Motorola Atrix Battery Life

[shaft103]

So after I made the change to the radio, I unplugged the phone at ~12am. It's been sleeping most of the time since then (gps/data on) but 12hrs later I'm at 80%.

Where is this radio setting located? I went through the menus and can't seem to find it?

 

[razholio]

My experience exactly. I did a factory reset yesterday and today my battery life is terrible compared to yesterday. I think it might also have reset the battery calibration (?) so I'll try some complete cycle charges over the next few days and see how everything works out.

I'm convinced the factory reset 'bonus' we see on the battery % is totally bogus and goes away after the battery gauge is properly calibrated again (after a charge or two). I think the full discharge/recharge cycle thing can have an improvement, but also just time in general as well. My iphone4 started out with worse battery life than a few weeks later.

the other thing to consider are the number of running widgets, whether or not they need internet access (weather, etc.), and check running processes and experimenting with stopping those that don't auto-restart to see if that helps.

Anyone find any battery killing apps out there? I think photobucket is a candidate for me,though I'm not 100% sure on that.

 

[razholio]

Where is this radio setting located? I went through the menus and can't seem to find it?

there's a magic code you have to enter into the dialer to get a diagnostics screen. It's in somebody's post earlier in the thread.

 

[Hawk375]

Hmm... set radio to GSM auto from GSM/CDMA auto. Don't know why it would be set to that since ATT is only GSM lol.

Also, looking through partial wake usage it seems Google Voice is the biggest battery user. Might get a task killer to just kill this, or program tasker to do it automatically lol.

the phone supports wcdma in the event you need to be "roaming" on someone else's network, it's useful if you do a lot of travel

 

[vlnvedala]

Where is this radio setting located? I went through the menus and can't seem to find it?

Open dialer

Dial *#*#4636#*#*

You can find the radio setting in Phone Information.

If you scroll down you can see it to yourself.

Thanks

 

[chrlee2004]

I was wondering for folks who changed their phone battery-- did they find resistance from AT&T?
My experience with AT&T is that they have horrible customer service. Having battering problems and stressing that this is going to be a big fight with AT&T.

 

[mehsdomi]

So the hard reset worked for a few days and now the battery sucks again. I have everything to low and no live wallpaper. I did maybe 10 texts today and 15 minutes of Bluetooth and I am at 60% battery...UGH

 

[razholio]

So the hard reset worked for a few days and now the battery sucks again. I have everything to low and no live wallpaper. I did maybe 10 texts today and 15 minutes of Bluetooth and I am at 60% battery...UGH

after how many hours of use? full data sync? have you tried a few full discharge/recharge cycles? I suspect those are where the results come from...

 

[mehsdomi]

after how many hours of use? full data sync? have you tried a few full discharge/recharge cycles? I suspect those are where the results come from...

5 hours maybe. Like I said about 10 texts and 15 minutes of Bluetooth...thats all. I have tried a full discharge and recharge cycle with no significant changes.

 

[falafel]

I dont think you need to reset. if it happens again (battery performance bad) try just a power cycle. it worked like a charm for me. Also, usage varies from person to person. Saying things like, "many txts, a couple of calls doesnt help much. Here is how we should compare battery performances: I will start:

1 day 4 hours 4 minutes 44 seconds since unplugged
voice 37% 1 hour 1min 14 sec
phone idle 25% 1 day 1hour 26min 49sec
display 24% 2hours 38 min 20 sec
cell standby 10% (same as unplugged time)
bluetooth 4% (same as unplugged time)
wifi 3% 6hours 18min 48sec

I just went from 30% to 20%

If everyone posts the above specifics then we can truly compare.

 

[sabesh]

Green Power battery saver gets me about 20-30% extra on top of what I normally get. Cheers.

 

[abhiperiwal]

In the beginning for a couple of days battery life on my atrix was too bad. it wouldnt even last for 12 hours.
Although now it is around 36 hrs even after using wifi for a few hours and playing games for 45 min and making few calls ~ 1 hr.
The initial drain must be due to the motoblur sync of all the accounts... it transferred huge data. Also the battery needed few cycles of full charge.
Also I'm using the Maximum battery saver. Didnt try with Performance mode though...

 

[humjaba]

battery halfway through 70%
13 h 27 m 37 since unplugged
idle - 36%
cell standby - 34%
display - 25%
wifi - 7%

 

[vinay427]

In the beginning for a couple of days battery life on my atrix was too bad. it wouldnt even last for 12 hours.
Although now it is around 36 hrs even after using wifi for a few hours and playing games for 45 min and making few calls ~ 1 hr.
The initial drain must be due to the motoblur sync of all the accounts... it transferred huge data. Also the battery needed few cycles of full charge.
Also I'm using the Maximum battery saver. Didnt try with Performance mode though...

Do you use Juice Defender, Green Power, or another battery saving app to get those times for battery life or not? Because I can only sometimes match those with Juice Defender set quite aggressively, which can get annoying when I quickly want to check something and have to wait for the data connection to re-enable.

 

[asuprice]

My battery has seemed rough. Not much display time it seems.

 

[Nighthawk]

I have noticed on my device (HTC Hero) that my battery drains extremely fast when I have wifi turned on all day, because it keeps searching and searching when I'm not in range of a wifi... If you are having battery problems try turning wifi off for a day and seeing if that makes a difference?

 

[tatiana320]

Hey guys, just thought since we are all taking about the Atrix battery so much, thought you should know that Seidio is making an Extended battery for the Atrix. They say it will have the same form factor no bulk same slim size with longer life. We shall see. Oh yeah its coming soon, since that's what the page says. Here's the link.

seidioonline.com

 

[captaincanada84]

I have to chime in with the fact that my Atrix gets better battery life than my Droid 1 ever did.

 

[mehsdomi]

My Galaxy S had twice the battery life of my Atrix.

 

[z28forlife]

I've only had my atrix for 2 days, I've charged it twice. It's on it's 3rd charge as I type this. It came with about 40% charge and that only lasted about 2 hours. Then the 1st charge lasted about 6-8 hours but i was on it pretty much the whole time. Took it down to about 30% maybe less and then I had to go to bed and I didn't want to not have a phone the next day so I went ahead and charged it overnight. Then this morning I took it off the charger around 9:30 and I put it back on the charger at about 11:00pm. So that was around 14 hours, I made around 30-40 texts, about an hour of calls, downloaded at least 10 apps, played around an hour or so total in games and at least 45 min to an hour of web browsing. So I think thats pretty good. Hopefully it'll it just get better from here. I know when I tried the evo 4g I couldn't get more then about 8-10 hours if I actually used the phone for more than just calls and texts. If I would jump on the browser with the evo I could literally see the percentage drop.

 

[Deliximus]

I think the software is just not accurate. My friend's lasted 2 days on mostly standby with only a few calls and text before it was at '30%'. This is on the first charge.
Last night it went from 100 to 30% in about 10 hours. I was curious, so i left it uncharged for 7 hours and it was down to 15%. So this phone can definitely last longer than any other android phone I know of. It also takes a while to charge!

 

[moto_atrix]

Got my new Atrix. When I connect my atrix to USB, screen is always on unless I press power/finger print button. Is there a setting to turn off the screen automatically?

It is also taking for ever to charge the phone and battery is draining fast.

 

[MosIncredible]

Got my new Atrix. When I connect my atrix to USB, screen is always on unless I press power/finger print button. Is there a setting to turn off the screen automatically?

It is also taking for ever to charge the phone and battery is draining fast.

Oddly, the setting to turn off the screen while plugged up is in settings/applications/development. And the phone takes forever to charge with usb, much less time with ac adapter. Display is violent on the battery but I've never found myself needing to charge midday doing anything I do on a regular basis.

 

[burtonvdp]

A few things I have noticed so far:

It took a week or so to get better battery life. I drained it down to about 5 -10% and never let it die. I've charged with the phone off a few times and did run it for an hour after full charge (everything on) then turned it off and charged again. I doubt that did anything.

My day(s):

Off the charger by 7:30am bluetooth, gps, and wireless off while charging.

Bluetooth Turned on for 30 - 40 minutes streaming music and phone to car stereo.

Bluetooth turned off and wifi turned on 8 hours while at work and bluetooth on 15 minutes or so at lunch. During work I use it for my zendesk app, txting, and email quite a bit.

Around 4:30 Bluetooth on Wifi off for 30 - 40 minutes streaming music and phone to stereo.

around 5:00 wifi on bluetooth off till around 12am using for txting, surfing, apps(Games, facebook, etc.), and mp3 player (Audio books/ long periods of time) either via speaker or head phones. Not all at the same time but still used quite a bit.

12am or so it gets plugged back in with anywhere from 30% to 40% of battery left.


Keep in mind I am still playing with it so there is a lot installing, rebooting, and screen time. Constantly turning the screen on to check alerts (Have it on silent a lot). I dont have any special apps or battery savers nor do I auto kill too many programs and my screen is set for 3 minute sleep... All sync options are either always on or when wifi is up which is pretty much all day.

Today I am leaving all of my antennas on to see how I am doing at the end of the day.

Something else I have noticed is 60% and 30% seem to last a longer and I'm using the 10% increment monitor.

My main suggestion for people that have crappy battery life is to put it into airplane mode over night and see what it is in the morning... That would indicate software or bad battery imho.

 

[one028]

watch the weather widgets...i got of the ones that automatically update....and turned off bluetooth and wifi.....im on hour 14 and still have 40% left after using it pretty heavy..