Battery Life - The Good The Bad and The Ugly

[Caloy]

I've noticed two contrasting groups on the forum lately. Some state getting only a few hours of battery life, others find the battery life to be much more reasonable.

I easily found my phone to last all day with moderate to sometimes heavy use with battery to spare. I'm not doing anything special either, no task killer, stock battery. I generally use wifi when around a hotspot, GPS while navigating and using location based services, and bluetooth to my car stereo while driving.

I'm not saying I wouldn't love a battery that lasts longer. Of course I'd take two million dollars over one million also.

Do we really use our phones so differently which battery-life has that much variance?

I believe so.

It's like cars. Some people get better mileage for the same car. Other's like to see numbers on 0-60 and still others like to see how much farther they can stretch a tank-full of gas. At highway speeds, some like the windows up to conserve gas, and some like the top down and feel the breeze.

For me, I would rather get the best the phone can offer. I have aspare battery if I needed it. Some like to prove their phone is efficient and would stretch everything to prove they can last 18 hours with a single charge.

I say it's your phone, use it the way you like to. But don't complain of mileage if you use it like a race car.

 

[SirSlayer]

wow i am not sure what happend...
but i ditched the curvefish battery monitor i was using. i am using the battery indicator pro.
from when i disconnected from charging after writing my last msg here,
i noticed i was holding a good charge for some reason.
i was at 97percent at 7:17 when i took off charge. i have been txting light
internet light, a few phone calls, it is now 9:17 so thats 2hours. i am at 73percent. that is an amazing difference from before.
so only things different i have done was.

run SYSTEMPANEL which is really unbelievable how useful, and informative
this program is, i see every single thing that uses my cpu and how much memory they use etc. also learned some things about how the phone works such as the live background, htc sense uses verrry little power and only uses cpu when you are on the homescreen.

and run the battery indicator

and no i am not using atk to kill the running apps like i tried to before, tried to cheat around the system.

oh one more thing the ANDROID SYSTEM IS currently 26 percent

Glad you figured it out!!

 

[StephSkywalker]

i found something that really works...go into setting account and sync, and turn off background data

If you do that will that prevent sync from gmail, twitter, facebook, etc?

 

[mr.almeida]

If you do that will that prevent sync from gmail, twitter, facebook, etc?

I believe that'd make everything manual. Which I prefer anyway.

 

[beandogg]

I just received my Mugen 1800 mah batteries from Hong Kong today. They fit right in the back cover. I'll let you know how they do...they say you have to charge them for the first 4-5 times for 12 hours in a row with the device on then discharge them until they are low (but not completely out! [it literally has an exclamation point in the instructions]). After which you can charge and recharge them as you will.

That's hard to do without a battery charger, with the device on. So some of this may get shortchanged a little.

 

[SeauxCrazy]

I was almost 15 hrs .... I had similar settings, just read it, figured it out on my own, but glad to see great minds think a lot

My settings :
Autobrightness ON
GPS On half day/Turned off rest
Wifi On and off throughout day
Bluetooth ON
AutoSync Mail/FB/Twitter ON

Kinda messed up this one ... and already plugged it in and deleted these shots, so no going back now lol

 

[spider055]

i found something that really works...go into setting account and sync, and turn off background data

What do you lose when you turn this off?

 

[cesjr02]

I believe so.

It's like cars. Some people get better mileage for the same car. Other's like to see numbers on 0-60 and still others like to see how much farther they can stretch a tank-full of gas. At highway speeds, some like the windows up to conserve gas, and some like the top down and feel the breeze.

For me, I would rather get the best the phone can offer. I have aspare battery if I needed it. Some like to prove their phone is efficient and would stretch everything to prove they can last 18 hours with a single charge.

I say it's your phone, use it the way you like to. But don't complain of mileage if you use it like a race car.

I like your race car analogy. Having said that, my race car gets pretty damn good gas milage considering.

 

[lyons238]

I was almost 15 hrs .... I had similar settings, just read it, figured it out on my own, but glad to see great minds think a lot

My settings :
Autobrightness ON
GPS On half day/Turned off rest
Wifi On and off throughout day
Bluetooth ON
AutoSync Mail/FB/Twitter ON

indeed haha. what app is that monitoring app? and are you using ShootMe to take the s/s?

also is it normal for my android system to be using 30-40% battery on average? iv seen it using as high as 93% and i dont seem to have any apps hogging resources on me :/? any ideas?

 

[SeauxCrazy]

Using shootme for screen shots and the monitoring app, isn't an app at all. It's the stock Android monitoring system.

Go into "Phone" and dial "*#*#4636#*#*" and on the last * it'll take you to a Battery/Phone information menu. Battery info is just text and tells you the exact battery level, health of battery, etc. Battery History is the one with the red/pink bar graph. After unplugging it to download the pics, My wifi On/Running is 100% and so is Bluetooth. hmmmm....

The other screen shot I took was from "Settings" > "About Phone" > "Battey"

 

[mrk]

I get similar results to the OP.

-4G mostly off, but turned on to check to see how signal strength was a few times.
-WiFi on for about 5 hours while on campus (11mb down on a phone this fast makes me very happy). Sleep policy set to never.
-3G on the whole time (though I think that it automatically turns off when WiFi is connected)
-Bluetooth off (never use it)
-Location on (GPS only activates for taking pictures/streaming qik vids, both of which I did do)
-Background syncs on ~1 hour (for friend stream, and that's about it... GMail is pushed, obviously)
-Brightness on automatic
-Assloads of email
-A few texts
-A couple of Google Talk chats
-1.5 episodes of Doctor Who (45 minutes/episode)
-About an hour of web browsing

With all of that, I was at 30% after 12 hours or so. I'm well-pleased.

 

[sjones302]

I definitely think signal strength has alot to do with battery life. When I'm at work my phone will die within 4-5 hours. At home, it lasts about 13 hours. I get 1 bar at work and hardly use the phone because im running around all day. I have 5-6 full bars at home and im constantly using it.

 

[SeauxCrazy]

 

[Thefoodman52]

There is no need for a task killer unless you are running a shitty app. If you're running the shitty app, get rid of it.

Plus ****ing one on that dude. Warning though, Pandora is a shitty app that needs to be killed if you insist on killing it. It's ALWAYS running, and never actually closes when you leave it off long enough. Always on, always eating CPU. I like lastfm more anyways, so I'm good.

 

[hitekalex]

I really wish Google had designed Android in a way that underclocked the CPU during idle states. My Evo does not need to be running at 1GHz while it's just sitting there with the screen off. I know some people in the dev/root community have started using an application that does just this. Scales down CPU speed when idle, and as soon as the screen is turned on, boosts it back up to 1GHz. Once there are some very usable custom roms out, I'm definitely considering this route.

SetCPU is your friend. And you don't need a custom ROM for that, just a rooted phone.

 

[thaboyz]

Hahaha I'm sorry I had to. I was too funny.

Join it
My cell phone battery is amazing...LOL JK I have a HTC Evo | Facebook

 

[cary328is]

My god this EVO lasts WAAAAAY longer than my old Palm Pre. It's amazing! I've been unplugged for 13 hours now and made calls for about 2 hours, did some video chatting, browsing, playing games, scanning random crap around the house with the barcode scanner, trying to customize scenes as best I can but realizing its futile since there's infinite options LOL, and downloading a few animal sound apps for my daughter to have some fun with. I love this phone. It's now at 26% but I feel like I really beat it up and it's still going strong

 

[Caloy]

I like your race car analogy. Having said that, my race car gets pretty damn good gas milage considering.

Probably since you're engine has no supercharger (4g)... LOL

 

[sjones302]

My god this EVO lasts WAAAAAY longer than my old Palm Pre. .................

Agreed on that one !! I tried really hard to like the palm pre because I was such a treo fan but the pre had way too many issues. The EVO runs circles around it.

 

[TheAndroidWorks]

It's not THAT bad that it deserves public ridicule on Facebook, is it? I think once people are not using their phones NONSTOP they will come to realize it is not any worse than any other smartphone out there!

 

[raqball]

Post your battery screens....

 

[Jordus]

Its not bad. People must have dud batteries or someting.

Plus, 2 spare batteries + a battery charger is 12$. I havnt had a dead Evo for one second since I bought it on release day because I just swap batteries when it gets low.

Its amazing what applying 10 seconds worth of logic to a situation can do.

 

[tracerit]

shortcut < settings< battery use

i don't see this... when i get into settings, there's no "battery use"

EDIT: nm, for me it's actually found in

SETTINGS > About Phone > Battery > Battery Use

 

[mercdizzle]

Its not bad. People must have dud batteries or someting.

Plus, 2 spare batteries + a battery charger is 12$. I havnt had a dead Evo for one second since I bought it on release day because I just swap batteries when it gets low.

Its amazing what applying 10 seconds worth of logic to a situation can do.

Yea, I really look forward to taking off my case to swap batteries.

 

[Jordus]

Yea, I really look forward to taking off my case to swap batteries.

I don't use a case, but they cant be that bad to take off.

Dude if you really dont like the phone that much, take it back so someone else can have it (there are thousands maybe tens of thousands of people waiting on this phone) and go get your iFail, i mean iPhone.