performance is still pretty poor, since like Day 1 from 2.5 weeks ago. This morning, for example, on a fully charged battery, I was down to 90% in just a half hour. I was at 30% in the late afternoon and put it back on the charger.

Edit: At least 1 thing about this phone/battery is that is that the battery is in increments of 10% (until the end, when it does 5% increments) and it doesn't randomly go up and down. My previous phone, for example (LG enV Touch) had the battery reading from 1 to 4. When it dropped from 4 to 3, from that point on, it would randomly go from 1 to 3 bars left, depending on if I had sent picture messages or taken a call. It was annoying to say the least, but the phone almost always lasted me a full day.

beowulf7 said:

Juice Defender in the standard (default) setting hasn't done much for me. I haven't really noticed any benefits from it. I noticed it has an "aggressive" mode, so I'll probably give that a shot eventually, but haven't yet. But battery performance is still pretty poor, since like Day 1 from 2.5 weeks ago. This morning, for example, on a fully charged battery, I was down to 90% in just a half hour. I was at 30% in the late afternoon and put it back on the charger.

Edit: At least 1 thing about this phone/battery is that is that the battery is in increments of 10% (until the end, when it does 5% increments) and it doesn't randomly go up and down. My previous phone, for example (LG enV Touch) had the battery reading from 1 to 4. When it dropped from 4 to 3, from that point on, it would randomly go from 1 to 3 bars left, depending on if I had sent picture messages or taken a call. It was annoying to say the least, but the phone almost always lasted me a full day.

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Sounds like a bad app somewhere. Even on the stock battery I didn't hit 90
% until at least 2 hrs off the charger. That was with spotify in offline mode, and some texting.

ekyle said:

Sounds like a bad app somewhere. Even on the stock battery I didn't hit 90
% until at least 2 hrs off the charger. That was with spotify in offline mode, and some texting.

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I doubt it b/c "Cell standby" and "Phone idle" are the 2 worst consumers of my battery.

beowulf7 said:

At least 1 thing about this phone/battery is that is that the battery is in increments of 10% (until the end, when it does 5% increments) and it doesn't randomly go up and down.

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This might help some of us assess our batteries a little more accurately (or drive us even more crazy as we watch it painfully!): Circle Battery Widget will show the battery level in 1% increments.

PiperCub49 said:

This might help some of us assess our batteries a little more accurately (or drive us even more crazy as we watch it painfully!): Circle Battery Widget will show the battery level in 1% increments.

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I wonder why they don't since laptop batteries have 1% granularity. But in any case, 10% increment is better than the 25% increment of my previous phone (which had the 4 bars, 3 bars, etc. I mentioned).

It might save on some battery not having it poll the remaining % all the time

ekyle said:

It might save on some battery not having it poll the remaining % all the time

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Percentage remaining wouldn't have anything to do with polling frequency. You can poll once a minute and still report in 10% or 1% increments.

Just a little update. Got my replacement battery and have had 2 days of good battery life...knock on wood.. maybe it was just a batch of bad batteries

Was at 40% after 8 hrs but 6 and 1/2 hrs I was at work not using it and it started fully charged I hate my battery life my phone dies in a heart beat

ekyle said:

I can definitely say that the case fits with the extended battery as I won them both. Just trying to say that it will fit

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The VZW hard case does "just" fit with the extended battery, but seems to make the the D3 too bulky to hold and use with it on, IMO. The extra wait also was noticed. D3 handling IMO is much better without it, but comes with the obvious risk (without a case).

rushmore said:

The VZW hard case does "just" fit with the extended battery, but seems to make the the D3 too bulky to hold and use with it on, IMO. The extra wait also was noticed. D3 handling IMO is much better without it, but comes with the obvious risk (without a case).

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I dropped my DX and scuffed up the edges. I might have OCD or something, but it drove me nuts. So I just opted for the case form the start this time around.

I really think the battery usage is made up. Im at 30 percent with about two hours browsing and youtube, but it say my voice calls are 70% of my usage when I haven't made a call since yesterday. It says voice calls on for 6 hours I don't think I've talked that much in a combined two weeks