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Motorola Atrix Battery Life

love the phone,but I feel that I can't get more than 10 feet from a charger. I've had the phone for three weeks and still barely get through a day of light usage on a full charge. Think I'll go to the local AT&T store and see if I can complain my way to a new battery.
 
A lot of the posts in this thread talk about turning various things off, turning them down, etc. In other words, if you turn everything off, the battery lasts longer. I'm betting that everyone who has an Atrix bought it because it promised to out-perform anything else. So the idea of hobbling this beast just seems...wrong. I keep hoping that the battery will get with the plan and start hanging in there a little longer.

Until then, I'll just keep making light conversation with all my new friends in the AT&T customer service (now THAT is false advertizing!!) department.
 
Roze said:
*snip*
Thanks for any input!

Roze,
Loving her Atrix but hating the battery life
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Can you live without the weather/news sync?

Today I was at 50% by the end of my work day which is 7am (unplug) to 4:45pm (leaving building) with 4+ hrs of mp3s w/ PowerAmp, 1
 
Mike8414 said:
A lot of the posts in this thread talk about turning various things off, turning them down, etc. In other words, if you turn everything off, the battery lasts longer. I'm betting that everyone who has an Atrix bought it because it promised to out-perform anything else. So the idea of hobbling this beast just seems...wrong. I keep hoping that the battery will get with the plan and start hanging in there a little longer.

Until then, I'll just keep making light conversation with all my new friends in the AT&T customer service (now THAT is false advertizing!!) department.
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I agree with you on that point. Like I mentioned, I use bluetooth for a couple hours, have a few widgets and I do have sync-intervals set for some apps for every 4 hours. I use auto-brightness by default.

I think it's important to control certain things that will just suck the life out of your battery that your not even using but I also don't think you need to keep your phone bare-bones just to be able to use it for one day.
 
For at least some of you, the issue will be poor battery gauge calibration. WHen I was attempting to discharge, I got nearly 2hrs straight of video playback between 30% and 5%.
 
kilasix9 said:
I think it's important to control certain things that will just suck the life out of your battery that your not even using but I also don't think you need to keep your phone bare-bones just to be able to use it for one day.
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That also depends on what a full day away from a charger is for you. Mine starts at 5AM and I'm@ home by 8PM. With all my settings cranked way down or off I can even ride that same charge all the way to bedtime depending on my use that day. I might even have been able to keel more settings turned on or up but this way I always know I'll be ok
 
Well, things like wi-fi, bluetooth and GPS should always be turned off on any smartphone if your not using them. No point in having your phone waste battery life on them no matter how good or bad the battery might be.
 
kkel19 said:
should this stop me from buying the phone over my iphone 4?
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My battery reader is showing me at 25 hours unplugged and 40% remaining. Total use has been around 6 hrs of websites 3 photos 2 min voicecall 5 min video and 10 texts since my last charge. This is why I keep my settings as low as I described a few posts up.
 
GrayKode said:
After a few days of heavy usage my atrix is lasting almost as long as my iPhone 4, and i carry both daily.im currently at 50% after unplugging it 12+hours ago
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What is this program your using? I've only seen mention of Spare parts, which I've got, but I'm not really sure I'm understanding everything it can do. I just want to know where what's going and being used. My battery isn't bad at all really, I would just like to tweak it and keep it running healthy. One big thing I need to also need to figure which processes I can have stopped that I don't need running in the background, as some have mentioned.

Quick side note, may have missed it but... I've had my Atrix almost a week, I haven't let it completely die yet, should I still do that now even though I've charged it a few times?

I'd like to find a good 'all in one' battery indicator/utilities app widget of sorts.
 
Okay, I was on the edge...had the Atrix for three weeks and was pretty much convinced that I needed lots of chargers (office, home, car, etc) if I was going to live with this phone. Then I read a response (to this thread, IIRC) that advised looking for rogue apps that chew up batteries. I found it...in my case is was a pre-installed Yahoo mail app that kept kicking off a process to poll the mail server. I also installed Juice Defender. Wow!

Prior to all of this, I would charge the phone overnight and then have to put it back on the charger by late afternoon--all with light usage (a few txts during the day, checking email a half-dozen times, and maybe a phone call or two). After uninstalling the Yahoo mail app and installing Juice Defender, now I charge overnight and by 7:30 or so in the evening I still have 80% left on the battery. Woo-hoo!
 
Mike8414 said:
Okay, I was on the edge...had the Atrix for three weeks and was pretty much convinced that I needed lots of chargers (office, home, car, etc) if I was going to live with this phone. Then I read a response (to this thread, IIRC) that advised looking for rogue apps that chew up batteries. I found it...in my case is was a pre-installed Yahoo mail app that kept kicking off a process to poll the mail server. I also installed Juice Defender. Wow!

Prior to all of this, I would charge the phone overnight and then have to put it back on the charger by late afternoon--all with light usage (a few txts during the day, checking email a half-dozen times, and maybe a phone call or two). After uninstalling the Yahoo mail app and installing Juice Defender, now I charge overnight and by 7:30 or so in the evening I still have 80% left on the battery. Woo-hoo!
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Interesting...your battery life seems similar to mine atm. Did you use the yahoo mail app? I guess I'll try this out and see if it helps.
 
I got 4 hours of display and 2 1/2 hours of phone calls today. Battery continues to amaze me. No way I would've been able to do that with another phone.
 
The Atrix has horrible battery life and while looking at the battery manager I see display as the number one batter killer at a whopping 29%, I have my brightness turned down all the way with auto brightness turned off.

Also the dumb buttons on the button means that the buttons are actually part of the display and are therefore always illuminated too draining battery life, while Motorola painted over the rest of the area with black paint, so in reality the display is not 4" ,but actually 4.3" of battery draining size.

Also phone idle is using 20% battery life, why would the phone not doing anything be the number 2 batter killer, followed by phone standby at 18%.
 
Keep the screen on less and it will decrease. Is this what we get these phones for - to keep their screens of - I do not believe so YMMV though.
 
darklide said:
The Atrix has horrible battery life and ...
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Huh? By almost all accounts the Atrix has great battery life compared to other droid phones - especially after the recent software update. Mine lasts at least 2x what my Captivate used to even though I use it heavier than I did with the Captivate. FYI, my display is set to "auto" and 1 minute shut off.

John
 
darklide said:
Also the dumb buttons on the button means that the buttons are actually part of the display and are therefore always illuminated too draining battery life, while Motorola painted over the rest of the area with black paint, so in reality the display is not 4" ,but actually 4.3" of battery draining size.
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Lol, wut!?

If you're referring to the capacitive buttons at the bottom (menu, home, back, search), then no, those are not "part of the display". If yours are always on, then I'd think there's something wrong with your phone.
 
My battery life is excellent and a lot better since the update, I normally have my display turned up to max. I've been up since 5 this morning, sent 10 emails, surfed Facebook for a while, Angry Birds Rio for about 20 minutes and sent a few texts and I'm still at 90%.

Sounds like you may have a bad phone if your still in your 30 day window I'd take it back.
 
:):DYeah since the update, I have seen a much bigger battery improvement. I was able to also keep root by following these instructions.
[SCRIPT] Root v2 for 4.1.57 (Stock 1.2.6 REQUIRED) - xda-developers

I am a heavy user an I will say it has improved significantly. As I have said a while back on this forum, Sedio is suppose to be selling a extended battery. The page still says coming soon. Its suppose to be the same size as original, so you don't have to worry about it being bulky. So I can imagine how much longer this phone will last.
 
Roze said:
Interesting...your battery life seems similar to mine atm. Did you use the yahoo mail app? I guess I'll try this out and see if it helps.
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I use yahoo and gmail apps, but all of my emails are set to manual retrieval so they're completely inactive unless I start them myself and check my email.
 
:):DYeah since the update, I have seen a much bigger battery improvement. I was able to also keep root by following these instructions.
[SCRIPT] Root v2 for 4.1.57 (Stock 1.2.6 REQUIRED) - xda-developers

I am a heavy user an I will say it has improved significantly. As I have said a while back on this forum, Sedio is suppose to be selling a extended battery. The page still says coming soon. Its suppose to be the same size as original, so you don't have to worry about it being bulky. So I can imagine how much longer this phone will last.
 
Mike8414 said:
Okay, I was on the edge...had the Atrix for three weeks and was pretty much convinced that I needed lots of chargers (office, home, car, etc) if I was going to live with this phone. Then I read a response (to this thread, IIRC) that advised looking for rogue apps that chew up batteries. I found it...in my case is was a pre-installed Yahoo mail app that kept kicking off a process to poll the mail server. I also installed Juice Defender. Wow!

Prior to all of this, I would charge the phone overnight and then have to put it back on the charger by late afternoon--all with light usage (a few txts during the day, checking email a half-dozen times, and maybe a phone call or two). After uninstalling the Yahoo mail app and installing Juice Defender, now I charge overnight and by 7:30 or so in the evening I still have 80% left on the battery. Woo-hoo!
Click to expand...


When I use juice defender on the default setting my mms won't work. Anyone else have this problem?
 
I've always had great battery life on mine as well. It was 'ok' before I started tweaking my settings for max battery performance, now it's excellent. I haven't even DL'd the recent battery life improvement update yet. Sounds like you got either a bum battery or you're an extremely heavy user.
 
So rooted and froze all of the unwanted apps. 8 hours since unpluged (6am) and I have 60% battery life left and I was on normal to heavy usage today.

52% -Voice call - 1 hr
12% -Display - 1 hr
10% -Phone idle - 7hr
5% -Cell standby - 8hr
5% -Android sys - cpu 7min data 15mb
4% -browser - cpu 5 min data 1.2mb
4% -alarm clock -cpu 5min
3% -market - cup 4min
3% -watchdog - cpu 3min
2% -phandroid - cpu 2min
2% -android os - cpu 2min

Prior, same usage less phone call and after 8hr I'd have 30% left. So I think I'll last with normal usage that 16hours if I am out.
 
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