Help Time w/o signal ~50%? killing battery...

[Steel36]

So I p/u a used eris for my wife to use until the Bionic arrives. I'm experienced w/ Android and have an Incredible. I got it all setup for her w/ a basic scheme.

For some reason, the battery didn't last 8 hrs the first day w/ it mostly sitting on her desk at work. I checked out the battery use and the time w/o signal was ~50%, and we have signal both at home and work to spare.

I also noticed this morning that when I turned the display on, the phone initially read "No signal" on the lockscreen instead of "Verizon". Then it popped on.

Is there a known bug that causes this?

 

[doogald]

There is a bug in the reporting, but I believe it is understood that the actual 50% bug is not draining your battery. You can get rid of the 50% bug by going into Airplan Mode briefly - long enough for the display to sleep is a decent time - and then turning Airplane Mode back off. From that point on, time without signal will drop from 50%, but you can zero it out by putting the phone on power when you do the airplane mode trick, as those stats are reset by powering the phone (IIRC.)

The reason that the 50% bug is considered not to drain battery is that when you airplane mode right after booting a phone that is charged 100%, you will get the same battery life than if you did not do the airplane mode trick.

8 hours seems short, but batteries do decrease in life as they are used, and if your wife is in an area with a weak Verizon signal it will definitely drain very quickly. Of course it depends on how much you use the phone, and how much background processing happens - if she is using HTC Mail and polling for mail every 15 minutes, rather than push mail from Gmail, that will hurt the battery life. I used to get around 16 hours or so from a full charge with stock Eris.

 

[Steel36]

thanks for the info. perhaps the battery is weak due to it being used. I've got the original battery from my Incredible still so I may switch it in and see how the phone fares.