Help Does the Optimus M Battery Suck?

[byulax22]

Any tips for making the Optimus M battery last longer? My wife can't make it half a day without the battery dying. She's not even using it THAT much. Any help?

 

[new optimus]

Any tips for making the Optimus M battery last longer? My wife can't make it half a day without the battery dying. She's not even using it THAT much. Any help?

I have not seen that, Today I put my phone on the charger at 25% battery left and it listed time since last charge 2 days 8hours 3mins.
Granted this was with light use, played solitaire on it and some web surfing and other misc things.

 

[thunderkiss65]

Any tips for making the Optimus M battery last longer? My wife can't make it half a day without the battery dying. She's not even using it THAT much. Any help?

Go in settings and make sure gps is off under location and security, And in accounts and sync turn off background data and sync when not using it, then set your screen timeout to something lower. Works for me.

 

[Darnell0216]

It's not the battery that sucks, it's the bloatware. To make up for it (in a non-rooted environment) you can take the steps that thunderkiss mentioned. Some people also look to apps like Juice Defender to help manage things in the background and conserve battery.

My phone is rooted and can probably last up to two days with light usage. So far my best is a day and a half with moderate use. I also leave sync, GPS, and WiFi enabled along with full brightness.

 

[new optimus]

It's not the battery that sucks, it's the bloatware. To make up for it (in a non-rooted environment) you can take the steps that thunderkiss mentioned. Some people also look to apps like Juice Defender to help manage things in the background and conserve battery.

My phone is rooted and can probably last up to two days with light usage. So far my best is a day and a half with moderate use. I also leave sync, GPS, and WiFi enabled along with full brightness.

I leave wifi enabled but turn off gps, and sync when not in use, screen is always at full brightness.

 

[UKCatFan]

The gps is not going to use much power unless you are using an app that uses it. I leave mine on all the time just in case I need to use Lookout to find my phone should it go missing. It is supposed to turn it on for you when you query from the website, but I tested it and it didn't work.

The bad battery life could also be from not having a good signal. I have horrible battery life at my job because the building prevents me from connecting to at least three towers. If you do not get three then it will constantly search for more and use much more power. I have yet to find a solution for this. BTW, I never lose signal, but I can go into the battery use details and see that it says that I spend about 80-90% of my work day "without signal".

 

[peebz]

Just turn off data when not using it this will literally give you like a extra five hours

 

[Notes_Norton]

I installed Gas Buddy and had terrible discharge problems.

I uninstalled GB and still had problems, so I rebooted the phone (took battery out and re-installed) and now the phone is fine again.

I suspect GB was constantly polling the network while the phone was idle (just a guess).

In a related post I read that if you use the back button instead of the home button to turn off apps, they quit using the battery. I don't know if that is true or not. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can comment on that.

Notes ♫

 

[Darnell0216]

Yes it is true that some apps recognize the Back button as an "Exit" and will quit fully. Other apps enter a sleep mode of sorts. They'll stay resident in memory but aren't actually doing anything to cause heavy battery consumption. I use the Home key for multi-tasking since most apps won't quit/sleep when using it. I either press it to go launch something else or if it's a program I've used recently, long-press to see the Recent screen and swap between them.

Regardless of all that, I still find media and GPS apps to be the biggest battery drains. This why I choose my gaming and video watching times wisely.

 

[July03]

Hello, When i bought this phone the battery would last me about 5 hours, and I was barely using it. Then I reset it, and it lasts me roughly about 10 hours with texting and minimal gaming. You should maybe reset it, if not take it to the store.

 

[nickrrr89]

battery is pretty good i go all day and my batt about dead but im always texting and checking facebook and playing games.

 

[TheAmazingDave]

My battery life has been pretty good, almost stellar. I'm running reppard's rOCK as well as his port of CM7 @ 748/480 MHz OnDemand. I use the simple Magic Smoke live wallpaper to prevent the black screen on wake. I do most of my computing on the Nook now, but still use my Optimus for browsing and Facebook, as well as a few of its mobile apps. Primarily, however, I'm using it as a wireless modem/GPS receiver for the Nook. I use free Wireless Tether to share mobile data over a secured AdHoc, and our phone's wireless chip supports the power level regulation of Wireless Tether so I turn it down to almost nothing to keep the power usage down since the Nook is on my person and not far away. To share GPS, I use the Wireless Tether to get my Nook on the same WiFi network, and then use paid TetherGPS to send my phone's GPS to Nook for navigation, Maps, and my favorite Cardio Trainer.

Using it as a WiFi hotspot/GPS bridge at the same time yields a power consumption of about 8%/hour. I couldn't be happier.

My biggest killer is also cell standby, so I make sure to keep it resting in a location that receives a constant signal. I unplugged the phone hours ago, and it was still sitting at 100% before I typed this post.

Besides AdHoc with Wireless Tether, I generally don't use WiFi unless Nook isn't handy.

The last few days, the Optimus has been at mid-30% range when plugged in around midnight.

 

[new optimus]

This is today, after light usage

 

[sandpipershore]

I'm not sure what has happened - up until this last week I've had great battery life, leaving wireless location on, gps mostly off, alternating screen brightness, but mostly on 40 to 100 percent, signal strength fairly-good (2 to 4 90% of the time).

11566 Days 14 Hours and 45 Minutes. - that's how much time I've 'had this unplugged'. Included is a poorly-taken picture. and Display takes up 100% of my battery?

I'm running jukefox. That can't be it... can it?

What is going on here?

 

[sandpipershore]

if it makes a difference, I keep a lot of apps on my sd. does it take extra/more battery life to keep the transfer from sd to phone, back and forth, more-so than simply having the resource on the phone's internal memory.

also, I have a schlitz-ton of music on my 32 gig sd. I feel like that is a dumb question, but could that have anything to do with it? 32 gigs? maybe that's it... which would rly suck.

orly?
yrly.

ok, I'm done talking to myself there.
thanks to any and all who can shine some light on this.

 

[new optimus]

if it makes a difference, I keep a lot of apps on my sd. does it take extra/more battery life to keep the transfer from sd to phone, back and forth, more-so than simply having the resource on the phone's internal memory.

also, I have a schlitz-ton of music on my 32 gig sd. I feel like that is a dumb question, but could that have anything to do with it? 32 gigs? maybe that's it... which would rly suck.

orly?
yrly.

ok, I'm done talking to myself there.
thanks to any and all who can shine some light on this.

The accessing of the sd card may take a small fraction more power, but not enough to lose even 30 mins of battery. And having a larger sd card is not hurting it. I could not tell you what is the problem but I can tell you those things are not.

 

[sandpipershore]

Thanks new optimus -

the timing on this is good - I'm reading your post, though I've just found this

Battery performance and microSD card, interesting observation [Archive] - xda-developers

thoughts?
this is about one year, this thread.
is there something I don't know?

I'm going to try using my 2 gig micro sd card and see what the difference is. worst-case I have to figure a clever way of carrying my micro sd 32 gig without feeling that I might lose it.

 

[new optimus]

Thanks new optimus -

the timing on this is good - I'm reading your post, though I've just found this

Battery performance and microSD card, interesting observation [Archive] - xda-developers

thoughts?
this is about one year, this thread.
is there something I don't know?

I'm going to try using my 2 gig micro sd card and see what the difference is. worst-case I have to figure a clever way of carrying my micro sd 32 gig without feeling that I might lose it.

ok initial thoughts they are using feature phones, and or old android versions, android 2.2 and newer has much better support for sd cards, plus those posts are about a year old, sd card tech has improved substantially in that time frame.

 

[sandpipershore]

you're right there.
its an old post. and all of what you say should prove true.
for me, just me, it seems from my experimenting today
that it is my card.

switched out the 32 for the 2 (stock from metro) and the change is night/day.

now the question is

if it is my card,
what can I do about it?
or, if its the firmware... I'm running the stock 2.2.1 froyo w/ gingerbreak -

the 32 gig is a sandisk sdhc micro class 4.

thoughts, or should I keep looking for other reasons besides the correlation of my card as perhaps a fluke on my assessment?

 

[new optimus]

you're right there.
its an old post. and all of what you say should prove true.
for me, just me, it seems from my experimenting today
that it is my card.

switched out the 32 for the 2 (stock from metro) and the change is night/day.

now the question is

if it is my card,
what can I do about it?
or, if its the firmware... I'm running the stock 2.2.1 froyo w/ gingerbreak -

the 32 gig is a sandisk sdhc micro class 4.

thoughts, or should I keep looking for other reasons besides the correlation of my card as perhaps a fluke on my assessment?

ah, could be the class of the card, class 4 is fairly slow, it may account for part of the problem.
also all the cards that had problems in that thread seemed to be sandisk cards maybe sandisk has problems. I have talked to people with 16gb cards and no problem at all, one person other then you has a 32gb and I never heard them say anything
So in conclusion it could be your card but I think typically they do not have problems.