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Display is the highest user of battery

coreyb

Lurker
Aug 12, 2010
8
0
Can anyone shed some light on this? when i go into my Battery Use (Settings > About Phone > Battery Use), Display is always the highest by a long-shot. Currently it's:
Display 66%
Standby 11%
Phone Idle 8%
Maps 5%
Android System 4%
Browser 3%
Android OS 2%

Is this simply because when you're using the phone the display is sucking up battery (duh) or is this indicative of defective phone as indicated here:
http://androidforums.com/samsung-ca...int-newer-vs-older-captivate.html#post1423774
 
Simple, any time your display is on, regardless of what you are doing, it will be using power, email, web surfing, facebook, games, etc if its on, its burning juice. So yes if you use your phone regularly your display will probably be the highest use item. Unless you make some long phone calls with a headset. Like the other guy said, If you go several hours without messing with it (it's hard I know) then look, your standby will be the highest. A handly thing I use is put a power control widget on one of my homescreens to tuen diplay brightness down when I dont need it so bright, it helps a lot.
 
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Is this simply because when you're using the phone the display is sucking up battery (duh) or is this indicative of defective phone as indicated here:
http://androidforums.com/samsung-ca...int-newer-vs-older-captivate.html#post1423774

Lots of advice in this thread but no real answers -

Run the 4-hour test in that thread and then you'll have your answer.

PS -- Cell Standy % will increase exponentially the worse your signal is. The worse the signal is, the more the radio has to boost it to talk to the tower. Phone Idle and Cell Standby would be about equal % if you had a perfect signal. Also be aware the radio does not draw significantly more power to rxtx 3G vs EDGE, but on EDGE the radio must rxtx longer since the data rate is slower. The difference is, EDGE works better on crap signals. AT&T programs their phones to prefer 3G, this means if you are on the borders of EDGE-land signal-wise, the radio will really burn it up trying to maintain 3G.
 
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I get really long battery run times from my Captivate, as compared to my iPhone 4, Droid X & others. Much of it is due to the fact that the brightness can be set very low and still have a bright display. Super Amoled is very efficient with power, and the Captivate comes out of the box with display brightness way too high. Another easy way to stretch battery life is to do a quick press of the power button to turn off just the display, when you set the phone down, another quick press will turn it on when you are ready to resume.

Using these techniques, I get terrific battery life even when using it for many hours per day.
 
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This is a misconception. Both OLED and Plasma cells - they have to have some minimal initial charge to show black. A black OLED screen still sips some battery power.

Source?

Yes, of course the display circuitry is always on if there are any pixels lit or the device is powered on. However, OLED displays still use power in-proportion to how many pixels are lit. A black pixel is an off pixel.

Think of OLED as an array of LEDs. LCDs are more like a Lite-Brite.
 
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I think the display usage on the battery must be connected to data usage.

Using Juice defender, I turned off 3G. After about 4.5 hours (around 11am) my battery was at 97% and Cell Standby % was highest and Display was 2nd ( I hadn't turned on my display at all this morning except to open the browser real quick and turn off my wifi.) I turned on my 3G at lunch (12:30) for a little bit and now my battery is at 89% (1pm now) and display is 46% and standby is 26%.
 
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I found a great little brightness indicator shortcut I put on my homescreen and I keep it set on 10% and it helps. I use LauncherPro full version and there is a lot more customization with it than the stock browser, better widgets, less power consumption and I only have the display using 59% of my battery and I've been messing with it quite a bit today.

Try to manually set the brightness of the screen through your settings-sound and display-brighness, I don't use power saving mode because I have found that manually setting it works better for me. Hope this helps.
 
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Source?

Yes, of course the display circuitry is always on if there are any pixels lit or the device is powered on. However, OLED displays still use power in-proportion to how many pixels are lit. A black pixel is an off pixel.

Think of OLED as an array of LEDs. LCDs are more like a Lite-Brite.
I read somewhere that both Plasma and OLED having a small charge applied to cells that are "off" in order to be able to fire them off when needed very quickly, to provide refresh rate. That small charge results in "off" cells being not completely black and emitting some light. I do not bookmark every web page I read, so sorry, no link source. But I will give you two PROOFS that are more clear than any source read.

1) Samsung itself claims that Super AMOLED has contrast ratio of 100000:1. If
a black cell is truly black (truly off) then contrast ratio would have been INFINITY:1. Same goes for Plasma, no plasma manufacturer claims an Infinity:1 contrast ratio.

2) Use Paint on your PC to create a small BLACK image that is 100% black, save it as a black&white bmp file to be sure. Move it to your SAMOLED Captivate, and view it full screen in completely dark room. You will see with your own eyes that the "black" is actually very dark gray and is emitting some low light.

Is this enough?
 
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