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Battery Life

my main quest... Does WiFi drain the battery? Maybe a dumb quest but as i read on here i get mixed results. I mainly keep it on when I am home.

My battery along with my wifes Cliq suck. I recently got task manager and ganna tweek the screen settings. I turned off what most said to.
 
Leaving wifi on will use more battery than leaving it off. Especially if it is looking for open wifi networks.

However, if you are surfing the web, using wifi to surf uses less battery than using 3G and it is much faster. So, there you go.
 
Exactly. Wifi uses less battery when it's connected, because with 3G, it is constantly looking to maintain a connection with a tower which can be a few miles away thus requiring more power to do so. With wifi, your access spot is hopefully within a few hundred feet.
 
Bottom line is battery technology is decades behind processing power. Ultimately it is battery tech that is going to hold us back, and it is becoming more and more evident every year. Right now if things were on par, you should have a phone with a 1ghz snapdragon that only needed to be charged once a month.
 
i'd be happy if the battery lasted 2 days... or even a full 24hrs... right now, 10hrs-12hrs MAX are what i get...
 
I just installed a different task manager app called TaskPanel (before I had Advanced Task Killer), and whereas before my Battery Health showed as Good, I now see it as Excellent. This is after about 9 days with the phone or so. I wonder if it will last more now. What does your battery health show, if you have a task manager app?
 
This is in the top left of the TaskPanel app. I think it correlates to whether the battery is conditioned or not. Even though it's excellent, after 10 mins of talking on 3G, my battery dropped 4%. According to my calculations, to hit the 420min talk time on 3G (according to google.com/phone specs), the battery would need to put out 168% capacity (at 4% per 10min). So....bad battery I'm thinking, as initially suspected.
 
Well I got a response from HTC... pretty vague me thinks... :(

I dunno.... maybe i'm just a "heavy user" without realising it ???


Thank you for contacting HTC!

We do apologize for any issues you are having with your HTC Google Nexus One. However, from what you have told me about what is running on your phone, 5 hours after a full charge to be at 50% is not bad. The WiFi and GPS alone drain your battery quickly, so we recommend that they only be on when you need them. I hope this solves your issue.

Sincerely,

HTC Email Support

Customer Information
Name XXXXXXXXXX
Telephone XXXXXXXXXXXX
Email Address XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Country United States
Inquiry Information
Inquiry Type Technical Support
Inquiry Description Hello, Wondering if I possibly have a defective battery in my Nexus One. Purchased on 1/7/10. After about 5hrs (from a full overnight charge), battery % is down near 50% or less. This is happening daily. Usage is maybe 15min of calls by this point. Screen brightness set to about 25%. Bluetooth off. WiFi on. GPS on. Email, web, sms... nothing outrageous. Apps with notifications are Weather Channel app, Facebook, the default news/weather app... and that's about it. No IM apps running. What do you suggest? Is it possible to obtain a replacement battery, and send in my current one?
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allen099 said:
This is in the top left of the TaskPanel app. I think it correlates to whether the battery is conditioned or not. Even though it's excellent, after 10 mins of talking on 3G, my battery dropped 4%. According to my calculations, to hit the 420min talk time on 3G (according to google.com/phone specs), the battery would need to put out 168% capacity (at 4% per 10min). So....bad battery I'm thinking, as initially suspected.
Click to expand...

ok I installed the app just to see... it just says "health", not "battery health". Mine says "good". Whatever that means. I'm not so sure it refers to battery though. I any case, it says "good" not "excellent"... this is about 1hr after being off charger with no usage really. Charged for about 12hrs last night.




.
 
mi_canuck said:
Well I got a response from HTC... pretty vague me thinks... :(

I dunno.... maybe i'm just a "heavy user" without realising it ???
Click to expand...

All smartphone users are "heavy users" by nature..you can't not be. But if HTC thinks that after 5 hours, 50% is good, this can't be the company I'm with. This is basic use w/ mostly standby, I mean. If you're using the phone hardcore, then that's a great percentage, but none of us will ever see that (so it seems). Come to think of it though, I got about that yesterday, with wifi and gps off; 3G was on. I'm not crazy about that statistic...a battery needs to last more than 10 hours (15 at least), plus that was with minimal usage really. So disappointing. Whoever said that battery technology is what holds us back is absolutely correct. Seems like every other day some scientist has found a way to keep batteries charged for days. Well, where are they??

Regarding the TaskPanel app, you're right mi_canuck. I'm sorry. For some reason, I convinced myself it was battery health. I guess I was secretly looking for some good news about my phone. On a positive note, it is a pretty good Task Killer.
 
I was just asking if relates to battery health, or if it's really just 'system' health... didn't mean to squash your dreams ;) lol
 
I use "automatic task killer" and have it leave wifi, bluetooth, gmail, sync, music, messaging, gallery, and GDE running and only went from 86% to 81% from 10pm until 7:30 am. I understand that did not inclde any usage by myself but leaving these programs running and kiling everything else leaves me with plenty of juice. Obviously if i use it to surf, text and call i expect it to drain faster, my issues were when i was not even using it myself, the background apps were killing the battery. Automatic task killer has solved my issues, i completely love my N1 now and am glad i switched from the iPhone 3gs.
 
I was originally having some issues with my battery life, at first I got less than 8 hours of usage. Now my phone has been unplugged for over 12 hours and I still have 54% battery life. Admittedly I haven't been using it heavily today, but it is still much better than what I was getting.

First things first... The battery life gets better over time. To me this sounds like a bit of a myth, however I have seen this repeated quite a few times, and from my experience it does appear to be true. The battery life itself doesn't actually increase, however the charging circuit gets calibrated. I believe the phone turns itself off automatically when the battery gets to a certain %, and over time this will become more accurate.

Secondly, if there are any dodgy apps or services running in the background this will kill you battery life. What I consider a dodgy app is something that constantly uses the CPU and doesn't let it sleep. In order to save power processors go into a 'sleep' cycle where they use a lower amount of power. When the system needs the processor to do something an 'interrupt' is sent which causes it to come back to the normal power state. They can easily go from the low power to normal state (and vice versa) thousands of times a second. If for whatever reason an app keeps hogging the CPU and doesn't let it go into this state (for example it is stuck in a loop) the battery life will be seriously affected.

Luckily there is a great little app which can easily see which apps (if any) are causing this, it is called Spare Parts, and it is free! Once you have downloaded it fire it up, go to Battery History, and select Partial Wake Usage from the top drop down, and Since Last Unplugged from the second. If your phone has been unplugged for a while you might want to plug it back in quickly (just until the charge icon appears), unplug it, and leave it for 5 minutes to collect data. Apps that fall into what I consider a dodgy app will have a big blue bar, much bigger than any others. If you have any of these uninstall them, remove the service, and rejoice in your newly extended battery life!

In my experience the following apps cause issues:
  • Locale Beta (Ironic as it is supposed to save battery life :P)
  • Default News and Weather Widget
I also have really bad battery life when listening to music. On my 30 minute tube journey it goes down by approximately 10%! I haven't investigated that yet, but I can tell the results!

Thirdly and finally... Turning off 3G / WiFi / GPS / Bluetooth / whatever doesn't really help. I have all but Bluetooth turned on (I don't use it) and I get the battery life you see above. Using WiFi will help if available, as it uses approximately half the amount of power that 3G uses (at least in other devices, and I see no reason why it would be different here - linky).

So yeah, those are my thoughts on battery life. Try it out and see what you get. Let me know of your experiences, and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!
 
i'm at 7h35m right now with 27% left... GPS and WiFi off screen at about 10-15% brightness.... includes about 1.5hrs of Pandora... biggest contributors right now are display (43%)... cell standby (34%)... next is Android System (5%)...

you guys consider this normal? i find it kinda sucky...
 
mi_canuck said:
i'm at 7h35m right now with 27% left... GPS and WiFi off screen at about 10-15% brightness.... includes about 1.5hrs of Pandora... biggest contributors right now are display (43%)... cell standby (34%)... next is Android System (5%)...

you guys consider this normal? i find it kinda sucky...
Click to expand...

This is about what I'm getting as well. Disappointing, isn't it? What is interesting to me however is that on the iPhone, when it's not in use, the battery really doesn't tick down. On the Android (N1 specifically), it does continually drip down. Now, I'm not sure if that's because of background tasks (which I do kill so i have no "stray" apps), or it may just be poor OS power management. I leave my display on "automatic brightness" mode and to me, that says it should be smart enough to conserve when needed; however, it is still the biggest battery killer according to Spare Parts and the System Status menu.

For anyone with older Android phones, what are you getting out of your battery? The Nexus has the highest capacity of any phone out there (and also the fastest/power hogging processor), so I'm curious how this works out. Thanks!
 
I did put the battery through one training session, where I completely drained it and charged it to capacity.

I have the phone on 2g networks only, as I noticed the phone does switch between 3g and 2g in the house. I switch to 3g when I want to use data away from home(have wifi at home and at work). This is similar to what the iphone went through, so I'm not worried that the switching will stop with a soon to be applied fix.

I have advanced task killer to kill apps. I generally kill everything except news and weather and gmail(these are ignored).

I use the phone all through the day(still playing around with things) and very heavily during lunch. At the end of today, which was about 11 hours, I was at a little more than 50 percent battery life. That's something I can live with.

I kind of think the biggest bang for the buck I got was training the battery, but who can really know for sure? The 2g/3g switching avoidance is probably helping well too. Killing apps when you're done(not sure how best to make this work automatically, as the phone does support multitasking, also seems to help.

I hope those that are having the battery issues can at least have around 50 percent available at the end of the day as well.
 
I turned off my cell radio altogether one day to see... and battery life was still nowhere near yours... 11hrs and 50%???? holy fock!!!!
 
If I have a day with more phone calls the battery really takes a hammering. Otherwise I don't have too much of a gripe with battery use in other functions.

However as the N1 is a phone...
 
mi_canuck said:
care to elaborate... that's a rather broad statement without detailing your usual usage... I mean, I could probably get 24hrs if I just let the phone sit there...
Click to expand...

my bad, that's with 3g use most of the day, wi-fi in the evenings, texting, checking emails and twitter, which sync every 30 minutes. not much usage in terms of calls and with normal wall paper, bluetooth on for about 1-2 hours when I'm in the car, gps on most of the time, listen to music for about an hour maybe, and brightness on medium.

I'm trying it now with brightness on full and using live wallpaper to see how much difference it makes
 
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