Let's talk about the battery

[aostang]

I hear they fit with the case on and the case fits with the battery in so it should be fine.

The extended battery adds 2mm to the depth of the phone. If you already have accessories, measure based on that.

 

[ekyle]

The extended battery adds 2mm to the depth of the phone. If you already have accessories, measure based on that.

I can definitely say that the case fits with the extended battery as I won them both. Just trying to say that it will fit

 

[cozz]

a quick and easy fix that really helps the battery life is an app called juice defender. there's a free version, or a paid 'plus' version and 'ultimate' version which give you more control over the battery, but the free one is great by itself.

the app does things like turn off 3g when not using it and controlling when apps refresh so the phone is constantly using data.

i downloaded the free one, am using the basic 'balanced' battery saving option, and right now i'm sitting at a little over 24 hrs with 40% battery left. it's worth a try if you are disappointed with the battery

 

[beowulf7]

After 8.5 hours of typical usage (as I've described in this thread), I'm down to 40% battery left. The top 3 power hogs are Wi-Fi at 26%, Cell standby at 26%, and Phone idle at 18%.

a quick and easy fix that really helps the battery life is an app called juice defender. there's a free version, or a paid 'plus' version and 'ultimate' version which give you more control over the battery, but the free one is great by itself.

the app does things like turn off 3g when not using it and controlling when apps refresh so the phone is constantly using data.

i downloaded the free one, am using the basic 'balanced' battery saving option, and right now i'm sitting at a little over 24 hrs with 40% battery left. it's worth a try if you are disappointed with the battery

I've heard a couple people mention JD. I'll give it a shot.

 

[ekyle]

After 8.5 hours of typical usage (as I've described in this thread), I'm down to 40% battery left. The top 3 power hogs are Wi-Fi at 26%, Cell standby at 26%, and Phone idle at 18%.


I've heard a couple people mention JD. I'll give it a shot.

My phone idle time is always over 30% it seems :\

 

[beowulf7]

My phone idle time is always over 30% it seems :\

Given the huge amount of battery being consumed by being wasted (doing nothing other than waiting to accept a call or some data), I wonder how it can get the long standby time that the Droid 3 advertises.

 

[XD_dued]

Hmmmm so last night somehow the phone used 80% of its power in 7hrs...

The night before it used only 10% in 10hrs.

I just got the phone so I only left it on over night those two times (and only had the phone for 2 days). What could be the problem? I even put the phone into airplane mode the second night (and not the first one).

Another question, my phone only displays battery life in intervals of 10%. Its not really a problem I guess, but I was just wondering if it was supposed to be that way.

 

[aostang]

The 10% thing is normal for most phones.

 

[maldroid]

What does the cell standby mean? Mine is 20to 30%

 

[aostang]

What does the cell standby mean? Mine is 20to 30%

It's how much power your cell radio is using while not actually on a call.. basically tower and call polling.

 

[krazykrivda]

To calrify some things:

The percentage you see for each app/activity is the % that the specific item has played in the overall battery depletion. SO - if you have 80% battery left, and cell standby says 30%... that means of the 20% (100-80 = 20) of battery consumed, 30% of it was due to cell standby.

Cell standby SHOULD in MOST CASES be the highest battery user. It is a phone afterall, and the majority of the battery should be consumed remaining connected to the network, waiting for calls, connecting to towers etc. So in the instance above 30% of the wasted batter was due to your phone STANDING BY waiting for a call or text, etc.

Assuming that for most of the time you are not on a call, or actively using your phone, this makes complete sense.

^^(again this is my understanding, correct me if I am wrong, please)^^

My issue is, i have 33% cell standby, and 20% phone idle, but in only 4 hrs, I went from a full charge to only 20%! That to me is an issue. Is anyone else experience similar things?

 

[bsweetness]

To calrify some things:

The percentage you see for each app/activity is the % that the specific item has played in the overall battery depletion. SO - if you have 80% battery left, and cell standby says 30%... that means of the 20% (100-80 = 20) of battery consumed, 30% of it was due to cell standby.

Cell standby SHOULD in MOST CASES be the highest battery user. It is a phone afterall, and the majority of the battery should be consumed remaining connected to the network, waiting for calls, connecting to towers etc. So in the instance above 30% of the wasted batter was due to your phone STANDING BY waiting for a call or text, etc.

Assuming that for most of the time you are not on a call, or actively using your phone, this makes complete sense.

^^(again this is my understanding, correct me if I am wrong, please)^^

My issue is, i have 33% cell standby, and 20% phone idle, but in only 4 hrs, I went from a full charge to only 20%! That to me is an issue. Is anyone else experience similar things?

It makes sense, but with every other Android phone I've had - original Droid, Droid X, Droid Pro - cell standby and idle were never at the top of the list. They were never really in the top three, even with the phone just sitting there doing nothing. This is the first time that they're constantly the top two battery users on my phone. And what makes it even stranger is the fact that like you, my battery is draining incredibly fast, presumably because of those two things. I'm not dropping quite as fast as you are, but in two hours, with my phone just sitting on my desk with the screen off in an area with great coverage, the extended battery dropped from 100% to 72%. Something isn't right.

 

[krazykrivda]

It makes sense, but with every other Android phone I've had - original Droid, Droid X, Droid Pro - cell standby and idle were never at the top of the list. They were never really in the top three, even with the phone just sitting there doing nothing. This is the first time that they're constantly the top two battery users on my phone. And what makes it even stranger is the fact that like you, my battery is draining incredibly fast, presumably because of those two things. I'm not dropping quite as fast as you are, but in two hours, with my phone just sitting on my desk with the screen off in an area with great coverage, the extended battery dropped from 100% to 72%. Something isn't right.

I had the original droid for a long time, unless i made phone calls, or had the screen on a lot- idle, and standby were often up top in battery usage.

Can i ask what you usually saw as the number 1 and 2 battery drainers on other phones?

Also, beeing that default battery manager on D3 only goes in 10% intervals, what are you using to track the battery percentage.

AND.. if you are on an extened battery and lost about 30% in 2 hrs of limited use, that'd be down to about 40% in 4 hrs, which seems pretty comparable to my situation, however i did have some use of the phone, and I am NOT on extended battery. - This is very odd, sounds like you may have it worse than I.

After work I am going to stop by a store and check if my battery is charging to full capacity.

 

[aostang]

I had the original droid for a long time, unless i made phone calls, or had the screen on a lot- idle, and standby were often up top in battery usage.

Can i ask what you usually saw as the number 1 and 2 battery drainers on other phones?

Also, beeing that default battery manager on D3 only goes in 10% intervals, what are you using to track the battery percentage.

AND.. if you are on an extened battery and lost about 30% in 2 hrs of limited use, that'd be down to about 40% in 4 hrs, which seems pretty comparable to my situation, however i did have some use of the phone, and I am NOT on extended battery. - This is very odd, sounds like you may have it worse than I.

After work I am going to stop by a store and check if my battery is charging to full capacity.

Back to my post from the first page, this was an example of my standby time on my Droid X1.



Yes, standby was always near the top of the list, but it also consumed so little power that it was always around the same as the screen that was almost always off during the standby stress tests. On a normal day of use, I'd never even see it drop to 50%. I could do 2 solid days of "normal" use on the DX1. With the Droid 3, it's been weird. My second day with the phone, I actually got 12 hours with 90% remaining at the end of the day. This was before I installed much. Now if I hardly use the phone, I'm sitting about 60-50% at the end of the 12 hours. This is with no different apps installed than what were on my DX1. I'm really not in the mood to deinstall or clean slate the phone, so I'm not sure whether that second day was some odd fluke or what.

Back to the original point - cell standby should be about the same as Display if you leave the phone off the entire day. Unless you're in absolute crap coverage (I never am), standby should use very little juice. That's not nearly the case here, for whatever reason. Display is toward the bottom of the list, showing that standby is using a lot more juice than the Display. If we can get root on this phone, terminal/busybox and Titanum Backup will make it very easy for me to figure out if it's offending bloat or apps causing or contributing to this, or if perhaps the problem actually is in the baseband.

Another test that can be done, but I can't really afford to do right now, is to use the phone an absolute minimum from a full charge (or better yet, not at all) in a normal standby state, then the second day from a full charge again turn on airplane mode and let the phone sit the same amount of time. Then you can compare what % of battery has drained. Actually, I can probably do that over the next two nights, since I don't think anything less than about 12 hours would be a very accurate sampling.

 

[640k]

I posted this up over at XDA; i'm going to go out on a limb and start asking people with high battery life to start posting their build numbers to make sure there's not some discrepency. my battery life has been absolutely abismal, which is ironic (for me) considering my D1 and D2 seemed to get above-average life, compared to friends with the same phones.

My D1/D2 could easily stream Pandora for 8+ hrs and only get to 30-20% battery. My D3 barely makes it 2hrs before it's at 20%. Today I ran a test and streamed Pandora off-charge, with the display off and got a grand total of 2.5 hrs before the phone shut itself off.

Something is definitely wrong. The OS is optimized, the battery is larger, the screen should be more efficient. At this point, I'm not convinced it's a hardware problem.

 

[krazykrivda]

Just an update...

I went to a VZW store and they swapped out my battery for a new spare battery (free of charge).

Today is the 1st day of use.. VERY minimal use, but after 5 hrs i'm down to 80% - from full charge (about 45% cell standby, and 40% phone idle).

Same phone, same apps, same settings, but different battery. Keep in mind yesterday after only 4 hrs, I was down to 20%!

 

[aostang]

Just an update...

I went to a VZW store and they swapped out my battery for a new spare battery (free of charge).

Today is the 1st day of use.. VERY minimal use, but after 5 hrs i'm down to 80% - from full charge (about 45% cell standby, and 40% phone idle).

Same phone, same apps, same settings, but different battery. Keep in mind yesterday after only 4 hrs, I was down to 20%!

Let us know how it is after a few more days of use. What I've noticed is a gradual decline in battery performance each day.

 

[boster]

To calrify some things:

The percentage you see for each app/activity is the % that the specific item has played in the overall battery depletion. SO - if you have 80% battery left, and cell standby says 30%... that means of the 20% (100-80 = 20) of battery consumed, 30% of it was due to cell standby.

Cell standby SHOULD in MOST CASES be the highest battery user. It is a phone afterall, and the majority of the battery should be consumed remaining connected to the network, waiting for calls, connecting to towers etc. So in the instance above 30% of the wasted batter was due to your phone STANDING BY waiting for a call or text, etc.

Assuming that for most of the time you are not on a call, or actively using your phone, this makes complete sense.

^^(again this is my understanding, correct me if I am wrong, please)^^

My issue is, i have 33% cell standby, and 20% phone idle, but in only 4 hrs, I went from a full charge to only 20%! That to me is an issue. Is anyone else experience similar things?

Thank you, krazykrivda. You made some things clearer to me. But now you've got me wondering, what does "phone idle" represent that consumes battery? It sounds like doing nothing, so why is it consuming battery?

-boster

 

[boster]

It makes sense, but with every other Android phone I've had - original Droid, Droid X, Droid Pro - cell standby and idle were never at the top of the list. They were never really in the top three, even with the phone just sitting there doing nothing. This is the first time that they're constantly the top two battery users on my phone. And what makes it even stranger is the fact that like you, my battery is draining incredibly fast, presumably because of those two things. I'm not dropping quite as fast as you are, but in two hours, with my phone just sitting on my desk with the screen off in an area with great coverage, the extended battery dropped from 100% to 72%. Something isn't right.

There's a lot I don't know about all of this, but as an old tech guy it strikes me that an apparent increase in Cell Standby might only be apparent. The CPU is faster, which comes with many benefits. One of those is that the same jobs that took some amount of time in the past now take less time--maybe half the time they used to take.

In other words, all the other processes might be getting their work done quicker, so they're using less battery. Cell Standby, though, isn't ever going to be "done quicker" because it's never done. So it's relative consumption of battery goes up.

I'm only theorizing. I don't know this to be the case.

-boster

 

[boster]

I've had my phone for about a week, and I'm less than thrilled with the battery life. There are things I can try, and I will. But it's not lasting as long as it did on my D1, with the same usage. As it stands now it's livable, but I'll normally have to charge during the day unless I can get some improvement. I rarely needed that with my D1.

I've been leaving my GPS radio on. I did on my D1 and it seemed to be okay. Maybe that's a problem. I'll start turning it off.

I'll try Juice Defender, which was recommended up above.

-boster

 

[Stupidzeus]

update on my extended battery, i've had somedays that were stellar and some that were not, the one day i didn't use the phone at all after i took it off the charger and it was dead in like 4 hours.... another day i had it off the charger for15.5 hours with light-moderate use and it still had 80%, i called verizon about it cause i've had 2 android phones before and have never seen that kind of unreliable battery life, and they are shipping me a new extended battery because this one might be bad.

 

[ekyle]

update on my extended battery, i've had somedays that were stellar and some that were not, the one day i didn't use the phone at all after i took it off the charger and it was dead in like 4 hours.... another day i had it off the charger for15.5 hours with light-moderate use and it still had 80%, i called verizon about it cause i've had 2 android phones before and have never seen that kind of unreliable battery life, and they are shipping me a new extended battery because this one might be bad.

Yea, probably a bad one. I'm on 18 hrs of moderate use and hit 50% about 10 minutes ago. I even synched 60 songs or so from Spotify.

 

[Stupidzeus]

I hope thats all it is, it would be nice if it was just a simple fix

 

[PetriesLast]

Have we gotten anywhere with figuring out why some people seem to be having great battery life and other like me play music for an hour and see 30% disappear? This isn't normal, it's like if I use the phone I have to charge it constantly throughout the day. I'm dying to know if it's hardware or software related so I can exchange the thing.

 

[krazykrivda]

boster :

Phone idle (from my understanding) is simply the power consumed to keep the phone on. Waiting for you to push the power button to show the screen etc. Cell stand by has to do with the radio waiting for somethin gto be recieved or transmitted, while phone idle has to do with the device itself needing power to be ON.

There is a sleep option on the phone via long press of power button, which I have not used, but I imagine if you did, phone idle % would decrease drastically, but probably little to no decrease for cell standby, porbably an INCREASE (after all the percentages you see need to add up to 100%, so if something goes down, something else must go up)

UPDATE ON NEW BATTERY:

I did not charge my phone yesterday until after about 14 hrs of use. I was down to 20% charge remaining. Usage did increase at days end with some phone calls etc.

Today's battery life - again, after 4 hrs I'm down to 80%. However my use was higher this morning. Yesterday I did about nothing besides have it on, and today I spent about an hour with GPS and BT on. 1/2 hr of phone calls and 1/2 hr music both streamed via BT.

To restate, I'm using replacement battery (standard) the VZW gave me. Based on this, I'm going to have to say it's most likely a battery issue and not phone issue (for me at least)

Let me know if updates are still desired, or if there are other questions.