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Help Battery Life

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sparks3229

Newbie
My husbands phone seems to get poor battery life. He charges it daily. I have had a Droid Charge, and now have the Galaxy 4, so I am somewhat familiar with shorter battery life on smart phones, yet I feel he really should be getting more time out of his battery. He doesn't make calls, a few texts daily, and some e mail checking, but really not much daily use. Is turning off WiFi the only recommended thing to do?
 
Turning off 3g and killing unused apps in the background saves the battery a lot. He can turn WiFi on if he needs to check for emails but after that he can simply turn it off.
 
Nahhh you can leave the wifi on that will save on data . But you can adjust the display timeout and the display dimmer to lower settings . Are you rooted
 
The battery should last 8-10 hours with HEAVY use. Regular use, more like 32 hours.

Regular browsing should drain ~7%/hour with continuous use, standby no more than 1%. Maxing cpu/data/brightness 15%/hour, max.

Has he modified the phone at all?

Terrible reception (especially while using data) will drain the battery surprisingly fast.

There's a graph in "battery" under settings, could you post a screenshot after letting it run down to 50% from a full charge? That page also shows what's using the most power. Anything there look conspicuously power hungry?

From his use, sounds like he should get 48hours easy.
 
Yes, I thought he should be getting more battery use. When he gets home and I can see his phone, I will try to post a screen shot. He has not modified it at all. This is his first smart phone, so he is really a beginner at it.

So tell me...how do I do a screen shot , and then how do I post it? Sorry...I know that is really lame, but I have never done it. Just looked at everyone else's.
 
Press home + power to SS. hold them for a second or two.

You'll have to open the image & crop 50 pixels or so off of the bottom to be able to attach it (open pic, menu button, crop, take 1/2" or so off of the bottom, and then manage attachments while replying), or you can use a website to store the pic & then link to it.
 
Has the phone in question received the update pushed out recently? I read somewhere that it was supposed to improve performance and increase battery life.

I have no idea what I did, but lately my Victory has been getting great battery life. I unplugged it this morning at 6:00, it's 16:00 now and I still have 64%. I have used it for phone calls, emails and played Candy Crush for quite a long time today. I noticed it got better after I let the battery drain to below 20% and then charged it fully a few days back. I have read where it's recommended that you allow the battery become almost fully used up and recharge to increase overall battery life.

Could the battery on that phone be bad out of the box? Try a replacement?
 
I notice a big difference in battery life when I do a power cycle while on the charger at night. With heavy use, gps. and music player I end up about 50% after about 12 hours off the charger.
 
I couldn't get to do a screen shot, as he is now charging it again. He turned it on this AM (10 AM) at almost 100% battery. I looked at it again when I got home from work at 7 PM and it was at 51%, so I thought I would just wait until tomorrow, since obviously there didn't seem to be an issue (I felt 50 % at dinner time sounded OK). From when I got home to 10 PM (3 hrs) it went from 51% to 20 % with no use! Very weird. I didn't know how it lost 30% in 3 hrs. I will watch to see if this drop is happening at night. WiFi is off.

The graph for the battery (settings) showed the screen using the most, at 30%, which is fairly normal for smart phones. I think my screen runs at that too. (ish)

@buzzcon-he thinks he may have downloaded an update recently, but no specific recall. Is there a number I can look for to see if he did,in fact, get that update? If he did and downloaded it, it backfired!
 
Yeah...that's not normal. The screenshot would help a lot.

Do you live out in the sticks by chance with 0 reception?

Can you put his phone in airplane mode for a few hours on battery and see what happens?
 
I will do the screen shot tomorrow. We live in a small city outside of Oakland California. Very good service and reception. I am very curious as to whether there will be a big drop again tomorrow evening. I don't work tomorrow so I will keep an eye on it. I thought about airplane mode today. Although if I were to put it in airplane mode then we might as well turn it off as he wouldn't receive any texts.
 
To drop 30% in 3 hours would take streaming a video with full screen brightness, for the whole 3 hours.

For that to happen with the screen off...does the phone get hot?

I suggested airplane mode to test whether it's the radios sucking up the juice or the CPU/screen.
 
sparks3229 said:
@buzzcon-he thinks he may have downloaded an update recently, but no specific recall. Is there a number I can look for to see if he did,in fact, get that update? If he did and downloaded it, it backfired!
Click to expand...

Just go into System Settings>About Device (at the bottom of the list) and look at the Baseband Version and Build Number. If they both end in PAMG5 then you have the update installed, if they don't, the update isn't installed.
 
Also I've read that you should do updates with a full battery. It can end up messing with battery stats and make the phone think whatever charge you had when you updated is a full charge. So if it was like 30% the phone could now think 30% is a full charge. Not completely sure on that, just something I read.
 
I have been noticing the past few days that when I get a notification and check the phone the GPS icon is displaying in the status bar. Could that phones GPS location keep draining the battery?
 
OK...i finally got the screen shot but how to get it here is beyond me. Sorry.
it shows: Battery discharging 39%: screen-25%, android OS14%, Google services 11%, phone 7%, android system 7%, device idle 6%, Cell standby 6%, Facebook 6%, Clock 4%System UI 3%.

It was 100 % this AM. This is taken at 5:30PM. Little cell phone use. Couple of texts, once trying to get a traffic app to open. That's all.

It DOES have the recent update. WIFI off. GPS off. We do seem to notice that WiFi is on at times. He swears he turns it off. He is surprised to find it on. I am keeping my eye on this to see if it is somehow randomly turning on by itself, which seems impossible, though. I will update soon. :confused:

edit: Also, when i first looked at the battery about 10 min. before the screen shot, the ANDROID OS % was higher than the screen percentage!
Maybe this link works:
http://mail.aol.com/37996-111/aol-6/en-us/mail/get-attachment.aspx?uid=30802532&folder=Spam&partId=1

TADAAAAHHHHHH
 
sparks3229 said:
OK...i finally got the screen shot but how to get it here is beyond me. Sorry.
it shows: Battery discharging 39%: screen-25%, android OS14%, Google services 11%, phone 7%, android system 7%, device idle 6%, Cell standby 6%, Facebook 6%, Clock 4%System UI 3%.

It was 100 % this AM. This is taken at 5:30PM. Little cell phone use. Couple of texts, once trying to get a traffic app to open. That's all.

It DOES have the recent update. WIFI off. GPS off. We do seem to notice that WiFi is on at times. He swears he turns it off. He is surprised to find it on. I am keeping my eye on this to see if it is somehow randomly turning on by itself, which seems impossible, though. I will update soon. :confused:

edit: Also, when i first looked at the battery about 10 min. before the screen shot, the ANDROID OS % was higher than the screen percentage!
Maybe this link works:
http://mail.aol.com/37996-111/aol-6/en-us/mail/get-attachment.aspx?uid=30802532&folder=Spam&partId=1

TADAAAAHHHHHH
Click to expand...

The connections optimizer does turn on the WiFi by itself. You can turn that off if you want. Settings/more settings/mobile networks/connections optimizer. Uncheck the box
 
Distribution looks normal, to my untrained eye it looks like the battery isn't getting a full charge.

Can you go to the app store and download cpu-z, then tell us what the mV rating is when the battery is at 100%?

Wiping battery stats should fix it, but I don't remember if the stock recovery will let you do that.

Also, is the battery dropping steadily, even when the screen is off, or does it plunge when it's awake then stay stable while it's locked? (Can't see the screenshot)
 
Downloaded cpu-z. MV rating...is that the voltage? (4258 mV) @ 100%. It also says battery health good.

I also unchecked the box in connections optimizer.

Also, is the battery dropping steadily, even when the screen is off, or does it plunge when it's awake then stay stable while it's locked? (Can't see the screenshot)
Click to expand...
Yeah lame on the screen link. Sorry. I will watch this tomorrow, as we will be out all day on a family outing. So I will randomly check his battery and watch his use of the phone.
 
Voltage is good...

Weird that you could have such terrible battery life and still have the screen using so much of it.

What are the mV like when the phone thinks the battery is low?
 
Chiral said:
Wiping battery stats should fix it, but I don't remember if the stock recovery will let you do that.
Click to expand...

Thanks for mentioning this because I always wondered what the benefit was to clearing the battery stats. I assumed it was for when you replaced the stock battery with a higher/lower mAh after market battery.
 
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