Battery Life

[MartinS]

I was at my in-laws yesterday, they live in a village with no signal at all (except for the window in the bathroom...). I noticed that my battery lasted much worse than normal.

I would say this and using GPS are 2 of the most battery hungry operations when the screen is not in use.

 

[AnotherFatalEpic]

Also you might want to check your charge state. I didn't realize it until just a bit ago but the light on the top turning green doesn't indicate a FULL charge. I think it may turn on at 90%. Make sure you charge it until it says "charged" on the lock screen.

THANK YOU. I was about to post...

"My battery has been great so far, voice calls and GPS navigation drain it but I'd expect that.
Until TODAY when I charged it via USB cable till the light turned green. And after a 5min call my battery was at 88%!!"

I can assume, now, that my battery is still perfectly fine because I might have unplugged it at 90% instead of 100%.

The only thing I'm worried about now.. is it OK to charge it from 90% or is it really better to wait until its around 30% before plugging it back in?

I read about "conditioning" your battery and I've always let it get to 20% or so until I do a full charge. I'm on my 4th or 5th cycle but then I also read that this is completely unnecessary. Can anyone explain the "truth"?

 

[AnotherFatalEpic]

What I think would solve a lot of people's problems... a "Spare Battery" available at Nexus One Phone - Web meets phone.

 

[davix8]

sry but.. what the hell is a rogue app? and how do i reognize one?

 

[mkrmec]

In my opinion all apps except the ones that you have running when you firmware reset your phone are rogue

Rogue apps are the apps that are running and don't need to be running and are just draining battery for no reason because of it.

 

[Dolmangar]

I seem to be one of the people with battery life issues as well. I can't make it though eight hours without a charge.

Today I installed ATK (free) to give it a try and see what it could tell me. Up until now I'd been using the Running Services under Applications to manually kill things.

Some info about usage.
1. I'm on AT&T so I've got 3G turned off, and run WiFi while at home.
2. I spend maybe spend 10 minutes on the phone a day
3. Half a dozen texts
4. Three email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Exchange)
5. I had been running News and Weather widgets but I've turned them off to experiment.
6. I keep the display brightness down using the power widget.
7. Live Wallpaper (just turned it off because status says it's 9% of my battery usage)

After a reboot ATK tells me the following are running:
1. Voice Search (this is really aggressive, once killed it's back up in a few minutes and I never use it).
2. Google Voice
3. EMail
4. Messaging
5. Note Everything
6. NewsRob
7. Finance
8. Clock
9. MP3 Store (I haven't even registered this to Amazon, and can't seem to kill it, it restarts on its own every once in a while)
10. Voice Dialer (any way to stop this from starting?)
11. Gallery (I have a Picasa web album configured, as well as downloaded, and camera albums)
12. Weather Bug (set to manual sync)
13. Settings
14. Advanced Task Killer Free

That's after a reboot (soft boot, not pulling the battery).

Just Killed everything except Email, Settings, ATK)

I'm working though the list of apps to see what I can disable and reconfigure. Obviously its a smart phone, if I have to turn off everything, then what's the point? However, reading though the posts here it seems like a number of people are getting pretty good battery life so there is hope.

BTW, in the time it took me to write the above, Weather Bug and Voice Search have restarted.

If I see some improvement I may upgrade to the automatic version. Right now I didn't start with a full charge. I charged all night, and disconnected around 8am, phone says I'm at 55% (11:40 am now) but I've been tinkering with apps to change settings for a while now.

Hopefully I can report back some gains. Can anyone comment more on automatic task killers?

 

[rynowhi]

Is anyone getting anywhere near the claimed 7 hours of talk time? My battery has been performing well for the last few weeks unless I use google navigation (still waiting on the car dock) or I talk for an hour. 60 minutes of talk time = 38% of my total battery on average for the past 2 weeks. That gives me a whopping 2 hours and 15 minutes of talk time if I do nothing else besides use my phone as a phone. I'd be fine with that number if I could also use the smart features, actually I would expect that. But instead I'm drained to 30% battery by noon (averages for the past 8 business days): I talk for 40 minutes in the morning, check 5-10 emails, use google maps three times (no navigation), send 3-5 texts, and browse the internet for 15-20 minutes.

 

[thengodisseven]

If you haven't completely drained the battery to below 5% once, I recommend doing just that. Do it at night just before sleeping, I had the screen on full blast with a long time to timeout, and mp3s playing. It will automatically shutoff at just below 5% battery level.

Put it on the ac charger overnight, let it get a 100% charge. The charger has a chip to keep it from overcharging the battery. This will 'train' your battery.

I had immediate results after doing this and I haven't looked back. Some say you should do something like this once a month, which I will try. But my battery life now is longer than my iphone's was. I am often at 75% full after getting home from work. I leave the phone on the charger each night because I want to start the day with 100%

 

[Dolmangar]

Early on I did do a full discharge and recharge. But I'll give it another try.

During the week I'm in a building with poor cell reception, so I figured that I was draining the battery because it was constantly looking for signal. Which was fine because I could just charge at my desk. With all the snow in DC I've been at home for several days and realized that I'm getting terrible battery life. Perhaps the combination of full discharge and task killing will solve the issue.

 

[herojames]

Hey all

just a quick one, on my blackberry storm 1 which i had the battery life was dire, im sure google will update again soon to address this, i find now with smartphones, i have a hero and a storm two that i have to charge them each night. blackberry improved the battery life by about 50% with software updates, i bet over the next few months HTC and google will do the same. i mean lets face it, consumers these days are essentially part of the testing process, our hunger for more features and speeds drives this rush to market, the price we pay is updates and tweaks. we shouldnt be surprised microsoft have done this for years

james

 

[Dolmangar]

So yesterday I did a full discharge and recharge to start clean.

I turned off the Active Wallpaper (my wife thought the grass was cool).
I also removed the Weather and News widgets from my home page and changed the refresh settings a little on email.

Throughout the day I used ATK to kill off things that started on their own, or after I'd used them. I used the phone throughout the day (browsing, trying Buzz, some email, some texting), turning off WIFI when I wasn't using it, but I gave it a pretty average use.

After 13 hours I was at 23% battery power. Previously I couldn't make it though 5 hours without needing a charge.

So I don't yet know if it was a particular widget, or application, or just a combination of everything. I'll probably turn things on one by one to see if I find something that really kills battery. It could also be that it just needed to calibrate the battery meter.

Thanks for the suggestions, hopefully some of what I've posted will help someone else out.

 

[strictly86]

Bluetooth, screen brightness are the biggest killers...I have got WI-Fi on, gps on, sync on, brightness at like 5-10% and currently i am 76% after 8hours 14 minutes....with bluetooth on for about 1hour and 25 minutes

 

[outoffocus]

New to the forum (and Android/N1). All great so far. Might need some advice on fighting my new phone addiction, but that is for another time.

Been on the lookout for a good AA battery pack with a USB out connector. Something you can just plug the standard USB to mirco USB cable into and then power the phone. Something like this only maybe with a more solid look and feel.

USB Battery Box -Convert 4 AA Batteries to USB Port Power

I'm a working photographer and have been dealing with batteries (and packs) for years. I let the batteries fully discharge before recharging as much as possible. Works for me.

 

[mi_canuck]

I'm back b!tches!!! couldn't stand the BB anymore... Will give the Nexus another college try... just got it a few minutes ago... We'll see how battery life goes this go-round...

 

[mi_canuck]

plugged in now... not even using it til fully charged for the first charge...

 

[mi_canuck]

just discovered... 10% off on the Seidio site right now... great discount to order a battery.... code is: LOVE2010

 

[hllwyh]

So, after starting this thread and getting pretty annoyed at my battery life, I called HTC. The guy wasn't that helpful. I jumped through all the hoops, just to show that I hadn't got anything running that was going to kill the battery. I understand that he had to check a lot of things. When I got nowhere, he told me to run down my battery to zero, wait until the phone switched itself off, then charge it again. I hadn't done this since after its first charge. I agreed to do that, but got a case number, because I was sure I'd be calling back to try to get a better battery.

So, I turned on GPS navigation and Pandora and killed the battery over the course of around an hour (from 22%). I took the battery out, left it sitting out for maybe 20 mins, and recharged it overnight. I was shocked to see that it actually helped a lot - now I'm able to use my phone throughout the day (8-5) and have around 50% battery at the end of it. Nothing like the first day, when I tried to show it to some friends at 2.30PM, just to have the battery die in mid Google Goggles demonstration.

So I wonder if we should start off doing this once to begin with. I just received my N1 and I am charging (no playing) now. Should I have turned it on and drained it first? I realize they recommend just charging (which is what I am doing), but this response makes me wonder. I will follow the instructions for now, but if I have the same issue I will drain it and recharge.

 

[AnotherFatalEpic]

Innocell 1600mAh Extended Life Battery

How much more life would this give? Anyone know the mAh of the original?

Also... I wonder if this voids the warranty... since its non-htc/google made

I guess if anything DID happen than I could swap them out and complain that the orig. battery was defective.... (not that I would ever do that)

 

[mi_canuck]

So I wonder if we should start off doing this once to begin with. I just received my N1 and I am charging (no playing) now. Should I have turned it on and drained it first? I realize they recommend just charging (which is what I am doing), but this response makes me wonder. I will follow the instructions for now, but if I have the same issue I will drain it and recharge.

No what you're doing is what you're supposed to do... I just got mine (it's my 2nd one) today... charged it fully before even setting it up.... I think it's a good idea to drain a Li-Ion about once a month fully... but certainly not the first time (my opinion) and not too often... Frequent top ups usually are best - so I've read....

 

[mi_canuck]

Innocell 1600mAh Extended Life Battery

How much more life would this give? Anyone know the mAh of the original?

Also... I wonder if this voids the warranty... since its non-htc/google made

I guess if anything DID happen than I could swap them out and complain that the orig. battery was defective.... (not that I would ever do that)

In theory... about 14% extra (200 extra mAh, equates to 14% of 1400mAh... ) I would trust the Seidio battery before the HTC one (made in China)... at least the Seidio ones are labeled with "cells from Japan".... or something to that effect...

I'll be getting mine soon hopefully... will test it out...

 

[hllwyh]

No what you're doing is what you're supposed to do... I just got mine (it's my 2nd one) today... charged it fully before even setting it up.... I think it's a good idea to drain a Li-Ion about once a month fully... but certainly not the first time (my opinion) and not too often... Frequent top ups usually are best - so I've read....

Yes I agree and that is what I have done.

 

[BlueScreenJunky]

In theory... about 14% extra (200 extra mAh, equates to 14% of 1400mAh... ) I would trust the Seidio battery before the HTC one (made in China)... at least the Seidio ones are labeled with "cells from Japan".... or something to that effect...

I'll be getting mine soon hopefully... will test it out...

Isn't the original battery supposed to be 1500 mAh and not 1400 ? I keep reaing 1500 everywhere.
Anyway, I'm very interested in reviews or feedback of this Seidio battery.

 

[Lucifer]

Original battery is 1400 mAh. 1500 mAh is battery in Galaxy I7500.

 

[mi_canuck]

Isn't the original battery supposed to be 1500 mAh and not 1400 ? I keep reaing 1500 everywhere.
Anyway, I'm very interested in reviews or feedback of this Seidio battery.

Definitely 1400... it's printed right on the battery

 

[mi_canuck]

so far so good with the new Nexus!!!

at 5hrs 30min and still at 72% and this is with WiFi and GPS both ON, streamed a bit of Pandora - about 30min maybe... watched a bit of video... sent a few txts and browsed a little bit... not much.... currently have auto-brightness on, but i'm still undecided if i'll keep it that way or run at a static 10-15% brightness... we'll see...

not my heaviest usage day but overall quite pleased... my first Nexus would be around 40% by now if now lower.... more proof that there was something definitely wrong with it...


PS - a good battery widget is 'BatteryLife' (all one word, there's another called 'Battery Life')... this one is by CurveFish.... can modify the colours and gives you battery health as well.... quite handy





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