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Help Bluetooth calls drain battery

TheGrue

Lurker
Aug 11, 2010
1
0
Question for others who use a Bluetooth headset with their Droid X. I was on a call using my headset for about an hour. During that time, my battery went from 100% down to 60%. Is this normal? This was with a phone I pulled fresh off the charger. When I make calls just using the phone without Bluetooth, it barely drains at all. Anyone else experiencing this?

I went to the Verizon store and the guy there basically said that this phone only had 3 hours of talk time and that is why it drained so much and that with the Bluetooth on it would make it worse. I've used other phones with Bluetooth and not seen battery drain like this.
 
I personally do not use bluetooth, but I know someone with an X that does use bluetooth 24/7. They said their battery hits 30% by 1PM every day, they do not use much in terms of apps on their phone either. They basically use it for email, phone calls, and thats about it. No facebook apps or anything and with bluetooth enabled it drops to 30% by 1PM each day.

That being said, the rep that told you 3 hours talk time is dead wrong, it has somewhere around 8 hours advertised, 9.5 or so in practice from what I have seen (assuming no other high battery drain apps are running).

My phone only drops around 10% in an hour of talk time, but I do not use bluetooth or anything either.
 
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I'm on the phone several hours a day, and often with bluetooth headset.

what I find is if I don't use a bluetooth headset, and using just the speakerphone, I can easily get 5 to 6 hours of continuous talk, and still be left with about 30 to 40% battery left.

With a bluetooth headset, I can get 4 to 5 hours of talk and be left with about 20 to 30% battery left.

Strange thing is, with my bluetooth headset turned on, but not talking (i.e. phone in standby) the battery drops as fast as if I was on a phone call with bluetooth. that is, from a full charge, if I leave my headset turned on and connected to the phone, the phone battery will be down to about 20 to 30% after 4 to 5 hours.

Some days, with bluetooth turned off, and phone in standby, it will go from a full charge to 20% charge within 2 hours. not sure why it is draining so fast on those days of no use. Other days, with the phone sitting idle, it will still show 90% charge remaining after 12 hours. so it has been strangely unpredictable.

So using bluetooth does impact battery life a bit, but not as much as you would think.
 
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I don't have many apps on my phone and I have found that phone calls in general drain the most power from the battery. The most that I have called in any one day has been just under 1 hour and according to my phone, that used about 50% of my power that day. So that means of I used my phone for nothing else and made 2 hours of cals the battey would die. And that is without Bluetooth. A far cry from the 8 hours of talk time promoted by Motorola. I even got a replacement battery and then a second phone, and it is still the same. And this is with minimizing all settings. If I don't make calls, I can spend hours on the internet browsing, checking emails, etc. and the battery will last at least 24 hours.
 
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