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Battery Drops like Ashley Simpson's Career?

I've noticed performance mode makes the phone a little snappier but drastically reduced battery life.
 
So far I am impressed with the battery. I just got my 15% warning as we speak. My phone has been unplugged for 14hrs and 19 minutes. I have made several phone calls today, send about 10 texts. I have been installing apps and tweaking widgets and settings all day. I watched a couple of youtube videos and have been browsing forums a bunch. My phone syncs a gmail account via push, an Exchange account via push using Touchdown for Exchange, and a Roadrunner account every 30 minutes. I have twitter, facebook, weather and news widgets going with updates every hour or so (depending on the widget).

14 Hours with all of that going is better than I ever got on my Hero or Palm Pre. The only modern smartphone that I have had that does better on battery is the blackberry, but it just does so much less!
 
turn screen brightness all the way down. Even at 0% its still very clear and bright and you get used to it where if the brightness is even up it looks to bright. disable live wallpapers and clicking/buzzing when u press icons as well as as thats useless and kills battery.

after all those tweaks i can spend all day on my phone and it lasts almost 2 days
 
I have found if you
reboot your phone it will show the actual %. I have used mine all day 6am to 10p and I am now at 80%.
 
My battery died on its own, so I plugged it in. Around 20% I decided I would turn it on. "Phone charging 70%" WHAT???

Edit: I should say it lasted me about 10 hours from 12pm-10pm.
 
just plugged my phone in after it was reporting only 15% battery life left. after plugging it in, said it was still at 50% life. i guess it's just the battery meter that's broken and not the battery itself.
 
Got 11 hour of heavy use today, happy with those results so far. Just the face we can change batteries in a matter of seconds if an issue does arise is nice
 
This happened yesterday before I charged the battery from the store so I accepted it, however, today not so much.

The battery seems to hold off fine, but then as soon as the battery hits about 35%, it goes into a free fall until finally - minutes later - the 5% warning pops up and all of the sudden the phone shuts off and has to be charged to above 10% before it will even turn on.

Has anyone noticed this on their new Droid X (After the primary charge)?

I have this problem too

but it does charge back very fast
 
My battery seems to go quick also. 50% of my battery life is being drained in standby, WTF? I haven't been able to get my battery to charge to 100%. Left it charging overnight and it only went to 90%. Probably going to call Verizon when I wake up. I'll leave it off and charging while I sleep. /crosses fingers, arms, legs for luck : )
 
the new software update that is being rolled out on the 19th is supposed to help with the battery meter problems
 
Because Android is generally better at knowing which tasks to kill and when to kill them. When the Droid first came out, everybody rushed to install ATK only to find out it itself was the root cause of a lot of other strange problems they were having with their phone. The bottom line is: you don't need it.
Android's memory management is very good at managing memory, but it has no idea which items in memory are also battery hogs. Programs like ATK allow users to control which items remain running in the background so that battery-hog programs can be killed easily when not in use.

That said, using ATK to kill the "busy background" programs as I see fit, my X was on battery power from 0930 to 2330 yesterday and had 30% when I plugged it in last night. During that time I received ~75 emails on 3 Imap accounts, responded (briefly) to about 25 of them, used Co-pilot Navigator for about 30 minutes trying to find a church for a wedding (where I took 7 pictures and ~1 minute of video), played music, via bluetooth (A2DP) over the car stereo for ~ 1 hour, ran Slingplayer for about 20 minutes, read about 120 pages of a Kindle book, and had 5 phone calls for a total of 71 minutes. The only programs I run in the background are OS-related (i.e. ones I don't recognize) and K-9 Mail. Everything else I kill - especially the Social stuff.

The Droid X endurance is better than my Droid/Devour/Pre/Q/Omnia/Pearl/Blackjack/Dash2 and not as good as my Blackberry Tour/Curve. It should be enough for a work day too (more mail/calls, less stereo/Slingplayer/photos/videos) although I usually have the opportunity for charging during the day, which is how I got my Droid through an entire work day.
 
the x has good battery life, especially for an Android device. But it has neither been proven or disproved that a task killer of any kind has any effect on the battery. It can be a spirited debate. But almost everyone in the Eris section (thanks to OTD!) has really been open to atleast trying to go sans TK for a week. And most of them come back saying that the phone runs smoother and they have less problems without a task killer. My personal thoughts on the subject is that if you have to control one and with another then you don't really need either.
 
Android's memory management is very good at managing memory, but it has no idea which items in memory are also battery hogs. Programs like ATK allow users to control which items remain running in the background so that battery-hog programs can be killed easily when not in use.

That said, using ATK to kill the "busy background" programs as I see fit, my X was on battery power from 0930 to 2330 yesterday and had 30% when I plugged it in last night. During that time I received ~75 emails on 3 Imap accounts, responded (briefly) to about 25 of them, used Co-pilot Navigator for about 30 minutes trying to find a church for a wedding (where I took 7 pictures and ~1 minute of video), played music, via bluetooth (A2DP) over the car stereo for ~ 1 hour, ran Slingplayer for about 20 minutes, read about 120 pages of a Kindle book, and had 5 phone calls for a total of 71 minutes. The only programs I run in the background are OS-related (i.e. ones I don't recognize) and K-9 Mail. Everything else I kill - especially the Social stuff.

The Droid X endurance is better than my Droid/Devour/Pre/Q/Omnia/Pearl/Blackjack/Dash2 and not as good as my Blackberry Tour/Curve. It should be enough for a work day too (more mail/calls, less stereo/Slingplayer/photos/videos) although I usually have the opportunity for charging during the day, which is how I got my Droid through an entire work day.

Notice I said generally, you may know what to kill and have no problems, many others don't. And it's always better to err on the side of caution. I have always gotten decent battery life without using a task killer.
 
I posted this in another thread as well but after 3 days of terrible battery life i decided at 2 pm when it said 30% that i would turn it off, pull the battery out, put it back in and power back up...low and behold it then showed 70% battery and lasted another 8 hours...im hoping the battery will properly condition and the true battery life will stay for good!
 
When i first got mine on Friday i was a little worried about the battery, but after today im not worried at all. I took my phone off the charger at 5AM played music to and from work(about 25 minutes each way), got a few emails, sent a couple texts, downloaded a few apps, played with said apps and now its about 7 1/2 hours later and my battery is at 80%. Thats pretty good as far as im concerned.
 
My battery seems to go quick also. 50% of my battery life is being drained in standby, WTF? I haven't been able to get my battery to charge to 100%. Left it charging overnight and it only went to 90%. Probably going to call Verizon when I wake up. I'll leave it off and charging while I sleep. /crosses fingers, arms, legs for luck : )

Check what services you have running :O
 
My battery seems to go quick also. 50% of my battery life is being drained in standby, WTF? I haven't been able to get my battery to charge to 100%. Left it charging overnight and it only went to 90%. Probably going to call Verizon when I wake up. I'll leave it off and charging while I sleep. /crosses fingers, arms, legs for luck : )
Thats what happened to me last night. Battery died at work, came home at midnight and fully charged it. dnld'd some apps and checked settings for about an hour. When I got up at noon, played with phone for 10 minutes and got low battery warning, 5% !! Nothing was on accept background data and enhanced gps which I don't even know what that does. Gayness
 
Thats what happened to me last night. Battery died at work, came home at midnight and fully charged it. dnld'd some apps and checked settings for about an hour. When I got up at noon, played with phone for 10 minutes and got low battery warning, 5% !! Nothing was on accept background data and enhanced gps which I don't even know what that does. Gayness

Ouch...

Gayness indeed!
 
I am having the exact same issue. I charged my phone to 100% around 7pm last night. Before I went to bed at 11pm and sending only maybe 2 or 3 texts I was down to 80%. When I went to bed, I killed all apps. After waking up at 7am and sending 3 texts and deleting 5 emails my battery went dead. So in theory I maybe used the phone for about 45 min before the FULLY charged battery went dead. I don't have live wallpaper and I don't have tons of widgets running (just got phone so not sure how to do all of that yet!) so I am not sure why my battery life is just being drained! Def. going back to Alltell do discuss this...
 
Well i can confirm that letting my battery go from 100% to 0% three times followed by fully charging (power cycles) has made my battery MUCH more stable/strong.
 
People keep saying that the main cause is that most of us are playing with the phone non-stop. But that isn't true in my case and I'm guessing most cases at all. I am so afraid of seeing that battery drop again each time that I barely am picking it up in hopes of something getting better. And it still doesn't. A few minutes here and there of the lightest usage kills my battery 10 more percent every time I pick it up, so clearly something is wrong and it's not usage.

This thing should be able to take heavy usage without dropping anything for a while..just like those early reviews (guess they don't apply to everyone's phone now huh?).

I'm very disappointed with this so far and I couldn't even get a battery exchange today when I tried because of a lie where they said the software update will fix the issue, when really NO.

< Don't even know what to do now...


What are your settings like? I've owned my share of smart phones and found the Droid X's battery life to be decent. The reviews you're talking about are judging the battery based on talk time. I don't recall any of them reviewing the battery with heavy data usage. Keep in mind, there are a lot of factors that can affect battery performance. Here are a couple things that drains battery regardless of the type of phone you use.

Widgets - The more widgets you have on your homescreen, the more data you pulling down from the internet. I find this to be the main cause of battery drain for people especially when they have them refresh every 10-15mins.

Screen Brightness - The higher it is, the shorter the battery life. Also auto screen brightness will cause battery drain because it is constantly using sensors to adjust.

Live Wallpapers - it's obvious why this causes battery drain.

Bluetooth and Wifi - I keep these off until I need them. Keeping them on will drain your battery quick.

Location - Areas with poor reception will drain battery faster than area with good reception. This is true for even dumb phones.
 
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