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Desire battery consumption

Well today must be a record, left for work at 8:15am by 3pm I had to charge it as it had reached 22%

Didn't even use it a great deal, couple of txt messages, 20-30 minutes browsing, 5 minutes streaming music.

So i'm guessing something has been running today chewing away at the battery..
 
I had the same problem when i first got my desire. I found i was running msn and that was signed in all the time and using a 3g connection so i was only able to get about 6hrs out of it at most and that was not even using the phone. Go to accounts and sync settings and turn eveything to manual or every few hours. Check to make sure if your not using gmail to adjust the stock mail app cuz that checks for mail every 15 min. That is really all that i did. I went to a messenger app called "kik messenger" and i love it, its just like BBM but cross platform only uses a data connection when i sends or revieves and you can send sms messages using data on your end and the recipient will get it as a text on any kind of phone. I usally get about 13-16 hrs out of my phone depending on the use but on average i get about 15 and thats using the phone fairly regular. Im on a stock rom so i dont have set cpu or anything. no juice defender and i leave my screen brightness on automatic. dont use a live wallpaper or one with alot of white or a lot of bright colors. Do these few things and you will be fine. Oh BTW i dont have my gps, wifi, or bluetooh on so that helps too but i leave my 3g on so kik works.
 
how do these settings look

Up time: 195:21:38

Awake time: 130:39:45


Battery Use

Android System: 41%
Cell standby: 26%
Phone idle: 17%
Display: 14%
Wifi: 2%


i've sent like 70 texts today and been on wifi for 15 mins

current level 31%

is my battery duff?

edit: phone has just shut down
 
extremejoe said:
how do these settings look

Up time: 195:21:38

Awake time: 130:39:45


Battery Use

Android System: 41%
Cell standby: 26%
Phone idle: 17%
Display: 14%
Wifi: 2%


i've sent like 70 texts today and been on wifi for 15 mins

current level 31%

is my battery duff?

edit: phone has just shut down
Click to expand...

You don't tell us how long your phone has been off charge for.
 
I am always recommend rebooting smartphones regularly. Every couple of days or so. I see yours has been up for over a week.

If you think your phone is using too much battery, check screen brightness and update frequencies of apps using the net for data.

Its impossible to say if your figures look ok without knowing all the apps you have, all the synchronisation frequencies for each, all your other battery using settings (screen brightness etc),... But then its only useful information if I had something to compare it with.

One thing I would recommend is to try calibrating your battery.

Charge until LED green then disconnect.
Turn off and chagre until LED green... disconnect
Turn on, wait a minute until fully operational then turn off
Charge until green.

This could give you an extra few percent that your battery wasn't charging to before.

At the end of teh day, its a smart phone connecting to the internet with a huge, bright touch screen. Its not going to last like a
 
danfrance said:
I am always recommend rebooting smartphones regularly. Every couple of days or so. I see yours has been up for over a week.

If you think your phone is using too much battery, check screen brightness and update frequencies of apps using the net for data.

Its impossible to say if your figures look ok without knowing all the apps you have, all the synchronisation frequencies for each, all your other battery using settings (screen brightness etc),... But then its only useful information if I had something to compare it with.

One thing I would recommend is to try calibrating your battery.

Charge until LED green then disconnect.
Turn off and chagre until LED green... disconnect
Turn on, wait a minute until fully operational then turn off
Charge until green.

This could give you an extra few percent that your battery wasn't charging to before.

At the end of teh day, its a smart phone connecting to the internet with a huge, bright touch screen. Its not going to last like a
Click to expand...
 
I don't do exactly what Danfrance does, but I do something similar. I charge my phone every night when I go to bed. When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is turn the phone off, leaving the charger on for the 30-45 minutes I take to get organized for work. I notice when I turn the phone back on, it stays on 100% for sometimes hours. I have had my phone on for almost 12 hours today. I have sent a few texts, made a couple of calls, and also used the GPS with Cardiotrainer for about 40 minutes, and I'm still at 84%. Much better than how it was originally.
 
Having had my Desire for about six weeks, I have followed much of the advice about conditioning the battery. It made no difference.

If you charge the battery with the phone switched off, the battery will register 100% when the phone is switched on as the phone isn't using any battery power when off.

If you charge the phone while it is switched on the battery will reach a fully charged state then enter a discharge / charge cycle as the level drops below 90%. I use Battery Indicator Pro as this gives the percentages and shows the battery state in an exportable log file. Note: the LED remains green during this discharge/charge cyle thus giving a misleading impression.

Analysing the data in this file shows a constant discharge of the battery over time.

I bought a genuine HTC battery from play.com after reading that the supplied batteries were defective and a new one would solve the problem.
 
Long hours are definitely do-able :)
here's a snap off my fone
Wifi enabled

device.jpg
 
I just got my desire yesterday and I'll admit I was bit too excited about getting a new phone to read the manual.

I saw that you're meant to charge for 3 hours before turning on and saw that people said this can affect the battery life.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say just charging it for 3 hours turned off wont save me now? Does it really affect it /that/ much?
 
Hey guys,

Just got a Desire after switching from Xperia X10, and am trying to find out how much battery the Desire is meant to eat over night?

With my Xperia it ate around 2% per night, but of course, I had loads of issues with that phone and had to let it go lol.

With the Desire last night it ate 17% battery, which I thought was scandalous!! lol :D
So I had wifi, bluetooth, 3g and data all off, and no widgets to speak of.

Does that sound right? or a little high? Any ideas if it is high?

ps. love desire.

Cheers, Biff.
 
17% indicates apps running and not letting the phone sleep.

Leaving wifi, GPS and data on with syncs for mail and weather I get only a 3-5% drop over 8 hours.
 
Rzeractor said:
Long hours are definitely do-able :)
here's a snap off my fone
Wifi enabled

device.jpg
Click to expand...

Ack, that battery use screen is 100% useless! Seriously.

I'm also a Desire owner, but in the past few months, I've noticed the battery use is quite random - sometimes, it can survive for hours on a few percent, in other cases, it drops like a brick in free fall. As a developer, I decided to do something about it and digged deeper into the power usage patterns.

Result: app called System Monitor (market).

It shows the battery charge/discharge rate in mA, CPU usage etc, so you can see exactly what the heck ate your battery. Give it a try.


Initial results with an AMOLED screen:

Phone idle: 5-10 mA, 50 mA when sync is active.
Sysmon, maxed brightness, 120 mA.
Browsing (cpu idle), black on white screen, lowest brightnes: 200 mA
Browsing, black on white, brightness 35%: 250 mA
Browsing, black on white, brightness maxed: 300 mA
Robo Defense, 0% brightness at night: 300 mA
Google Navigation: 550 mA (!), phone was warm, battery died halfway to my destination :D


With 1400 mAh of capacity, that means around 4 hours of active usage with the screen dimmed, or 2 hours if you're outdoor and bumped the brightness up. The AMOLED panel seems to drain the battery *really* fast when displaying anything but a black screen, can anyone with an SuperLCD one post their results?


Conclusions so far:
- The AMOLED screen can drain up to 300mA of power on itself.
- Maxing out the CPU (games) will bump the power usage up with 100-150 mA.
- Add both together and active GPS means your battery dies really quick (Navigation).
- Not using the phone at all means it can last for days. Even at 25 mA average, 1400 mAh means 56 hours.
- Using the phone on vacation with a local SIM card like I did, outdoors with max brightness, with Maps & GPS running means it dies *quickly*. Now I know why.
- Disabling Wifi / BT is quite useless. They may add a few mA of idle power, but in reality, that's a drop in the ocean. Surely not in the 20-25% range in the battery use screen.
 
smokeygb said:
WEll my phone has been sent to HTC because CPW tech guys cannot get battery to last any longer than 4 hours on standby and that was by going to default.
So another 14/21 days to wait..ggrrr
Click to expand...


OK so now I have my phone back and they said I required a new phone.
So got it Friday afternoon and put it on charge for 5 hours, then switched phone on.
That night the battery life only last 6 hours so went into CPW to really rip into some heads. The Tech guys were brilliant... What HTC dont tell you that when you switch you phone on you have about 25 application all switched on and unless you turn them off you will lose battery life very very quick. He showed me and I could not believe what I saw.
They then said HTC recommend install an application killer ( He installed Advance task killer from Andriod site ) and also a good battery widget and played with set up in setting. The Apps killer is set to kill anything not required to run every 30 mins and its great.
NOW for the BIG BIG Bonus I ran my phone from Sunday 6:00am to Monday 4:00pm on 1 charge.
Currently
Even now My battery has 88% battery life and time since boot is 9hr 14 min.
So i would seriously suggest you download the application above and play with settings and watch your battery life improve 10000% fold.
Thanks for all that's tried to help !
 
smokeygb said:
OK so now I have my phone back and they said I required a new phone.
So got it Friday afternoon and put it on charge for 5 hours, then switched phone on.
That night the battery life only last 6 hours so went into CPW to really rip into some heads. The Tech guys were brilliant... What HTC dont tell you that when you switch you phone on you have about 25 application all switched on and unless you turn them off you will lose battery life very very quick. He showed me and I could not believe what I saw.
They then said HTC recommend install an application killer ( He installed Advance task killer from Andriod site ) and also a good battery widget and played with set up in setting. The Apps killer is set to kill anything not required to run every 30 mins and its great.
NOW for the BIG BIG Bonus I ran my phone from Sunday 6:00am to Monday 4:00pm on 1 charge.
Currently
Even now My battery has 88% battery life and time since boot is 9hr 14 min.
So i would seriously suggest you download the application above and play with settings and watch your battery life improve 10000% fold.
Thanks for all that's tried to help !
Click to expand...

Really? :confused:
 
smokeygb said:
What HTC dont tell you that when you switch you phone on you have about 25 application all switched on and unless you turn them off you will lose battery life very very quick.
Click to expand...

Unless those apps are actively doing something (synching, download, playing music etc) they are not draining your battery life at all. In fact Android saves battery life by keeping them stored in RAM.

Seems like the CPW tech guys haven't been trained in understanding how Android manages apps or memory.

Take control of your device by disabling automatic synching and/or background data.

The task killer is, without a doubt, costing you speed AND is draining more battery than if you simply tweaked the settings yourself.
 
I can only go by my time over last few months and trust me from a brand new phone and only having about 4 - 5 hour battery from max for what I have now i'll take anything.
This app is brilliant .
Now gone from Full charge to 20% battery life is now - 32 hours and 22 min and thats playing music and using Endomondo for 2 hour bike ride using GPS and browsing Internet.
So something is working.
 
I have just made the switch to android from BlackBerry and I'm very pleased with the phone and OS but the battery issue is a bit unnerving. It just seem odd that I would have to jump through hoops, configure and search on the net for info on how to save my charge. You would think, after becoming a slave to your provider for an additional 3 years and chucking out some hard earned dough, that all you should need to do is turn it on and be good for at least a day and a half.
It was as if I could almost watch my battery level go down as I cleaned up my contacts today. I have applied some tweaks and will be calibrating my battery tomorrow night so I hope that my battery comes to love me and keeps it's charge because if it doesn't come around and act right I will be forced to tell all it's friends that it wets the bed and has smelly feet!
I love this phone (Desire) and despite getting crud battery life (for now) I will continue to recommend it.
 
Dangry said:
I have just made the switch to android from BlackBerry and I'm very pleased with the phone and OS but the battery issue is a bit unnerving. It just seem odd that I would have to jump through hoops, configure and search on the net for info on how to save my charge. You would think, after becoming a slave to your provider for an additional 3 years and chucking out some hard earned dough, that all you should need to do is turn it on and be good for at least a day and a half.
Click to expand...

Wow 3 years?! Whereabouts are you? Is that a normal contract length?
 
As I've detailed in another thread, I recently reset my phone to factory default as I'd had a problem with music stuttering during playback.

Resetting removed all the apps I'd installed. I have only put back the apps I actually use. As I never get anywhere near my 1Gb useage I opted not to put on 3G watchdog and so far the only apps I've installed are are some Google ones plus Angry Birds (of course)

I've noticed a dramatic change in the way the battery lasts. Previously I always turned off mobile data during the day to save battery. I left it on yesterday to see if my newly cleaned up phone would fare any better.

With 3G on I got over 16 hours out of it.

During the day I downloaded the new youtube app, received email and gmail, peep updates, a bit of browsing, etc. In the evening I was on wifi and continued to browse, etc.

Clearly one of the apps I had on before was draining my battery, probably by tapping my 3G on a regular basis. I've no idea which one it was, but I will be extremely careful about installing anything else onto my phone from now on.

It's very easy to throw apps onto your phone but it seems to me that some of them are either badly coded or are going online more than you expect leading to poor battery.

My Desire is reborn, resetting it is the best thing I've done since getting it. Keep it clean and lean is my recommendation! I can't accept that the phone has a poor battery; my experience suggests it's far more to do with apps and how they use the phones resources.
 
First off, you have to adopt completely new expectations to battery life from what you were used to with BB (or any other non smartphone). My wife's got the Bold and the batt life is unreal...but with any smartphone, there's so much going on 'in the background' and what with the massive screens they use, you'll never get anything like you've ever had before.

However, as you say, a day or so is a 'must have' and the good news is 'Don't worry..'

As you charge/discharge it over the next few weeks, the batt life will improve dramatically as it 'beds in'....

I got a cheapo battery off flea bay and as my phone is also my alarm, I got a dock for my bedside cabinet with a 2nd battery slot so you can charge both your phone and spare battery up overnight.

I now never use the spare....well VERY rarely - only if I'm working 12hr nights and I'm on my 1st night shift. In that case, my phone might have been off charge from 9am and will get a lot of hammer before I get to bed around 7am so it's really handy having the spare in my pocket in my locker, knowing I'll never be phone-less...regardless of how much hammer I give the phone.

But on a day when I'm off work, I can use it as much as I like and it won't die on me before I get home, but I'd deffo recomend getting the dock & spare battery, just to give you a safety net, so you can use all the goodies it has on offer, without having to worry about conserving power!
 
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