Battery Life

[choffy21]

My experience with he droid and laptops is that you need to FULLY charge and kill a lithium battery a few times when you get it to get the full charge cycle out of the battery. My droid rarely runs out now.

Will keep that in mind.

 

[hookem]

Eris user here.

Got these specs for the Nexus One from Google:

"Power and battery Removable 1400 mAH battery Charges at 480mA from USB, at 980mA from supplied charger

Talk time
Up to 10 hours on 2G
Up to 7 hours on 3G

Standby time
Up to 290 hours on 2G

Internet use
Up to 5 hours on 3G
Up to 6.5 hours on Wi-Fi

Video playback Up to 7 hours
Audio playback Up to 20 hours"

This from a 1400mAh battery and power hungry hardware? The Eris comes with a 1300mAh and has a 3.5 hr talk time. Is the difference that N1 is running android 2.1?

 

[ekyle]

The manual says to, but reading about LiIon batteries, you shouldn't need to. I did.

I found that with my Eris that after several times of letting the battery hit 5% - 10% then doing a full charge overnight helped bring it up. I unplug at around 7 every morning and am at about 30% or so by 10PM. Not as good as my BB was but I don't have push email any more either Still worth it

 

[informale]

I don't have push email any more either

What do you mean by that? Do you mean you don't consider GMail sync on Android as push email (which of course it isn't, but it still is good) or you don't use it (auto-sync off)? It makes big difference battery-wise.

 

[oniongirl]

From the other current battery thread, important info to re-post I think:

How to prolong lithium-based batteries has some interesting info on lithium-ion batteries, specifically:

"The battery prefers a partial rather than a full discharge. Frequent full discharges should be avoided when possible. Instead, charge the battery more often..."

"Some lithium-ion batteries fail due to excessive low discharge. To prevent failure, never store the battery fully discharged. Apply some charge before storage, and then charge fully before use...."

edit: Just noticed there is a "Simple Guidelines" section at the bottom of the page. Has nice bullet points. Also explains why my laptop battery is rubbish

 

[osubrad04]

Just my two cents... The Nexus 1 hasn't disappointed me. I have turned off the GPS and that seems to make a serious difference in the battery life. I noticed GPS was running when I was using the browser. Major battery killer there... after that I ended the day with 80% battery life and over night my battery drained 3%. The GPS edit is the only thing I have done and I dont use a task killer. I made a few calls yesterday totaling about 30 minutes, email on push with about 40ish received and sent texts all day.

GPS being used by browser the culprit?

 

[Mrqwebb2]

I haven't noticed anyone mentioning twitter apps? I will be switching from the G1's horrible battery and would really like to know what effect twidroid has on the nexus one, say with updating tweets every 30 min or so.

 

[ekyle]

I just meant push mail in the sense of Blackberry. Where the server does the work instead of the phone.

 

[ekyle]

I haven't noticed anyone mentioning twitter apps? I will be switching from the G1's horrible battery and would really like to know what effect twidroid has on the nexus one, say with updating tweets every 30 min or so.

I just the native Twitter app that came on the Eris (Peep is it?) and set the updates to manual. That would nullify any battery drain from that app right?

 

[Mrqwebb2]

I just the native Twitter app that came on the Eris (Peep is it?) and set the updates to manual. That would nullify any battery drain from that app right?

Does that come standard on the nexus one?

 

[JoeIndy]

My experience with he droid and laptops is that you need to FULLY charge and kill a lithium battery a few times when you get it to get the full charge cycle out of the battery. My droid rarely runs out now.

I agree. This has been my experience with Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries for years. The first charge cycle sucks. Run it dead. So dead you can't get the phone to turn back on. Then charge it for 10 hours. After that, it'll run like champ.

Even though the battery people say it's not necessary, do it once. Trust me.

 

[omatix]

Just my two cents... The Nexus 1 hasn't disappointed me. I have turned off the GPS and that seems to make a serious difference in the battery life. I noticed GPS was running when I was using the browser. Major battery killer there... after that I ended the day with 80% battery life and over night my battery drained 3%. The GPS edit is the only thing I have done and I dont use a task killer. I made a few calls yesterday totaling about 30 minutes, email on push with about 40ish received and sent texts all day.

GPS being used by browser the culprit?

I'm really suspecting I have a bad battery, then. There are no major apps using power according to the Battery Status info screen, my GPS is off, yet I'm always down to about 60% after 4-5 hours of intermittent use of the phone (probably less than 45 mins total of non-standby use).

I do have the facebook widget and news/weather widgets running, but that surely couldn't take so much battery, could it?

 

[ekyle]

The weather widget updates often and I believe that it tries to grab your location, even when the GPS is off. I could be wrong on that since I'm only 5 days or so into owning an Android device. News aggregators can update often as well. I'm not too sure about the Facebook app. I stopped using it after I couldn't get notifications to work.

I suggest to try ditching the weather widget and see what happens and go from there.

I've got a lot of troubleshooting experience from own a BB Storm before this lol

 

[androidtx]

I don't seem to be having any problems, I have been using it a ton for web surfing, email, texting, taking pictures, video, etc. I have only charged it once since I got it around 3pm yesterday, and took it off the charger around 5pm. It is now about noon here the next day, and I still have 30%. I guess after getting used to a G1, I am not that picky. Seems about on par with how my iphone 2g used to be. I imagine once I get over playing with the phone, it will probably last a couple days with no charge, though I am totally in the habit of doing things like plugging my phone in when I am in my car, when I sit at my computer, and when I am watching tv, that it really is no big deal to me. And when I travel, I usually always have my laptop, so I always have a power source I can mooch off if need be.

 

[mi_canuck]

what screen brightness settings are you guys with good battery lives using?

obviously turning off live wallpapers is a must...

i was running like 75% screen brightness... but now down to 25% (luckily, the slider scale doesn't seem to be very linear, so even at 25% it's quite bright... almost too bright at 75% or higher...)

anyone running auto-brightness? i tried it, but it fluctuates too much and find it kind of annoying in a distracting way...

also noticed that have an IM app (such as HI AIM) running sucks down the battery pretty quickly....

after a few charge cycles though, with live wallpaper off, 25% screen brightness, turning off IM apps when not in use, turning off WiFi when not in use, battery seems to be holding up much better...

of course, i'm not playing with it every 5 secs like on the first day that i got it

cheers

 

[SynergyNT]

Yesterday I only got about 8 hours out of my battery with light to moderate use. So far today, the performance is much better. The change I made was to turn off GPS. I've got the weather widget running, which can find you based on cell towers, but there shouldn't have been anything else running in the background. For some reason, the GPS seems to be running in the background almost all the time if turned on.

 

[DellyBelly]

My battery life is kinda weak; Ive been at about 6 hours or less since i bought mine. Going to try some of the tips posted here although it seems we have some conflicting opinions on "conditioning" the battery.

 

[laughter95]

does live wallpaper make much of a difference? i kinda like seeing the blades of grass swaying ever so slightly, and the picturesque dusk makes me feel good that the day is coming to a close.

 

[mi_canuck]

Yesterday I only got about 8 hours out of my battery with light to moderate use. So far today, the performance is much better. The change I made was to turn off GPS. I've got the weather widget running, which can find you based on cell towers, but there shouldn't have been anything else running in the background. For some reason, the GPS seems to be running in the background almost all the time if turned on.

shouldn't the GPS only be running when you see the little satellite dish icon flashing in the status bar? that's what I wonder...

i leave it on, since i like having my weather location update on the fly... location/gps doesn't seem to even show up on the battery usage page...

display in my opinion is the biggest draw.... which i why i've dropped the brightness down to 25%... the screen is so good and bright that it's fine at that low setting...

 

[KeithG]

shouldn't the GPS only be running when you see the little satellite dish icon flashing in the status bar? that's what I wonder...

Yes.

i leave it on, since i like having my weather location update on the fly... location/gps doesn't seem to even show up on the battery usage page...

The weather widget should be able to get by with coarse location without issues... unless your weather is so localized that you need better than a 1km resolution .... I still leave it on though... (different handset though)

 

[sooper_droid12]

My experience with he droid and laptops is that you need to FULLY charge and kill a lithium battery a few times when you get it to get the full charge cycle out of the battery. My droid rarely runs out now.

Absolutely wrong. That's the one way to kill the battery and shorten its life. You should do long drains maybe once out of 4-7 charge cycles. These batteries do not have memory, but occasionally the chip inside the battery needs to be re-calibrated, hence the long drain power charge. Better to charge up at 40% than let it kill to 10-20% and bring it up to full.

 

[sooper_droid12]

Does that come standard on the nexus one?

No, Eris has Sense UI and it isn't native. Native Twitter doesn't exist. HTC layered a widget skin over Android OS which includes this kind of support. Not available on the N1 and any HTC app found in the Market is available to HTC phones only (not including the N1).

 

[sooper_droid12]

Run it dead. So dead you can't get the phone to turn back on.

Dangerous! Some people have done this accidentally (forgot their charger or something) and the result: A BRICKED PHONE! Very risky.

 

[oniongirl]

I have read the same sooper_droid, except my information said completely drain once every 30 cycles for the same reason - the "fuel gauge" may start falsely reporting an empty battery, cutting the power to the device. Frequent charges are the way forward, with limited complete drains if it can be avoided.

 

[sooper_droid12]

Maybe it was 30 cycles Either way, frequent long drains and deep charging cycles is a no-no and I wouldn't recommend it in the early part of the battery's life.