Help 3hours and 30 minutes and already 40% battery

Knitewulf said:

Where did you go to uncheck all the things in the Gmail app? Also how do I tell if the K-9 app is fighting the Gmail one, I didn't set up any other email so I should be good right?

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Settings > Accounts > [your gmail account]

aostang said:

What does your awake time look like in the battery stats graph?

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I repeated the drill again today, leaving it in airplane mode while at work for 9 hours and having 20% battery left. In the Battery Stats graph, the Phone Signal, Awake, Screen on, and Charging graphs are almost pure white across the board. Awake does have 7 blue lines that are the smallest width possible, plus 1 line that is about triple that width.

I really don't get what could be using the battery. I've seen some people suggest that the hardware that detects the battery power could be malfunctioning in these cases. That's the best theory I've heard so far.

Per above, reposting from what I posted on the Moto forums. I forget where I've talked about this and where I have not, but it's definitely pertinent to gallardo's post.

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Well I can note that there was some "weirdness" with the battery reporting when I exchanged my D3 because of a bad Wifi chip. After booting the replacement with my extended battery on it, I asked the rep that we wipe my old D3, so we popped the stock battery on that one. It reported 10% and would not factory reset because that requires 25% battery. So we swapped the one that came in the new box onto my old D3.. 5%. So we got my new D3 to a point that we could shut it down, took the extended battery off of it.. guess what? It reported 10% on the old D3. Wait, what? So we pulled off the extended battery and popped it back on my new phone.. it reported 90% on my new phone. Wow. So we figured we'd have to charge one of the other 2 standard batteries on the old phone so we could do the wipe.. popped one on, booted it.. now it reported 60% battery.

So yeah.. I really do think there is something "odd" with the battery reporting on the D3.. whether it report that the battery is almost dead when it is not, or even possibly that it has fully charged when maybe the battery is only partially charged. "Maybe" that's what some of you are running into. For those that have a battery problem, I'd suggest when it says fully charged, that you unplug and do a battery pull on the phone and see if it still reports 100% charge after you boot it back up. Maybe it's not actually fully charged. Likewise, if your phone is reporting only 5-30% battery life left at the end of the day or what ever time you think you need to charge it, do the same. When you put the battery back in and power back up, make sure the phone is still reporting the low battery % that it was when you just shut it off.

Other than that, I'd recommend that those with bad battery life do a factory reset, install *nothing*, take *every* widget off *every* homescreen, and just use the device as a complete clean slate for a couple of days and see if the problem goes away. If it does not, then you either have a faulty unit or faulty battery. I've heard a few people say they got a replacement battery from Verizon and that it did help with their battery problems.

Another followup on today.. I'm down to 40% now at 19 hours usage, but noticed something interesting. It was a very steady (but faster) slow downhill than yesterday's run with everything off down to 60%, then I noticed at 60% when I started doing some heavy email on my laptop (mostly forum reply response notification.. it's been a flood today helping people try to get root on this thing) and at the point that the heavier email traffic started I noticed a more steep decline and have lost another 20% in just the last 3 or so hours while doing hardly anything besides maybe a dozen texts on the phone. This has been a 50% drop since this morning, where as yesterday I went roughly 16 hours the whole day losing only 20% (and only dropping the extra 10% toward the end of the run). I'm really believing at this point that it is the Gmail sync that is causing a large drain on this phone. Now, I have a *HUGE* inbox with a 4 month backlog of messages that I'm going to finish cleaning out to my backup PST on my desktop, so I will be able to tell if it's a large inbox causing it, or if it's possible the background data setting that I also enabled is contributing to it. I'll turn off background data tonight and give tomorrow the same run with just Gmail enabled out of everything I disabled, but I'm definitely onto something here.

Knitewulf said:

If it happens to be the large gmail inbox causing battery life issues it would make sense as I have a large inbox too.

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For the most accurate test, I'm just disabling background data tomorrow. Friday will be the test with a cleaned up inbox. Also, here's some additional details. Usage with this very different battery life was as follows:

Cell standby 43%
Phone idle 40%
Voice calls 8%
Display 6%
Android OS 4%
Android System 2%

It's fairly obvious at this point that these battery usage statistics are lacking all of the usage information we need and is not accurate. Gmail would not be part of anything except possibly the last 2 entries, and even still those only total 6% which would not account for a 50% battery usage difference between yesterday and today. Whatever is causing the extra drain, this definitely isn't taking it into account at all.

Scratch the idea of just disabling background data and leaving Gmail syncing. It seems Gmail is one of the apps that respects that background data setting and won't automatically sync if background data is off. This leaves me with the impression that Gmail is what is causing the problem. Today's test will instead be background data on, with Gmail sync turned off, and then Friday will be the test of minimizing the number of messages in the inbox if I have time tomorrow night to sort through 4 months of emails lol.

aostang said:

Scratch the idea of just disabling background data and leaving Gmail syncing. It seems Gmail is one of the apps that respects that background data setting and won't automatically sync if background data is off. This leaves me with the impression that Gmail is what is causing the problem. Today's test will instead be background data on, with Gmail sync turned off, and then Friday will be the test of minimizing the number of messages in the inbox if I have time tomorrow night to sort through 4 months of emails lol.

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The market is another app that has issues if you turn it off.

Knitewulf said:

If it happens to be the large gmail inbox causing battery life issues it would make sense as I have a large inbox too.

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To avoid the infamous email bloating and resource hogging issues (common for most Android devices) I keep two accounts. One for my gmail phone account and another home account for 95% of other traffic.

Also have a link to my main home email account in the D3 web browsers, so I can access email if needed, but no resource drain on my phone.

rushmore said:

To avoid the infamous email bloating and resource hogging issues (common for most Android devices) I keep two accounts. One for my gmail phone account and another home account for 95% of other traffic.

Also have a link to my main home email account in the D3 web browsers, so I can access email if needed, but no resource drain on my phone.

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I adopted a zero inbox policy

rushmore said:

The market is another app that has issues if you turn it off.

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Yeah, that one I was aware of.

aostang said:

Scratch the idea of just disabling background data and leaving Gmail syncing. It seems Gmail is one of the apps that respects that background data setting and won't automatically sync if background data is off. This leaves me with the impression that Gmail is what is causing the problem. Today's test will instead be background data on, with Gmail sync turned off, and then Friday will be the test of minimizing the number of messages in the inbox if I have time tomorrow night to sort through 4 months of emails lol.

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I can already tell you Gmail sync is my drain. With background data back on and Gmail sync off, I'm sitting at 9 hours 17 minutes with my battery reporting 90% remaining. The graph at the top is a beautiful straight line going *very* gradually down, showing the 90% to be accurate. usage is:

Cell standby 49%
Phone idle 48%
Android OS 3%
Display 2%

I'll give it the rest of the day, but the culprit has been found. Now to determine if inbox size is the problem with Gmail sync or if there is some other problem with it. There's no way it should be eating 50% battery over the course of the day since it's using push and not polling.

Maybe try a battery exchange.

Knitewulf said:

It sounds lie that's what I'm going to have to do. Should I just go straight for the extended battery?

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Yep.

There must be a bad battery issue, my Droid 3 is at 68% after 17hours. Moderate usage, no gaming. I always use stuff like Dioxit D5 on my battery contacts. It worked wonders on my old BB and works well on my work BB.
I have over 70 apps installed. maybe I am lucky...

JoeFishNC said:

There must be a bad battery issue, my Droid 3 is at 68% after 17hours. Moderate usage, no gaming. I always use stuff like Dioxit D5 on my battery contacts. It worked wonders on my old BB and works well on my work BB.
I have over 70 apps installed. maybe I am lucky...

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40% after 19hrs 20 min. I did a lot of texting though. An hour of music. Synched 200 songs via Spotify. Browsing, etc. I've been reading about people exchanging their batteries and seeing a huge difference. I'm thinking Moto had a bad batch of batteries.

Verizon sent me a replacement battery but I didn't notice any significant change, if at all, in battery life. Oddly enough the new battery they sent me is dated a month older than the battery I got in the droid.

I did the turning off of gmail sync for today and after 8 hours have 60% battery left (at least as reported) and that is with wifi and bt on all day, a couple text messages, a few short calls, app updates, pop mail, weatherbug updates, etc. This is more inline with what I'd expect. Question is, what is messed up with gmail sync that it consumes *that much* battery?

If other 2.3.4 devices don't have this problem, it's possible Motorola has a plugin or other app monitoring this sync or changing how it occurs, and that may be causing it. There's really no reason why the same sync code should drain the battery further on one device than another, unless the D3 cellular radio isn't going to a low power state fast enough after use (if it even does that, I'm not sure).

I reset my phone (Settings > Privacy > Factory Data Reset) and got my first full day (yesterday) of usage on a single charge since I bought it on the day it came out. Today, I installed the Facebook app and the battery life dropped drastically again this morning. I then uninstalled the Facebook app around lunch time and the usage rate improved dramatically in the afternoon.

I know from previous tests, in airplane mode all day, that the heavy battery drain in my case doesn't appear to be related to sync communications, so it would seem to be the Facebook app itself or how Android reacts to its presence on the device (contact integration maybe?). I'm still testing things out, but this is what I've experienced so far.

gallardo said:

I reset my phone (Settings > Privacy > Factory Data Reset) and got my first full day (yesterday) of usage on a single charge since I bought it on the day it came out. Today, I installed the Facebook app and the battery life dropped drastically again this morning. I then uninstalled the Facebook app around lunch time and the usage rate improved dramatically in the afternoon.

I know from previous tests, in airplane mode all day, that the heavy battery drain in my case doesn't appear to be related to sync communications, so it would seem to be the Facebook app itself or how Android reacts to its presence on the device (contact integration maybe?). I'm still testing things out, but this is what I've experienced so far.

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I've always left Facebook sync manual on all of my devices. It's always been a heavy drainer.

aostang said:

I've always left Facebook sync manual on all of my devices. It's always been a heavy drainer.

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I've never had an issue with sync or battery life on my Droid 1 with the Facebook app. I'm using my Droid 3 exactly the same and getting around 10 total hours of battery life compared to over 24 hours with my Droid 1. After a week or so of testing, in my experience, it would seem that either the Droid 3, or Android 2.3 combined with the Facebook app (again in my case) is causing a higher than reasonable battery drain. I need to do some more testing to be 100% certain, but that's where my suspicions are focused.