There is always a lot of discussion on these forums about battery life and there was a thread the other day about Spare Parts and how it doesn't work with Gingerbread, so I thought I would share this info with everybody as its own thread instead of burying it somewhere else.

First, a wakelock is a process that is actively keeping your phone awake while the screen is off. Unless you're listening to music, or downloading apps, your phone should basically be doing nothing while the screen is off. If it's in an active state, you're going to see battery drain while you wouldn't expect there to be any.

First things first, this is the app you need, BetterBatteryStats. http://db.tt/3g0LT4tT I downloaded it off of XDA for free, but there is a free and a donate version in the market if you choose to get it that way. BBS is far superior to any other apps I have seen that show wakelock information and it is truly incredible how detailed it is. So download the app.

So in order for it to show what we need, open the app. There are two dropdown menus. To get it to show what we want, choose "partial wakelocks" on the first dropdown and "since unplugged" from the 2nd dropdown. So your screen should look like the image attached

Now this will tell you what processes have been utilizing your phone with the screen off. Like I said, if you listen to Google Music or Pandora a lot, it will show up here, but Facebook stuff seems to rear its ugly head a lot. But if you have any rogue processes causing battery drain, they will be listed here. You really shouldn't have too much keeping your phone awake as long as you are careful about app refresh settings. On Sense roms, stuff like Stocks, Weather etc refresh by default. Also I use Tweetcaster a lot and I think it defaults to refreshing every 15 or 30 minutes, so I just turn it off and manually refresh when I want to use the app.

Hopefully this helps you guys. If I can add anything to this, please let me know.

 

Doh, I'll just try it as an attachment

OP is updated. For what it's worth, it displayed on my screen!

 

I actually found an app that is just like Spare parts that worked on GB. But BBS just displays so much specific info. SP only shows stuff like "Android System" but this tells you what specificially in "android system" is causing issues.

 

I don't even know what a lot of them are either but on my pic there isn't anything substantial anyway. You're always going to have a few things on there but as long as they aren't holding wakelocks for significant amounts of time then that's all that matters

 

Click the drop box link from the first post