Help How is the battery life on the Droid X?

[TonyXL]

Via mail or going to a store? Let me know how that goes, because I think I may need a new one as well.

I unplug around 8AM, after maybe 10 minutes of checking email, it drops to 90%. It doesn't take long to drop to 80% (like another 30 minutes tops with NO activity), but that seems to hold for a bit. By the time I get home around 5:30, I am at 30-40% and need to charge by 10PM. I would consider myself a light user.

I have it in smart mode, brightness turned all the way down. Updates to weather every 4 hours, email every 1 hour. ESPN Scores update when I activate it. Some web browsing, facebook, few short calls, couple of texts...nothing dramatic. And I just put in a task manager to help me kill apps I forget to. It seems to be getting better, but what happens if I am not around a charging source!

Your usage/experience matches mine. I'm going to try running the battery down to see if that helps.

I'm a bit frustrated because some people have been getting crazy-awesome battery life, and some have not. I bought the phone because of the battery.

 

[mahers]

Your usage/experience matches mine. I'm going to try running the battery down to see if that helps.

I'm a bit frustrated because some people have been getting crazy-awesome battery life, and some have not. I bought the phone because of the battery.

Tony, late yesterday afternoon, I got an app called MultiTask Manager. It only works when you open it, but it lists all running apps in a scrolling ribbon on the bottom of the screen. You can tap an app to open it and back out of it if you don't need it, or long press it to get the Kill option. I also dumped Beautiful Widgets since the weather is screwed up. Today, I DL'ed and then dumped The Weather Channel because I found Weatherbug which looks nicer to me. Since I left my house at 8, it's now 4.5 hours later and still at 90%!!!! I can't believe it. I was shocked at how many apps I still had open and running when I first got that app. It was receommended by Droid-Life.com. Try it and see if it helps. Obviously, this is a short timeframe to really notice, but I have never gone this long and still have it at 90%.

One Note: DO NOT KILL MOTO HOME if you are using another home launcher!!! I learned the hard way

 

[TonyXL]

Tony, late yesterday afternoon, I got an app called MultiTask Manager. It only works when you open it, but it lists all running apps in a scrolling ribbon on the bottom of the screen. You can tap an app to open it and back out of it if you don't need it, or long press it to get the Kill option. I also dumped Beautiful Widgets since the weather is screwed up. Today, I DL'ed and then dumped The Weather Channel because I found Weatherbug which looks nicer to me. Since I left my house at 8, it's now 4.5 hours later and still at 90%!!!! I can't believe it. I was shocked at how many apps I still had open and running when I first got that app. It was receommended by Droid-Life.com. Try it and see if it helps. Obviously, this is a short timeframe to really notice, but I have never gone this long and still have it at 90%.

One Note: DO NOT KILL MOTO HOME if you are using another home launcher!!! I learned the hard way

Thanks for the tip. Only app running at startup was Home. After using my phone for a while it showed Home, Gmail, GVoice, Dialer, and Calendar, which seems OK since those were my most recent apps. Are you killing each app after you're done? It was my understanding that if you leave an app to return to the home screen (like GMail), it gets backgrounded it doesn't use any CPU/battery.

Did you show/kill any of your *services*?

Maybe your BeautifulWidgets was draining your battery.

 

[mahers]

Thanks for the tip. Only app running at startup was Home. After using my phone for a while it showed Home, Gmail, GVoice, Dialer, and Calendar, which seems OK since those were my most recent apps. Are you killing each app after you're done? It was my understanding that if you leave an app to return to the home screen (like GMail), it gets backgrounded it doesn't use any CPU/battery.

Did you show/kill any of your *services*?

Maybe your BeautifulWidgets was draining your battery.

I'm not killing each app. If I don't want it running anymore, I just hit the back key or hit exit if it's an option (like Dolphin). I can't tell you about the background stuff using CPU/Battery, but that may be true. It could have been BW, but everyone and their mother recommended it. The only thing it could use data for was the weather, as far as I can tell. I don't think there was an option to set intervals on it, but I don't recall. SInce I paid for it, I didn't uninstall it...yet. So far, still at 80% after 5.5 hours. But then again, I haven't done a whole lot with it today. Seriously, it could be that I played with it a ton since I got it cuz it was a new toy, but a few more days will tell for sure. I don't see the MTM app hurting in any way.

 

[lexluthor]

My battery is pretty much like TonyXL and Mahers.

Off charger around 8-9am. 60% around 4pm. Needs Charge around 10%.

That's with k9 pushing my gmail, checking touchdown manually a few times, weather widget, battery smart mode, scoretap widget, listing to an hour on google listen, 15 mins web browsing, 15 mins calls.

I'm stunned that people say they are getting over 24 hours with heavier usage than me, especially when people say they have a couple of hours of pandora in there. Pandora streaming probably hits me at at least 10-20% per hour of use.

 

[TonyXL]

My battery is pretty much like TonyXL and Mahers.

Off charger around 8-9am. 60% around 4pm. Needs Charge around 10%.

That's with k9 pushing my gmail, checking touchdown manually a few times, weather widget, battery smart mode, scoretap widget, listing to an hour on google listen, 15 mins web browsing, 15 mins calls.

I'm stunned that people say they are getting over 24 hours with heavier usage than me, especially when people say they have a couple of hours of pandora in there. Pandora streaming probably hits me at at least 10-20% per hour of use.

What's your 3G signal strength? Mine's pretty bad (I think?) at work and home: -92 to -101. That might have something to do with it, even though my battery stats are usually 90% display 10% cell radio -- I have a feeling the battery stats aren't very accurate.

Edit: I might try turning on airplane mode and playing some MP4 movies to see how the battery is affected.

 

[SgtBaxter]

I haven't streamed anything today, but I took it off the charger at 6:30 this morning, browsed websites all lunch hour, downloaded and installed an app or two, made a few phone calls. 11 1/2 hours later I'm at 70% battery. I'm not complaining.

 

[dennygreen]

My battery is pretty much like TonyXL and Mahers.

Off charger around 8-9am. 60% around 4pm. Needs Charge around 10%.

That's with k9 pushing my gmail, checking touchdown manually a few times, weather widget, battery smart mode, scoretap widget, listing to an hour on google listen, 15 mins web browsing, 15 mins calls.

I'm stunned that people say they are getting over 24 hours with heavier usage than me, especially when people say they have a couple of hours of pandora in there. Pandora streaming probably hits me at at least 10-20% per hour of use.

How hard to you think Listen is hitting your battery? I usually just listen to/download podcasts with it at work for 8 hours, with a little browsing, 10 texts or so, no phone calls, and less than an hour of iheartradio (Sometimes none). My off charger time is the same as yours, and by 4pm I'm at around 30%.
I don't have any widgets other than the default weather. I wouldn't think that Listen would kill my battery so much more being that I only manually download 4-5 podcasts per day. Doesn't seem like just playing audio would use much juice since I just hit play and then lock the screen and let it play.

 

[lexluthor]

I don't think listen is too hard on the battery. It's just playing audio from the SD Card.

To TonyXL, my 3G signal is pretty bad at home and good at work, but it shouldn't matter. I have wifi always connected at both places, so mobile network is off. Wifi should be using less than what mobile network work be.

 

[dennygreen]

Nice. I have 60% left at 6:15 with the same usage today. Probably did even more streaming, testing, and browsing today han any other day before it. But im not really sure what exactly caused the improvement since I chaanged a lot of settings, uninstalled the battery monitor i was using and rebooted when i took it off he charger this morning. Switched to battery saver mode from smart mode too. At any rate im happy.

 

[tsanuri]

Until today I had been very happy with my battery. But today I needed to use my phone as a phone and my battery dropped like a lead balloon. In just over 30 mins of talk time my phone had used 60% of its battery for phone calls and was at 15% or roughly 51% of my battery for 30 mins of phone calls. I had only used texting, email, browsing until today and was getting a full day easily but not with talking.
Needless to say I am confused since I thought that the other stuff would use much more battery and if the phone needs to be used as a phone for any period of time this scares me.

 

[BLK MAJK]

My battery has been getting better and better.

I let it die a few times and charged it full before turning it back on. This helped but I was still only getting about 12 hours with light to moderate use before it died. I downloaded an app called spare parts which shows you battery usage statistics (free). It will give you an idea if an app you have is not playing nice and keeping your phone awake. Case in point, I noticed one day my battery was down to 60% after about 4 hours. I checked spare parts and it showed that my phone was awake 100% of the time since I took it off the charger! No wonder! One place to pay attention is spare parts is the "partial wake usage". This will show you if anything is keeping your phone from going into idle. If anything shows up on this screen with a large blue bar, it means it is keeping the phone awake. This can get tricky if it shows up as "android system" because that wont tell you what program isn't playing nice, just that something is keeping it awake. What I did to find out what was keeping my Android system running was to restart the phone, make sure nothing else was running and throughout the day, I wrote down what apps I used, closed them when done, and kept monitoring my "partial wake usage" and "other usage" to see if I could narrow it down. Yesterday, I found that after I installed handcent the day before it wasn't acting right and my battery was dropping like crazy. When I check my spare parts usage log, handcent only showed a small amount of usage, but android system was thru the roof. Something with the way handcent was working was keeping my phone awake. I uninstalled handcent last night, rebooted and monitored things again today. With moderate usage (gmail all day, texting, browsing (including downloading a 7 mb mp3) and 1 hour of pandora) I was at 70% after 15.5 hours! A look at my usage logs confirms that everything was playing nice and the phone was going to sleep as it should. Im not saying that handcent is bad, but for some reason my phone didn't like it. Here are a couple screenshots from spare parts to show the logs I am talking about. One other tip with spare parts...the graphs wont refresh unless you back out to the main screen in spare parts and go back to history (so when you are done looking at the graph, hit the back button instead of just the home button) Hopefully this helps some of you guys who have bad battery life....it may just be an app not playing nice!

 

[dennygreen]

that sucks, I havent come close to using 30 minutes of talk time in a day yet. Maybe I should test that.

 

[lexluthor]

Whoa! Great post BLK MAJK.

It looks like I have a big problem here. Phone has been off charger for 12 hours and in "other usage" it's showing as running 100%. Partial wake usage is also almost around 12 hours for Android system.

So my phone isn't sleeping at all?

Light use today and I'm at 40% still, so I thought that wasn't too bad actually.

Might take some pretty methodical testing to actually figure out what the problem app is. I'd like to know if there definitely is a problem before I go crazy trying to find a solution.

What are other people seeing with this program?

 

[tsanuri]

that sucks, I havent come close to using 30 minutes of talk time in a day yet. Maybe I should test that.

Tell me about it I called VZ just to have it documented. But I can not understand why using the phone would kill the battery so quickly and doing everything else would not. And the techs I spoke with were quite stumped as well. But I did find out that on the battery manager does not update in real time. I had to call back becaue I looked before I got off the phone with the first rep and the battery still read the same but then checked it 5 mins later when I noticed my battery had dropped again and saw that is had updated so I called back to have it added to the notes.

 

[lexluthor]

Ok. I think I figured it out already. Looks like it's maps.

I started a new thread here on it
http://androidforums.com/support-troubleshooting-droid-x/136844-maps-preventing-phone-sleeping.html

 

[lakai113]

i was extremely bored at work today and used my phone a good amount.. mostly on face book and other forums. texting and playing same games.. got home and had 40% left..my other phones never could do this with the internet i was using.. pretty happy

 

[dennygreen]

Tell me about it I called VZ just to have it documented. But I can not understand why using the phone would kill the battery so quickly and doing everything else would not. And the techs I spoke with were quite stumped as well. But I did find out that on the battery manager does not update in real time. I had to call back becaue I looked before I got off the phone with the first rep and the battery still read the same but then checked it 5 mins later when I noticed my battery had dropped again and saw that is had updated so I called back to have it added to the notes.

Well i just had a 25 minute call and it didn't do much to the battery
Still at 20% after 13+ hours. I'm really impresed after today
.

 

[tsanuri]

Well i just had a 25 minute call and it didn't do much to the battery
Still at 20% after 13+ hours. I'm really impresed after today
.

That had been my phone until today. I had used it for everything except talking and had gotten 17 hours of use with multi hours of surfing, streaming and just about anything else I wanted to do with a battery at 30%. Which is why I am so perplexed now.

 

[ekyle]

i've noticed that I get variable battery life with my X. Yesterday with normal use I was at 50% when i plugged it in last night. That is 5am-11pm. This morning I unplugged at 530 and by 8 it had already dropped to 90%. The only thing I've downloaded is AIM, and that was last night (its not running now). I checked the battery monitor and spare parts and don't see anything suspicious. I don't get it. This isn't the first time I've noticed this either...

 

[BLK MAJK]

i've noticed that I get variable battery life with my X. Yesterday with normal use I was at 50% when i plugged it in last night. That is 5am-11pm. This morning I unplugged at 530 and by 8 it had already dropped to 90%. The only thing I've downloaded is AIM, and that was last night (its not running now). I checked the battery monitor and spare parts and don't see anything suspicious. I don't get it. This isn't the first time I've noticed this either...

The first 10% drop is definitely funny on the droid phones. The other day I my first 10% lasted 5 hours. some mornings the first 10% only last like 30 minutes with the same amount of use. I keep seeing people mention that 90% on the meter can actually be 90-99%.....I wouldn't worry about it unless the rest of the battery continues like that.

 

[ekyle]

Alright. I'll watch it. Hopefully its nothing because i need to drive to CT today and might need nav

 

[tbert]

My battery has been getting better and better.

I let it die a few times and charged it full before turning it back on. This helped but I was still only getting about 12 hours with light to moderate use before it died. I downloaded an app called spare parts which shows you battery usage statistics (free). It will give you an idea if an app you have is not playing nice and keeping your phone awake. Case in point, I noticed one day my battery was down to 60% after about 4 hours. I checked spare parts and it showed that my phone was awake 100% of the time since I took it off the charger! No wonder! One place to pay attention is spare parts is the "partial wake usage". This will show you if anything is keeping your phone from going into idle. If anything shows up on this screen with a large blue bar, it means it is keeping the phone awake. This can get tricky if it shows up as "android system" because that wont tell you what program isn't playing nice, just that something is keeping it awake. What I did to find out what was keeping my Android system running was to restart the phone, make sure nothing else was running and throughout the day, I wrote down what apps I used, closed them when done, and kept monitoring my "partial wake usage" and "other usage" to see if I could narrow it down. Yesterday, I found that after I installed handcent the day before it wasn't acting right and my battery was dropping like crazy. When I check my spare parts usage log, handcent only showed a small amount of usage, but android system was thru the roof. Something with the way handcent was working was keeping my phone awake. I uninstalled handcent last night, rebooted and monitored things again today. With moderate usage (gmail all day, texting, browsing (including downloading a 7 mb mp3) and 1 hour of pandora) I was at 70% after 15.5 hours! A look at my usage logs confirms that everything was playing nice and the phone was going to sleep as it should. Im not saying that handcent is bad, but for some reason my phone didn't like it. Here are a couple screenshots from spare parts to show the logs I am talking about. One other tip with spare parts...the graphs wont refresh unless you back out to the main screen in spare parts and go back to history (so when you are done looking at the graph, hit the back button instead of just the home button) Hopefully this helps some of you guys who have bad battery life....it may just be an app not playing nice!

Anyone else able to get the "Running" to be less than 100%? I've uninstall programs like Handcent and NewsRob and used a task manager to kill all programs before I put the phone to sleep by hitting the power button. When I wake up the phone, the Running bar is still at 100%. Does the mean the phone never went to sleep?

 

[lexluthor]

Yes, your phone shouldn't be running 100% of the time.

I figured out what the problem for me was and posted here
http://androidforums.com/support-tr...428-battery-drain-due-software-bug-w-gps.html

Unfortunately, looks like that issue might have been just limited to my phone as the there's been a relative lack of interest in that thread.

I thought I had maybe uncovered a huge pontentially battery killing bug.

 

[NoShineMM]

Yes, your phone shouldn't be running 100% of the time.

I figured out what the problem for me was and posted here
http://androidforums.com/support-tr...428-battery-drain-due-software-bug-w-gps.html

Unfortunately, looks like that issue might have been just limited to my phone as the there's been a relative lack of interest in that thread.

I thought I had maybe uncovered a huge pontentially battery killing bug.

Def. on to something. My phone was 100% running and the Android system bar was completly full. Tried your Gps toggle thing and now my phone seems to sleep. Only thing do you have to do this ALL the time? Toggle it... Im still testing other apps tho.