Root Bad battery life no matter what ROM I use.

[The Wolf Sage]

Hi, all.

Since I'm not a fan of HTC Sense and it doesn't look like an official gingerbread update for the Incredible is coming any time soon I decided to Root my incredible last week and give CM7 RC1 a try. I had some wifi issues (I always keep my phone on wifi since I can't afford to go over my monthly 3G limit) but that might have been because I didn't know enough to turn off mobile networks and disable wifi sleep. But the big issue I had with it was battery life. Granted the Incredible doesn't have the greatest battery life to begin with, but on CM7 my battery life was even worse then normal. Usually if I power my phone off before I go to bed at night with a 100% charge my phone will be at about 99-97% charged when I power it back on in the morning. On CM7 my battery would be at about a 90% charged in the morning. And it took hours and hours to charge. When I looked to see what was eating up all my battery life I found that "display" was using up 79-95% of my battery usage. Just to compare on the stock ROM "display" takes up maybe 20% of my battery usage at most. I set my screen to time out after only 15 seconds and turned the brightness down so low that I could barely see the screen, but nothing helped. I switched from CM7 RC1 to CM7 Nightly 11, but the problem persisted. Next I decided to try Ruby 2.0.2, and that ROM had the exact same problem. The only app I installed was watchdog lite, which showed no problems, so it's not a misbehaving app. I heard that using a diffrent kernel could help, so I tried invisiblek #28 but it didn't really seem to help. My battery life on all three ROM's was so bad that my phone was almost unusable unless I kept it connected to the charger most of the time. Thankfully I had a nandroid backup I could switch back to. I really loved CM7 and would love to go back to it but unless I figure out the battery life issue I'm going to stick with stock. I've read online that my current radio, 2.15.00.07.28, doesn't play well with AOSP ROM's and I need to update to 2.15.00.11.19 to get decent battery life. I wouldn't know how to update my radio, I really wouldn't feel comfortable updating my radio since I'm still pretty new to all this smartphone stuff, and I don't know if it would actually work. Does anyone know what the problem might be, and how I can fix it?

 

[gruss]

Why don't you grab a sense rom, or something like magnolia or something that can be "desensed". Actually i was running a desnesed skyraider 3.5 for a while and the battery life was pretty good, better than stock anyway. Incrom is also sense but load version 1.2. 1.4 is buggy, I'm on 1.2 right now and battery seems ok. Any of the stock roms or even the evo framework roms with something like Lou's #8 kernel will give you better than stock battery. I cant really speak for the ASOP roms you tried as I havent ran them, I actually like the sense features.
Radio upgrades can sound "scary" because you can brick your phone...my advice is find the tutorial on here for it, i know its around here somewhere and make sure you do it with a fully charged battery and you will be fine.

 

[jbdan]

Hi and welcome here

Keep your 7.28 radio, flash the latest nightly (#17 at the moment), boot up to your homescreen drag and drop this kernel onto your SD card then reboot into recovery, wipe dalvik cache and flash the kernel. (There are 2 ".37" invisiblek kernels one is 2.6.37 and the other is 2.6.37.2 with the .2 version adding fast charging. My link is to the non-fast charging ver). After flashing go into your Cyanogen performance settings and set governor to SMARTASS. Let us know what you think and give it a day or 2 before passing judgment. If your battery life stinks after this then something, aka an app, is keeping your phone awake an abnormal amount of time.

 

[ardchoille]

Also I see a lot of people who have battery issues are using a lot of widgets or apps that poll information quite often.

The best thing to do, in my opinion, is:

1. Turn all app refreshes off (except google apps syncing) and refresh anything that needs it when you launch an app - no sense in having an app/widget refreshing while you sleep. Having apps like Facebook, Twitter, weather, etc. constantly polling drains the battery.

2. Turn animations off. Eye candy looks cool but drains the battery.

3. Switch to a light home replacement app.

4. Don't manually kill tasks. Android is hard coded to kill tasks when memory is low and manually killing a task that isn't ready to be killed just causes that task to reload and start its job from scratch.

I'm on a Samsung Vibrant and get about 35 hours on a single charge with moderate use. I saw a significant increase in battery life when I stopped using widgets.

I hope this helps.

 

[scotty85]

Hi and welcome here

Keep your 7.28 radio, flash the latest nightly (#17 at the moment), boot up to your homescreen drag and drop this kernel onto your SD card then reboot into recovery, wipe dalvik cache and flash the kernel. (There are 2 ".37" invisiblek kernels one is 2.6.37 and the other is 2.6.37.2 with the .2 version adding fast charging. My link is to the non-fast charging ver). After flashing go into your Cyanogen performance settings and set governor to SMARTASS. Let us know what you think and give it a day or 2 before passing judgment. If your battery life stinks after this then something, aka an app, is keeping your phone awake an abnormal amount of time.

is this kernal compatible with the 11.19 radio? i just flashed it(the radio,not the kernal)-figured id give it a shot

 

[jbdan]

is this kernal compatible with the 11.19 radio? i just flashed it(the radio,not the kernal)-figured id give it a shot

Affirmative scotty

 

[scotty85]

sweet

 

[Bob Denny]

Here's an interesting one: I love the Incredible. I just bought a "spare" AMOLED one off eBay. Surprisingly it had only 50hr of talk time on it and was in great shape. I did notice that the speaker had a fine black mesh screen over the transducer. This was not present on my original Incredible from last Spring. I'm rooted, so I backed up /emmc and copied the SD, then rooted the new one with unrEVOked then plugged in the SD card clone, did a nandroid restore. Then I restored /emmc. Bingo, My new phone is a clone of my old phone, even down to the Android_ID. Then I registered it on my Verizon number so it'ss my real phone. Finally, I moved my HTC 2100mAh "fat" extended battery over to the new phone.

Now here's the interesting part: The battery life is significantly better. My long story above proves that there is no difference between the two except the hardware.. I'm guessing that there was a design change somewhere along the way which improved battery life, all else being equal.

 

[jbdan]

Here's an interesting one: I love the Incredible. I just bought a "spare" AMOLED one off eBay. Surprisingly it had only 50hr of talk time on it and was in great shape. I did notice that the speaker had a fine black mesh screen over the transducer. This was not present on my original Incredible from last Spring. I'm rooted, so I backed up /emmc and copied the SD, then rooted the new one with unrEVOked then plugged in the SD card clone, did a nandroid restore. Then I restored /emmc. Bingo, My new phone is a clone of my old phone, even down to the Android_ID. Then I registered it on my Verizon number so it'ss my real phone. Finally, I moved my HTC 2100mAh "fat" extended battery over to the new phone.

Now here's the interesting part: The battery life is significantly better. My long story above proves that there is no difference between the two except the hardware.. I'm guessing that there was a design change somewhere along the way which improved battery life, all else being equal.

So your orig Inc is AMOLED as well ehh? That is wild!

How much better is battery life?...this is something that is so difficult to replicate as usage and cell signal vary so much. That is unless your in a controlled situation like sitting at home all day doing the exact same things, running the same apps, talking on the phone the same amount of time etc... on the phone where the radio reception is close to identical.