Droid 4 Battery Woes - Is My Experience "Normal"?

I am having the same experience with the droid 4. I can never get more than 4 hours out of a charge.

KBoy420 said:

Hi Guys,

So I've had the Droid 4 for just about 2 weeks. Needed to have my first replaced because VZW determined it had a defective battery. I'm having enormous issues getting through the work day (8 hours) on a single charge.

This morning, I took the phone off the charger at 7:30am. It is now 10am and in that time, my battery has discharged 20%. I sent approx. 10-12 txt messages and looked at email for approx 10 minutes.

What I've Done To Help Battery Life:
- turned screen brightness down as low as possible
- turned off all auto-updates for social feeds and email, etc.
- turned off 4G (what's the point in a 4G phone??)
- turned off GPS & WiFi
- display timeout set to 15 seconds

I'm wondering if you other Droid 4 users are experiencing this horrible battery performance as well. My biggest concern is that if I have to charge all the time, I'm going to kill the already useless battery and then I can't even buy a new battery.

So I went out and bought a 4G phone and have basically dummed it down equal the 4 year old Blackberry that I was trying to upgrade from.

Can you guys give me any advice on what else I can do for battery performance? Or at least tell me this type of performance is "normal" for the Droid 4 so I don't feel like I have a second defective phone/battery.

Ughhhh...thank you!

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Could you possibly post a picture or typed in the breakdowns of your battery usage?

Use SmartActions or Juice Defender. Both go a LONG way in terms of battery for me. I get at least 14 hours out of my battery using JD. Also, don't be afraid to use wi-fi at work. It uses much less juice than 3G. It only becomes counter-productive when you aren't in a wi-fi area and it's constantly looking for the signal.

AMTrombley0924 said:

Use SmartActions or Juice Defender. Both go a LONG way in terms of battery for me. I get at least 14 hours out of my battery using JD. Also, don't be afraid to use wi-fi at work. It uses much less juice than 3G. It only becomes counter-productive when you aren't in a wi-fi area and it's constantly looking for the signal.

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Quick question, is Juice Defender Ultimate worth purchasing? Is there a drastic change in battery life between the two programs? (Free/Ultimate)

I would say yes. There are SO many more customization options, and with Ultimate I got 2x battery life once

Have you checked your battery usage? You can get "bad ass battery monitor" to get more detailed results.

There are a few things you can do, and by looking at those apps mentioned above I think you are well on your way to doing them... but specifically you need to kill apps that are running in the background when you are not using them. So for example, set stuff like "Play Store" to auto-end after 2 minutes of un-use, etc etc.. Also, you need to pay careful attention to your apps - for example, I installed (and love) Touchdown to act as my corporate email client, but for some reason if I set the sync from 30 days to 60 days I seem to get stuck in this endless sync loop... If I was not paying close attention to the grey-on-black 'sync status text' I would not have know this, and that would have meant my phone was maxing out data use 24/7, turning a 10 hour average charge into like a 2 hour charge....

A couple quick things too on your other things you mention - the Droid 4 battery can be replaced, it just has to be done so by Verizon. FAR FAR FAR from ideal, but still not the same as unable to be replaced. Then, I dont know what you mean by 'whats the use of a 4g phone?'. I suppose for only voice phone calls, then nothing, but for any data-based activity the use is that its like 10 times faster than 3g! I can upload a 40mb video clip to Flickr in like a minute...

bigmatty said:

Then, I dont know what you mean by 'whats the use of a 4g phone?'. I suppose for only voice phone calls, then nothing, but for any data-based activity the use is that its like 10 times faster than 3g! I can upload a 40mb video clip to Flickr in like a minute...

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I believe what he meant was, if you have to turn the 4G off on a 4G phone what is the point of having a 4G phone in the first place)which I agree with).

Ive noticed when "my gallery" is running in the background for no apparent reason the battery life goes really fast.

Some things I've done to achieve an 8-10 hour charge with casual usage

Instructions for this can easily be found on Google. Most of it is on the xda forums

First, you have to update to the 219 version
The update improves battery life

Second, root that sucker using motofail

Third, debloat, you can find a list of safe to FREEZE apps on xda
You can do this with root uninstall er pro

Turn off all location services

Something I noticed was that when I organized my apps in the app drawer by frequency of use, was that maps, latitude, social places and navigation were always at the top of the list, but never appeared in the battery usage. I use Pandora and the browser FAR more than anything else and they were always below them.

So I froze maps, and since the others are tied into maps, they went with it.

Another thing I did was froze my images, my files, and my music.
These are additional apps that motorola installs and seem to use the network for some reason.
I then installed a market file browser and image viewer that uses far fewer resources.
And use Google play music which is already on the phone




Remember, freeze the apps
Don't uninstall them, you'll need to unfreeze them to install ota updates and patches
And you'll need them when ice cream sandwich comes out too

Edit: I worked 9 hour shift tonight, listening to Pandora on 4g from start to finish. Had 20% remaining
The 8-10 hour guess at the beginning of this post was just that, a guess. Now I estimate I could easily get much more with casual use.

Some good info in this..

Root, purchase Titanium Backup Pro and have it freeze DRM Protected Content. That's what was killing my battery. The only downside is you lose access to DRMed media.

silverfang77 said:

Root, purchase Titanium Backup Pro and have it freeze DRM Protected Content. That's what was killing my battery. The only downside is you lose access to DRMed media.

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DRMed Media?