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Absurdly awful battery life!

JAGI410 said:
The first 2 days with mine it needed to be charged every night. The 3rd day I let it die completely and charged it overnight. Now I can go nearly 2 full days without charging.
Click to expand...

That's what I read! And from a long time reader on several smart phone forums, it appears that there are two types of batteries. One type appears to be the one in the Droid that actually gets better in the first days as you drain it and charge it, especially if you fully drain it. The other type, it doesn't matter what you do. What it is is what it is.
 
10h 35min since unplugged
Battery at 50%, usage as follows:
50% display
11% browser
10% mediaserver
7% phone idle
7% cell standby
7% android system
3% break the blocks lite
2% voice calls
2% android core apps

My screen is set to "always on" (I do turn it off manually), did play mp3s for about 3hrs while at work (at about 80% volume, used headphones), browse the web for an hour or so after that and I did send about 30 msg, made a couple of phone calls (10 mins airtime), and I did use it to stream video thru "TV.com" app (about 5 mins) just to show my new toy to a few friends.
Oh, I also did play with "Wifi Analyzer" and "Google Sky Map" for about 10 mins each.
So far I'm quite impressed with my battery life :)

Oh, my Droid was made 40/09, bought it online thru Sears.
good luck
J
 
This thread is useless without listing the TIME each system item has been on. Telling me screen is 50% means nothing, 50% of what? For example I'm 6 hours unplugged, pretty heavy usage, screen is 56%, on for 2h 5m. The percentage can remain the same, but the duration is key for getting to the bottom of these issues by comparing apples to apples.

TIA
 
The worst experience I have had with the battery is when I was working a convention last week. I was in a booth that was definitely in a bad spot. I was swapping between EVDO, 1X, roaming, and no signal for 4 hours. I was at 60% when I arrived and at 15% when I left. I took the phone off the charger about 3.5 hours prior to arriving at the convention.
In that 3.5 hours prior; I used GPS for the 35 minute drive to get there, made phone calls (about 10 minutes total), and streamed Slacker(for about an hour).
I still got around 9 hours total that day. Once I left that booth in the convention hall I held on EVDO and just took it easy until I got home.
 
just checked and I'm on a 39/09 model, more likely to be faulty? or is it a battery issue and not a device issue?
 
This thread is useless without listing the TIME each system item has been on. Telling me screen is 50% means nothing, 50% of what? For example I'm 6 hours unplugged, pretty heavy usage, screen is 56% of total power use, on for 2h 5m. I'm at 50% battery remaining. The percentage can remain the same, but the duration is key for getting to the bottom of these issues by comparing apples to apples.

TIA
 
[rant] OK, my belief is that the older devices are the same ones that they were passing around letting the VZW employees play with so they would be more familiar with the device. Thus, those batteries may need to go through a power cycle, of sorts, where you use it down until fully discharged and then charge it up.

With it being the weekend, it might be the perfect time to do it - don't charge it tonight, and let it go all day tomorrow until it powers off. Then power it on again (if it can) and if then finally charge.

Not sure if this actually works or not, YMMV, but it has subjectively made it feel like the batter is lasting better (I cannot say for an absolute fact b/c 1) I haven't tried it with the DROID yet, and 2) I never physically timed the Alias, but I am almost 100% positive the time was several hours difference after a full discharge followed by an overnight re-charge....

Oh, can anyone tell me how to bring up the battery app from a normal screen? I have only seen it when I am at 15%....

The reason I ask is that I took my phone off the charger sometimes at 10 AM this morning - and it is now 1 AM (the next day) - meaning I ma sitting at 15 hours and what looks to be 50% battery life....

And my WiFi has been on all day long - and so is GPS, and sync....
 
adamman41 said:
just checked and I'm on a 39/09 model, more likely to be faulty? or is it a battery issue and not a device issue?
Click to expand...

My model is 39/09, and I haven't had one problem. I think people are inclined the assume that the first batch is filled with duds. Regardless, it seems (at least in comparison to me) that your battery is getting poor life. Since you're within your 30 days, I would take it to the retailer and see if you can do a swap. It's hard to say what the problem is (phone or battery) so it'd be best if they could exchange both.
 
I am basing my comments on the numerous threads over at the Motorola forums - a lot of the folks experiencing camera problems have the later builds, whereas the lockups and poor performance and resets seem to be more with the older builds.

Besides, it is turning into a szoo over there. 1 week ago there were maybe 150 threads. 2 days ago there were 800+ - now, 180 hours after I got my DROID operational, three are 1087 discussions. And it is hard ot keep track of new topics, so there are more than a few dupes....
 
The rationale beghind WiFi taking less power than 3G is governed by the fact taht most people do not live underneath the cell tower, but usually have WiFi within a few hundred feet (or, like me a distance of roughly 2 feet :D ). Thus, the signal is working much less harder than if you're trying to connect to a cell tower.

I think that there is more to it than that, but I cannot say one way or another as I don't know enough about the hardware yet.

At any rate, my phone has been on for 15+ hours - and it is still at 50% batt level....
 
Ok, So I unplugged on my phone at 10'oclock last night and had 90% left had it sit on the nightstand all night, and when i got up at around 7:30 my phone was DEAD... So now the next test will be once the battery is fully charged I will have it off the charger and see what happens... I did have wifi running, bluetooth on, advanced taskkiller running, locale running, touchdown on, and other regular core apps such as GMail, etc..
 
Mine went dead some time last night - but around 2 AM I started downloading and installing a few more apps, and that sucked some serious power, so....

It's on the charger now....
 
Been haunting a lot of Droid forums the past few days and the consensus seems to be that this OS, being Linux based, runs very well with several apps running in the background. Very little resources allocated to idling apps so no real value in killing apps. The OS was designed to work this way unlike Windows Mobile which ate up memory and leaked memory like a sieve. A possible exception might be apps that frequently fire up the GPS like Weatherbug or an IM program that constantly has to ping a server somewhere.
 
I experienced the same lousy battery as most other users have, however I've hit my first week since owning the droid and I believe its has become better. I've only completely drained the battery once and most of the time I top it up once it hits 15%.

Still I don't really want to leave it up to chance, but since I bought this phone at Best Buy I think returning/exchanging it would cause them to hand me another phone. Something I'm not looking forward to since the only problem I've had with the phone is the battery.
 
johnlgalt said:
[rant] OK, my belief is that the older devices are the same ones that they were passing around letting the VZW employees play with so they would be more familiar with the device. Thus, those batteries may need to go through a power cycle, of sorts, where you use it down until fully discharged and then charge it up.

With it being the weekend, it might be the perfect time to do it - don't charge it tonight, and let it go all day tomorrow until it powers off. Then power it on again (if it can) and if then finally charge.

Not sure if this actually works or not, YMMV, but it has subjectively made it feel like the batter is lasting better (I cannot say for an absolute fact b/c 1) I haven't tried it with the DROID yet, and 2) I never physically timed the Alias, but I am almost 100% positive the time was several hours difference after a full discharge followed by an overnight re-charge....

Oh, can anyone tell me how to bring up the battery app from a normal screen? I have only seen it when I am at 15%....

The reason I ask is that I took my phone off the charger sometimes at 10 AM this morning - and it is now 1 AM (the next day) - meaning I ma sitting at 15 hours and what looks to be 50% battery life....

And my WiFi has been on all day long - and so is GPS, and sync....
Click to expand...

I don't think its the battery because I had horrid battery life with my 41/09 and they tested the battgery, wasn't the problem, it was the phone somehow.I got a new 42/09 and all problems solved. Got 16 hours on one charge with pretty good use as aposed to 10 hours max with low use (mostly sitting in my pocket)
 
Just out of curiosity, how are you guys precisely measuring your battery life, and what is using how much of it? All I see up top is a little battery bar, and no other options to view it under settings.
 
adamman41 idk if this will work for you, but i was having the same problem as you, and i tried shuttin everything down and all kind of other things. Then out of curiosity the last thing I did was set the display brightness to around 25% and voila! my phone has been on for 1day 11hrs w/ 40% battery left and my g/f playing mario bros on nesoid ne time shes bored! So just for tommorow try to turn off the auto brightness and c if that helps. :)
 
djmeslie said:
adamman41 idk if this will work for you, but i was having the same problem as you, and i tried shuttin everything down and all kind of other things. Then out of curiosity the last thing I did was set the display brightness to around 25% and voila! my phone has been on for 1day 11hrs w/ 40% battery left and my g/f playing mario bros on nesoid ne time shes bored! So just for tommorow try to turn off the auto brightness and c if that helps. :)
Click to expand...

thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a shot. Low brightness gets annoying though and some people are having that kind of battery life with auto brightness right? So even if it lasts with low brightness should I still exchange it for one that can last with auto?
 
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