go to settings -> about phone -> battery and see waht is using the power the most there. It will give you an idea of what is going on.

 

Personally, I don't trust the auto screen brightness. If you see that your screen is using the battery, manually set it to around 40%. This is easily bright enough for all situations including out door.

What do you mean by "It's from UK so where I live I can only charge it via USB"?

If in the USA, you are not using a wall charger?

Why not get an adapter plug?

Is the phone at 95%+ power at the start of the day?

 

This. I'm getting 36hours out of mine with everything on (bar wifi) and updating as frequently as possible, screen on max brightness. Something isn't right here.

 

would get rid of the task manager for a start, Android is more than capable of managing running applications, the consensus now is that task killers do more harm than good.

I would buy a new battery before you look to swap the phone, could just be a dud but something isn't right there.

 

That is definitely wrong....also the music player (assuming its local music and not pandora) should not take much battery at all. The display should be off for most of your listening time...

I listen to music here at work...if I do pandora streaming for hours THEN my battery only lasts about 10-12 hours...
If i do local music or none, then at around 15hours my phone is still at 35%...

something is definitely up or you leave your screen on the entire time you are playing music.

 

Carrier: T-Mobile
Phone: Nexus S (stock)

ISSUE: When I first got the phone mid January, I was pretty amazed at how well the battery on this phone held up. I could go a 1.5 to 2 days using the phone normally.

I typically turn it off and charge it overnight. Last week, i reached to use my phone and saw that it was instructing me to connect to a charger bacause it was a 15%. It was just the middle of the day and my phone had been mostly unused because I was at work.

I thought it may have been a new app or something draining all the power because of background communications. I didn't have much stored, so I disabled all the back ups and factory reset the phone.

So I charged the phone last night, and bump charged it a couple of times this morning (I use the OEM home charger and a Griffin 1A dual USB 5V charger in the car with a Rocketfish RF-CA1MR charging cable (data pins shorted)).

Right now My phone is completely reset, I didn't set up a google account on it (no data syncing), and it's been sitting on my desk unused. It's been on battery for 2h 2m 43s, my battery is @ 67% and the battery use indicated shows the following:

Display 40%
Cell standby 33%
Phone Idle 12%
Android System 9%
Android OS 6%
Browser 2% (I went to google for about 5 minutes during a break)
Dialer 2% (I think I checked my voicemail?)

I have the Display setting as follows.

Auto is turned off and I have the setting scrolled all the way to the left (0) with screen timeout at 15 seconds.

It seems that my display is really pulling waaaay too much juice whenever I bring up the screen.

I have wi fi off, moble network set to data enabled and 2G only (for testing), bluetooth off, NFC off, and, since I don't have the google account set up on it, no synching.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Anyone else having strange battery problems?

Thanks in advance for your help.

PS. I have searched and I'm still going through other people's experiences with the Nexus S and battery life. Seems to be a mixed bag of "this phone is great!!" to "battery sucks!!!".

 

You're not alone. I've tried almost everything. Also our house has 4 Nexus S all bought at the same time. I've even bought a spare OEM battery. I've had WiFi off and 2G (with full reception) forced and it's still garbage.

after five hours I'm at 40% and that's hardly using the phone. To give an example I'm using it for text messaging only all day (and not more than 50 of them or so) and it's dead.

All the phones are like this and I have no idea why. They're all running different applications. I can't even leave my phone on all day without it nuking itself by the time I'm out of work.

It seems like people are saying THIS THING WON'T DIE or "Why does mine last 5 hours?"

I love my phone, have dropped quite a chunk in change on applications and don't want to give it up but there's no way this thing is supposed to only last this long.

 

All figures are high there but the cell stand by really sticks out.

Is your phone in a low signal area?

 

Very odd. My phone has been on battery for 3 hours now and is down to 93%. My battery use chart is pretty similar to yours. Cell Standby is about 24% (I only get one bar where I live). Handcent is also at 24%, and Display is at 20%. Everything else is essentially the same.

Maybe your third party charger screwed something up in your battery or charging circuitry? It's definitely not something that would commonly happen, but it is a possibility. Try switching back to the stock charger. You could also grab a new battery (I think they're only like $15) to see if that's the problem.

 

First up, I'm not an expert on this, and I can't say that everything I'm about to write is applicable to all the various individual problems that you're having, but here's my two pennies worth...

When I got an HTC Hero in august 2009 I did a lot of research on forums like these about battery life. The advice was as follows:-

1. In the first few weeks of use, you won't see any amazing battery life performance. You have to charge it regularly, everyday, often. I charge mine every night, sometimes during the day. Lithium batteries need this and you will only see the full benefits after a few WEEKS of doing this, sometimes from the battery only lasting a few hours in the first few days of use.

2. DO NOT discharge it completely every time. Lithium batteries do not like this. The more you do this, the more harmful it is to battery life. Discharge it completely approximately once a month however. But more often than this, its a bad thing to do.

3. Usual rules such as turning on everything/ wifi/ power hungry apps will of course drain your battery faster.

I'll be honest with you, I have no idea why the advice is as above, but I followed it, and sure enough after a few weeks my Hero comfortably lasted a couple of days. I'm 2-3 weeks into using my nexus s and I usually have about 40-50% battery remaining at the end of the day, which will hopefully improve in a couple more weeks. Hope this helps.

 

Try putting your phone in airplane mode. Your battery will absolutely not budge. I know there's enough people out there reporting that their battery life is rubbish. I really hope it's addressed at some point... even forcing 2G my battery lasts maybe 10 hours.

 

People often misunderstand this point about Lithium batteries. It's fine to run them down to the point that your phone turns off. That's not what they mean by "completely discharged." Lithium batteries need a bit of juice left over in order to be recharged, but the charging circuitry has protections in place to prevent this.

The risk to letting the battery run down until the phone shuts down is leaving it uncharged. As the phone sits powered off, the battery will continue to lose a bit of charge that the circuitry can't protect against. This is what they mean by "completely discharged" which will ruin the battery. But you'd have to leave it like this for days (probably months) for it to actually fully discharged.

 

I played with mine today... not too heavy (Angry Birds a bit and some texting) and I managed 17 hours out of it on one charge.

Keep charging it up overnight while it's off is what I did.

Not that it helps but I turned debug mode on then off. It does nothing I'm sure but I'm just suggesting something for you to try. It was something I did.

edit: The following day I struggled to get 8 hours out of the phone. Now on day three it looks more stable. I decided to play with the Network settings and scan for a new network. I have no idea why but once I do this it seems like my battery stabilizes.