Battery problems, quirks and issues: Read first.

[tkascak]

I've noticed the same thing with my phone. Charging level drops off 100% down to 80% practically as fast as I can walk from house to the car. I noticed it this morning because the inidicator on my handsfree in the car showed my level wasnt full and I thought that was strange since it was charging all night.

More importantly, its not just a level indicator problem, this thing just doesn't last. I hardly made any calls, sent some text messages and have activesync setup on it. 8 Hours laters, the thing says its on 15% of life. And, it died an hour later. 9 Hours for a phone is ridiculous. I've used a bunch of crappy phones and I'm beginning to miss my old Blackjack already. Hell, even in 3g mode, it would last almost two days with similar usage.

My girlfriend also got a hero so I've had a chance to play with that and the battery life on that is better but it aint much to crow about either.

We might end up returning them both. I really like the android setup but I need a phone that can last a whole day not just 9 hours.

 

[dkjones96]

Mine dropped to 80 like you guys said but life is seeming about right for a phone rated to 5.5 hours of talk time. I pulled mine off the charger at exactly 5 and it is now rolling over to 9 and with about 3-3.5 hours of talking on the bluetooth while using the wifi heavily for internet I still haven't killed it. It is giving me a charge warning but has been at 5% for a while now. I've been tasking it enough to make it nice and warm too.

Waiting for it to die watching music videos now.

Those of you not seeing a days worth of use from a single charge, what all do you have running on the phone? Email, IM?

Even my Q with a 300MHz processor and a fresh 1640mAh extended battery couldn't take this kind of abuse and still be on. The talk time alone would have damn near killed that phone. A quick way to slaughter your battery is frequent email checks. Blackberrys have push email that other phones don't so they last MUCH longer with email.

 

[Edaze55]

Those of you not seeing a days worth of use from a single charge, what all do you have running on the phone? Email, IM?

To be perfectly honest, the battery life on the Hero was much better than this even if you had one that wasnt sleeping. Its really unacceptable for any type of phone.

There is only 60mAh difference between this and the HTC Hero. Larger processor, but more efficent screen. The Hero also has a lot more widgets running in Sense. I swear it was supposed to ship with 1350mAh, but its got 1440mAh. It doesnt make any sense why the Moment has such bad battery life.

 

[emcube]

Mine dropped to 80 like you guys said but life is seeming about right for a phone rated to 5.5 hours of talk time. I pulled mine off the charger at exactly 5 and it is now rolling over to 9 and with about 3-3.5 hours of talking on the bluetooth while using the wifi heavily for internet I still haven't killed it. It is giving me a charge warning but has been at 5% for a while now. I've been tasking it enough to make it nice and warm too.

Waiting for it to die watching music videos now.

Those of you not seeing a days worth of use from a single charge, what all do you have running on the phone? Email, IM?

Even my Q with a 300MHz processor and a fresh 1640mAh extended battery couldn't take this kind of abuse and still be on. The talk time alone would have damn near killed that phone. A quick way to slaughter your battery is frequent email checks. Blackberrys have push email that other phones don't so they last MUCH longer with email.

if my phone lasted that long with that kind of usage, i wouldnt be concerned at all. i'm trying to figgure out what is running invisibly that is draining the battery prematurely.

list of installed 3rd party apps:

-weather channel update has been uninstalled and removed widget.
-google maps(list it because it locates me in Tulsa, wherever that is...)
-google skymap
-handcent sms
-instant lyrics(app that pulls lyrics from internet when playing mp3)
-layar
-locale (doesnt work because not able to correctly locate my current position)
-ringdroid
-robodefense
-shazam
-taskiller
-tts translator w/ tts service extended
-ultra notes
-video player
-yellowbook
-no IM client installed and gmail is set to retrieve every hour

any ideas?

 

[Deleted User]

I have gotten through two full days of good usage, though my battery indicator wasn't happy today, it doesn't to actually affect the phone's usage time for me.

 

[ragingbull2k2]

been stuck at 60% CHARGING for the past hour or so... ran the battery dead (3% and shut itself off) at work... plugged it in at 10:15pm PST... will report back when it is at 100% (if I'm still awake, lol)

Joey

 

[ragingbull2k2]

was at 70% for a while, but then I rebooted the phone to get the tethering working... when it came back on, it was at 90%... been there for 30 minutes or so... will reboot and see if that changes anything...

Joey

 

[billbunton]

Mine was actually up to 100% this morning, and that lasted for almost half an hour. It's been off the charger (and barely used) for an hour and a half now and is down to 80%, so I guess nothing's really changed, but it was kind of nice to see 100% for once

 

[abrahan]

Download "Battery Graph" from the app store. It gives you a visual of your battery usage and charging.

thnx, its a good way to show how proof of how it goes from 100 to 80 in no time.

 

[satinkzo]

To update my little experiment from last night where I just ran the battery till the phone turned off and then turned it back on till it ran and turned off again then put it on the charger overnight....

This morning, I took the phone off the charger at 6:30am, it's now 8:30am and I ran the GPS today for 20 minutes to test something, then browsed the web for a quick 2-3 minutes.

Battery is at 90%

 

[jaywku]

Woke up this morning pulled phone off charger... BOOM 90% the second I pulled it off. Within 5 minutes I was at 80% after reading 2 emails.... This sucks

 

[awrnsmn]

I've also noticed the battery only shows in increments of 10. When it's showing 80% is it actually 89%? Hard to tell with the increments of 10. Has anyone found a patch or program that shows actual battery percentage instead of calculated? I wonder if it will get better after it's conditioned like the Palm Pre. It took a week before the battery was good and didn't die after 6 hours.

 

[satinkzo]

I've also noticed the battery only shows in increments of 10. When it's showing 80% is it actually 89%? Hard to tell with the increments of 10. Has anyone found a patch or program that shows actual battery percentage instead of calculated? I wonder if it will get better after it's conditioned like the Palm Pre. It took a week before the battery was good and didn't die after 6 hours.

See that's what I am wondering and was thinking the same thing. I think the battery guage is just junk for the most part, but the battery is fine. As I noted earlier, the battery on my phone said 5% for over an hour and the WHOLE TIME I was using the web AND had my GPS radio on. Then when it powered off, I turned it back on and resumed the same activity for another 20 minutes before finally the phone just would not stay powered on.

Today, so far as I noted earlier, it's been 2 hours of basic use or web, email and GPS thrown in for 20 minutes and I'm still at 90% (which might be 90% or 95% etc)

 

[awrnsmn]

Hopefully after a little time we'll notice a gain in battery life. I'm going to keep looking for a better battery widget with actual percent left. Thanks for the reply.

 

[satinkzo]

9:10 am. Been off charger for about 2.5 hours now. In addition to the usage above, I had a 10 minute phone conversation

battery still at 90% (I am using a battery widget to display on the home screen)

 

[deadsoccer]

How is it that the reviews never mention horrible battery life? I don't remember a single Hero or Moment review trashing the phone for the bad battery, though obviously both sets have big issues.

Do reviews expect bad things about the battery since they are constantly messing with the phone?

Maybe there is something to the battery being conditioned theory. Seems this issue has plagued the Hero (myself included) and now is present on the Moment.

Seems wierd reviewers would not pick up on this--maybe the PR folks at the respective companies send units to the reviewers that have a batter that has already gone the charge cycles.

 

[Silverexpress]

Got mine to go to 100% by setting it to Airplane Mode before I went to bed last night. This shut down the Cell Voice and Data radios.

I've tried a few apps from Android Market. One I truly like is Advanced Task Manager by Arron La. It has a one button click to kill all Tasks, and by doing this you'll find the persistent ones re-initiate.

Here is a run down of what I've got....

Waze
Car Locator
Where
DTG 2.0
US Yellow Pages Search
Craigslist Notification
FLixster Movies
Advanced Task Manager
Ultimate Stopwatch
Better Keyboard
Amazon.com
Droid Live Lite
Meridian Player
Astrid
Pinball
Power Manager Full
Shop Savy
Night Clock
AK Notepad
SplashID
Scan2PDF Lite

The reason I've listed these is because some are stay resident. For example Craigslist Notification. It just keeps coming back. Thus, I'm going to ask the developer if he/she can include the option to kill this task from the app when not needed, since it continually access the internet for listing updates in the background.

Same with NFL - the program that came preloaded. It can't be killed, and is always active.

In fact, I'm going to write the developers of each programs above and ask two things....

1. Is this optimized for the hardware of the Moment?
2. Please provide the option to kill this app as a menu item

So if your downloading apps like crazy be wary that some may stay active in the background consuming hardware resources (aka battery power) even though you are not in it.

 

[satinkzo]

9:10 am. Been off charger for about 2.5 hours now. In addition to the usage above, I had a 10 minute phone conversation

battery still at 90% (I am using a battery widget to display on the home screen)

10am. Still at 90%. So 3.5 hours and still at 90% since I completely discharged the battery last night to the point it would not even start the phone, then recharged over night.

 

[dkjones96]

After killing mine last night(almost, I ended up losing radio and just charged it) and I've been off about an hour with light usage and the battery says 90%.

I noticed the same thing satinkzo, it lasted a LONG time after hitting 5%. I'm sure that after a complete kill tonight it'll be just fine. The battery tender just needs to learn where the upper and lower limits of the battery are.

 

[jaywku]

After killing mine last night(almost, I ended up losing radio and just charged it) and I've been off about an hour with light usage and the battery says 90%.

I noticed the same thing satinkzo, it lasted a LONG time after hitting 5%. I'm sure that after a complete kill tonight it'll be just fine. The battery tender just needs to learn where the upper and lower limits of the battery are.

I hope you guys are right... I REALLY like this phone but it's gonna have to go back if it lasts only half a day. I'm gonna try and kill mine tonight as well


After 2 hours: about 8 emails read, 2 phone calls, 5 min of internet, one trip to app store with no download....70%

 

[billbunton]

After getting to 100% overnight, I somewhat gradually went down to 50% over the course of five hours. One minute later I was at 15%. Spare Parts isn't showing anything in particular (i.e. nothing using a lot of partial wake time, or GPS (after killing TWC)). The "good" news is that Monday I hit 15% a little earlier in the day, and was still at 5% when I went home...

 

[billbunton]

And now I'm down to 5%, much faster than Monday.

Of course, that may be because the location system seems to think I'm in Poland, while Sprint is telling it my time zone is some south atlantic island.

But five minutes on the charger and the battery is showing 60%

 

[satinkzo]

11:30am now, About 5 hours off the charger, In the last hour or so, I had another phone call and then surfed a data download intensive site for 20 minutes (lots of graphs and pictures). Also went to the market and got a couple apps.

Battery now down to 60%

 

[indiana jones]

i finished charging the phone at 9pm had a 1hr conversation 1 hr. of web surfing and went to sleep at 11pm. this morning the battery was at 70 percent. thats down 10% from last night. a couple of calls today listen to music on the speaker while surfing for 30 mins and its down to 40% at 11:00 am today. weird thing is that i read some post that if you restart you might get a different reading. i just restarted and the phone is back up to 60%. im also not using the default sms app and switched to handcent to see if its that sms bug but i dont think theres a diff. why would i have to restart the phone to get a better reading of the battery?idk im going to try and recalibrate the battery today and see if that works. although its not great battery life its no diff than the hero so i wonder if its androids cupcake cdma fault since the hero had a known battery issue as well.

 

[Deleted User]

Mine was actually up to 100% this morning, and that lasted for almost half an hour. It's been off the charger (and barely used) for an hour and a half now and is down to 80%, so I guess nothing's really changed, but it was kind of nice to see 100% for once

That's exactly how mine was for me this morning. Almost 1/2 an hour on the dot, and I was using it in that time period, setting up NewsRob for my RSS feeds and showing off the phone a little to coworkers.

Yesterday I also ran the battery down, I played some games last night until the phone shut off. I then restarted it and it shut off immediately, waited about 10 mins, tried again and it shut off immediately again. So I plugged it in, turned it on, and charged up over night. The battery lasted me just fine the last two days (fully charged up over night each day) regardless of what the indicator was saying. We shall see how day 3 goes...