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Desire battery consumption

Another update on the battery - First day I've properly used the desire, unplugged it at about 7:30 this morning and it's on 45% now (A little over 10 hours later), using about 4.6mb of data, 100 texts, couple of minutes of phone calls, and some more fiddling around with apps etc. I'm pretty impressed!
 
Phenomenological said:
Another update on the battery - First day I've properly used the desire, unplugged it at about 7:30 this morning and it's on 45% now (A little over 10 hours later), using about 4.6mb of data, 100 texts, couple of minutes of phone calls, and some more fiddling around with apps etc. I'm pretty impressed!
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Good to hear it mate, I'm two bars down after 13 hours and I been using my phone a fair bit. Turning off always on mobile date did the trick for me
 
I've had my desire for a couple of months now and the only issue I have is the battery life. I have tried most of the recommended settings suggested around but looking at what some users claim, I must be still missing something.

For most of the time I can 'live' with the battery life as I am office based and have laptop (and usb cable) with me much of the time.

But this weekend we had a family day out in London and after next to no phone use after 12 hours the battery was at 20%. This included 3 hours switched off during a show. I made 1 phonecall, 4 texts, perhaps 10 checking emails and thats it.

Had I of tried to use the underground map, or geocaching or web searching etc the phone would most certainly been dead before the end of the day. All things that are quite reasonable things to do.

So the point, well for most of the time, I need a phone with the occasional facility to do 'PDA' type stuff. But the Desire barely manages that for a day.

I had set the refresh intervals to all known apps etc to every hour. Switched off wifi when not using. But something is still draining battery (I had always left 'mobile' (3g?) on).

Rather annoyed I got out my BB 9700 and reconfigured, and then shelved the Desire. But later I decided to turn off the 3g data connection via the HTC Mobile widget........and run it as a backup phone to see what happened.

What a difference, manually switching on (both mobile and wifi) and then syncing various apps (google, pop mail, weather, sport, news etc) and then switching it off again and now the phone got to the end of the day with 75% remaining.

So the question remains, despite the fact that I thought I had set all apps to infrequent refresh rates, I can only assume that something is still consuming the3g connection... But what?

I have used 'spareparts' but fail to ever see what is continually draining the battery!

Am I missing something or do I resign myself to manually switching on/off Mobile (3G) and wifi and refreshing manually?
 
Captain Vallo - It's most likely you were moving between different reception types all day. For example when you move out of a 3G area into a 2G area, the phone constantly searches for a better network connection, which drains a huge amount of power. Hence, switching off the 3G connection dramatically improves your battery life.

And turning mobile etc on and off isn't a chore at all. Just stick the wifi and 3G toggles on your homepage, then one click and a couple of seconds reactivates them. As for manually updating, that's usually a one or two click job too. You get used to it.
 
It is a massive PITA having to manage all your connections and the battery issue a big one. Sure you can get 36 hours on standby with everything switched off and you don't use the thing, but that's hardly the point. I wish someone would make a phone like this that had a sensible battery. The desire is pretty thin, I wouldn't care in the least if they bulked it out a little bit to give a decent battery!

The good news is you don't have to manage your connections manually though! Grab a copy of JuiceDefender from the Marketplace, that will manage all your connections for you. It's over doubled my battery life since using it. Does things like turning off wifi while your screen is off, enable data for 3 mins every half an hour to do sync'ing stuff... all these things are customisable by the way. It even knows when you are away from your configured networks and will disable wifi totally.
 
Luffer said:
It is a massive PITA having to manage all your connections and the battery issue a big one. Sure you can get 36 hours on standby with everything switched off and you don't use the thing, but that's hardly the point. I wish someone would make a phone like this that had a sensible battery. The desire is pretty thin, I wouldn't care in the least if they bulked it out a little bit to give a decent battery!
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99% of the population simply don't need more than about 16-18 hours battery life - Because they sleep through the rest of the day. If you put the phone on charge when you get into bed every night, you will have no problem with the battery, because it'll be charged by morning. Complaining about the battery life because you can't be bothered to put it on charge while you sleep is, in a word, lazy. :rolleyes:

The battery is perfectly sensible if you're sensible with it. You don't leave the oven on while you aren't cooking something, why shouldn't the same policy apply to the wifi or 3G connection? It takes about 5 seconds from tapping a toggle on the home screen to the 3G coming online. Which is about the same time it will take for you to open the web browser or navigate to the news feed you want to update. It's not even close to the inconvenience people make it out to be.
 
Phenomenological said:
99% of the population simply don't need more than about 16-18 hours battery life - Because they sleep through the rest of the day. If you put the phone on charge when you get into bed every night, you will have no problem with the battery, because it'll be charged by morning. Complaining about the battery life because you can't be bothered to put it on charge while you sleep is, in a word, lazy. :rolleyes:
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Well you're talking crap there, I charge my phone every night! The Desire will never do 16-18 hours if you have 3G and wifi on, but it should!

I expect my phone to last a full day from when I wake up at 7:00am until I go to bed at around midnight. So roughly 17 hours... the Desire has never done that, even when I have turned off wifi and 3G. I don't know where people pluck these magic numbers from. Do you literally turn your phones off for 8 hours a day? With JuiceDefender installed I can make it through until around 6-7pm but have to put it back on charge when I get home.

I've never gone a full day without topping it up since I got this phone around 3 months ago. I've never had to do that with any other phone I've owned.

Phenomenological said:
The battery is perfectly sensible if you're sensible with it. You don't leave the oven on while you aren't cooking something, why shouldn't the same policy apply to the wifi or 3G connection? It takes about 5 seconds from tapping a toggle on the home screen to the 3G coming online. Which is about the same time it will take for you to open the web browser or navigate to the news feed you want to update. It's not even close to the inconvenience people make it out to be.
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You oven analogy is flawed, I am using my phone when it's in my pocket. Waiting for calls/text messages/emails. I can't turn it off because I'll miss them!

I do have wifi off when I'm not near my network, but I am not going to cripple the device. You wouldn't build a car with a fuel tank that only got you half way to work before it ran out. Car manufacturers put in a sensible size of tank. Phone manufacturers should put sensible batteries in their phones too!
 
In the words of Scotty, 'I canna' change the laws of physics.'

Battery technology isn't good enough to put a more powerful battery in such a small space yet. If you need more battery life and don't care about the thickness, buy an oversized extended battery and case of ebay. If you like the phone thin, there isn't much anyone can do.

And my phone goes through a 17-18 hour day with 30% battery left at the end. That's including sending probably 200+ text messages, 10 minutes of phone calls, an hour or so browsing the internet, streaming 5 or 6 minutes of video from BBC news, regularly updating email, two news feeds, and a weather program, and spending probably 15-20 minutes on the android market. Suits me just fine. :)
 
Phenomenological said:
In the words of Scotty, 'I canna' change the laws of physics.'

Battery technology isn't good enough to put a more powerful battery in such a small space yet. If you need more battery life and don't care about the thickness, buy an oversized extended battery and case of ebay. If you like the phone thin, there isn't much anyone can do.
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That's my point though, they should put a bigger battery in it to start with! Why does style win over function? I don't care if my phone is 5mm or 8mm thick, but if it means I can get another 4 hours from the battery they should do it!

I often wonder if there are different batteries out there, I could never do what you do without my battery giving up. This is backed up by dozens if not hundreds of other users making similar complaints. Yet you seem to manage the impossible. That leads us to two possibilities, either you are greatly exaggerating your claims (and I'm not suggesting you are, you have no reason to)... Or there are better batteries in some phones, yours being one of them! Fancy doing a battery swap :)
 
Not sure if this has been mentioned before but if you're getting bad battery life, particularly if it seems to be draining when the phone isn't in use, then try this:

Menu > Settings > about phone > battery

Take a look at the 'up time' vs the 'awake time'

If they are both the same, and you haven't been actively using the phone, then you have a problem. One of your apps or widgets is preventing your phone from sleeping, and your battery will drain faster than it should.

Unfortunately, I haven't found out an accurate method of determining which app or widget it is, so it'll have to be trial and error.

I extended my battery life quite a bit when I discovered that a BBC news app from the market was preventing my phone from sleeping.

Many people criticise the Desire, and other phones, for bad battery life when in reality a lot of the problem lies with apps. Some of them really are badly written.
 
Using your example Phenomenological, I would be most happy with that performance, the problem is that unless I manually switch off 3G, it doesn't come close to yours. I assume you have your 3G on all the time?

What I am trying to establish is that I am doing something different to those of you who have acceptable performance. Something is running in the background that is draining the battery despite the fact that I believe I have set all applications and facilitates to only refresh every hour.

The point is that I barely used the phone on that day, definitely had wifi, BT and GPS off, yet it consumed nearly 80% battery in 10 hours (whilst it was in my pocket).

Today again I am manually managing the wifi and mobile (3g) and refreshing occasionally, using the phone for phonecalls, texts, news etc (like a proper smart phone) and still have 96% after 3hours.

Additional points:

Also spurious extended batteries in my experience rarely perform better than stock batteries.

And Scotty often did change the laws of physics ;-)
 
Luffer said:
I often wonder if there are different batteries out there, I could never do what you do without my battery giving up. This is backed up by dozens if not hundreds of other users making similar complaints. Yet you seem to manage the impossible. That leads us to two possibilities, either you are greatly exaggerating your claims (and I'm not suggesting you are, you have no reason to)... Or there are better batteries in some phones, yours being one of them! Fancy doing a battery swap :)
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Not making it up, promise. ;) It would be interesting to swap batteries and see if it makes a difference to determine if it's the battery or the use. Don't suppose you know someone else who owns a desire you can try that with?

Captain Vallo said:
Using your example Phenomenological, I would be most happy with that performance, the problem is that unless I manually switch off 3G, it doesn't come close to yours. I assume you have your 3G on all the time?

The point is that I barely used the phone on that day, definitely had wifi, BT and GPS off, yet it consumed nearly 80% battery in 10 hours (whilst it was in my pocket).

And Scotty often did change the laws of physics ;-)
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Go into Settings --> About phone --> Battery --> Battery use, and post the percentages shown here.
 
Phenomenological said:
Not making it up, promise. ;) It would be interesting to swap batteries and see if it makes a difference to determine if it's the battery or the use. Don't suppose you know someone else who owns a desire you can try that with?

.
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I trust you, why would you lie?

Well I do know someone, but they have same issue. Big difference is that they havent 'configured' or messed with the phone, its still same as out of the box.

Yes I use those settings but have never really identified precisely what is 'consuming' all that power.

What I will do now, is record the battery use from today based on the manual switching on mobile and refreshing as required and then put it back to auto and review battery use then.

I am positive that there is some background process or application that is using the 3G despite my best intentions.

I am now on 92% after 5 hours, with few phone calls, few texts, email collection/reading, little bit of news, update of weather, 10 photos.

26% Cell standby
26% Phone idle
19% Camera
19% Calls
10% android system
4% Display

So for me that sort of battery consumption is simply wonderful and better than I could hope for with such a powerhouse.

So I either need to:
get to the bottom of what is doing the damage
.... or .....
find an app that can switch on and off 3G and refresh/sync on a user defined basis.
 
Both of your percentages look fine to me, they about correlate with mine. As for a program that can change settings automatically based on time, location etc, Tasker is apparently very versatile.
 
@ Luffer: People say Lithium Ion Batteries don't have a memory issue but I find that 'conditioning' the battery helps improve its performance. Not sure if you've done a full discharge before you charge the phone a few times and see how it works?
 
I can see both sides of the argument, as I come from a Blackberry 9700, which can do all the same stuff (but on a smaller screen) yet consume 15% in a day even with wifi and 3G on the whole time.

So it seems to me its not a battery issue, but a software issue!

The extended argument is that its ok for the likes of us who come here to try and improve things or make best use of, but what about those who just expect it to work to a reasonable standard out of the box.

Phenomenological you may be right in that something is stopping it go into sleep mode, but I dont think so, as I have always observed reasonable sleep %'s previously.

You may also be right about my day trip to London, with it constantly switching 3g to 2g.

If blackberry can do it, then surely the desire could be developed to be more economical.

 
The blackberry has a larger, higher capacity battery (I checked), and is running a smaller screen and a less powerful processor. The amount of number crunching the processor in the desire has to do to maintain apps etc is huge, so a lot of energy is dissipated as heat by the CPU. But I agree they probably could have poked around and made it a bit more frugal.

Incidentally, with AMOLED screens it's a good thing if you like black - Light colours eat power due to the way the displays work.
 
Phenomenological said:
The blackberry has a larger, higher capacity battery (I checked), and is running a smaller screen and a less powerful processor. The amount of number crunching the processor in the desire has to do to maintain apps etc is huge, so a lot of energy is dissipated as heat by the CPU. But I agree they probably could have poked around and made it a bit more frugal.

Incidentally, with AMOLED screens it's a good thing if you like black - Light colours eat power due to the way the displays work.
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Indeed it is slightly bigger, but surely the screen doesnt enter into it when its simply standing there.

In other words, I could configure email, weather, news etc on 3g and or wifi on both phones yet the blackberry will appear to do all the same stuff considerably more economically

I want to turn this into a slagging off HTC or Android game, or a which phone is better, but I am trying demonstrate that surely it must be possible to program the desire (or android) so that it can run background operations using 3g or wifi more efficiently.
 
I took my Desire off the Charger at 06:50, now its 16:12 and it has dropped to 75%. Thats less than 3% per hour. I made a few calls, used the internet for 5 minutes, 1 text message, 3G & GPS are enabled, Bluetooth is off. I have Tasker running, and SystemPanel is monitoring continiously. Good Technology push mail is constantly running (a known battery eater), Email and calendar are syncing at 1 hour intervals.

Besides *#*#4636#*#*, it was really SystemPanel that gave me insight which apps draw CPU over a longer period of time (hint: Monitor History, use Plot for a battery graph and Plot Top Apps for apps by top CPU usage. That way, i found out that the desk clock leaves the cpu ticking at 10% continiously. And TVUPlayer gives a constant 3% CPU load, even when the phone is asleep (which makes me doubt the phone is asleep). The hourly syncings show up nice as CPU sparks every hour. And while charging, the battery level drops to 90% every few hours after which it recovers to 100% (sign of the not fully loading/dropping to 90% behaviour).

I would get even better life by disabling SystemPanel battery monitoring and the Battery Indicator in the taskbar. SystemPanel, best $2.99 ive spent.

Juicedefender made my battery life worse. APNDroid for disabling 3G has better effect.

Edit: while the phone is asleep, the general CPU load shows to be less than 1%
 
My phone uses 40% battery over 6 hours at night when I'm asleep!

This is with Wi-Fi off and the phone just on standby.

The battery information currently shows -

Android 34%
Cell Standby 21%
Phone Idle 13%
Display 12%
Voice Calls 9%
Internet 4%
Wi-Fi 3%
Shop Savvy 2%
Dialer 2%

(What is Dialer by the way??)

This is how it stands now, so it would probs be best doing it in the morning.

But 40% means it needs charging each evening and a top-up during the day. Surely this isnt right???

I have the following apps -

3G Watchdog
aCurrency
Aloqa
Barcode Scanner
Basketball Shot
Batterytime Lite
cab4me
Flight Director
GOAL.com
Hearts Free
Motris
Papijump
Pkt Auctions eBay
Ringdroid
Scanner Radio
Shazam
Shop Savvy
Sky News
Soccer Scores 5.0
Tilt Lander
Timeriffic
Traffic Rush
Urban Dictionary
Urban Spoon
Wi Finder

Anything obvious thats draining my Desire dry? It's only 3 weeks old.
 
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