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Nexus S Batt Life

BryanS said:
I've just bought a new Nexus S and battery life is pathetic, even with Juice Defender ultimate installed. I take it off the charger at 8.00 and by 18.00-20.00 the battery is flat. I have screen on low and hardly ever use it, apart from 30-45 mins of Angry Birds.

What is the point of having a phone with great features if they can't be used! My wife's iphone 4 battery lasts a lot longer and she uses it a lot more. And why do we need to buy apps such as Juice Defender, the program should have built in energy saving as standard. It's a shame to say, but it's put me off android and I was originally enthusiastic, opting for android instead of iphone - what a mistake!
Click to expand...

Funny you bring up the iPhone 4. My friend complains that his iPhone's battery doesn't last through the day.

I don't use anything like Juice Defender or any task killers, and my Nexus S easily makes it through an entire day, generally with more than 50% left after 18 hours away from the plug (I know, I don't get much sleep). In fact, I've gone through 3 Nexus S's (they sell well overseas), and they all lasted throughout the day without issue.
 
I'm going to be buying a Nexus in a couple of weeks (can't wait!!!) and am wondering...:

Best way to charge a phone: On or off?

Should we avoid using the phone at all cost when it's charging?

Thanks!
 
elemteacher2be said:
I'm going to be buying a Nexus in a couple of weeks (can't wait!!!) and am wondering...:

Best way to charge a phone: On or off?

Should we avoid using the phone at all cost when it's charging?

Thanks!
Click to expand...


Honestly that shouldn't matter. Charging while it's off will charge faster. But I never turn my phone off unless I am rebooting it. I play with mine all the time while it's charging.
 
I don't want to cross post, but I just wrote this up today with details on how my phone is set up:

http://androidforums.com/nexus-s/274685-nexus-s-battery-life-12h.html#post2295714

I just checked my phone right now and it's been up for 6h, 41m, 28s
on battery for 3h,3m,33s

Yet the display shows that it has consumed 39% of the power while the details show that the Time On for the display is only 27m7s.

Aside from breaks and lunches, the phone has been sitting idle on my desk with the screen in standby mode.

1) there may be a bug in the video driver for the screen
2) the screen may be faulty
3) the battery may be faulty

Anyone with battery issues notice that their display is taking up waaay too much juice? For those without battery problems, how much of a percentage of the power is your display using and how long is it on for?

I'm going to take this one back and get a replacement.

P.S. My wife has the same phone set up the same way (basic), and she does not have the problem.
 
algs26 said:
You have an easy way to test your setup. Swap batteries with your wife.
Click to expand...

Definitely a great suggestion. Also have you tried training your battery?

Charge it to 100% and then use it until it shuts down. Then charge it until completely full again. Do this 2 or 3 times and that should really help your battery life. My battery life was terrible until I had trained my battery. and used the phone frequently for a few weeks.
 
I bought my phone 2 days ago, I fully charged it, let the battery drain completely, fully charged it again during last night, pulled it off charge about 6:20 this morning, and I have about 6% remaining now (5:50pm)
Battery use shows just over 11 hours.
That is with the screen on auto brightness,
a few short calls,
some texts,
checking facebook once or twice,
checking the headlines on my news and weather widget,
about 10 minutes of angry birds
everything on apart from bluetooth with widgets/email updating every 2 or 3 hours,
downloaded 2 or 3 apps at home through wi-fi.

How are some people getting over 18 hours???:eek:
Oh, and that is with the phone on silent mode, no vibration.

Is there anything I could do to help my battery more?
 
willbill0587 said:
I bought my phone 2 days ago, I fully charged it, let the battery drain completely, fully charged it again during last night, pulled it off charge about 6:20 this morning, and I have about 6% remaining now (5:50pm)
Battery use shows just over 11 hours.
That is with the screen on auto brightness,
a few short calls,
some texts,
checking facebook once or twice,
checking the headlines on my news and weather widget,
about 10 minutes of angry birds
everything on apart from bluetooth with widgets/email updating every 2 or 3 hours,
downloaded 2 or 3 apps at home through wi-fi.

How are some people getting over 18 hours???:eek:
Oh, and that is with the phone on silent mode, no vibration.

Is there anything I could do to help my battery more?
Click to expand...


Root your phone and use a custom rom and undervolt the processor with setcpu. Undervolting isn't necessary though. I basically doubled my battery life by using cm7 and the netarchy kernel.
 
willbill0587 said:
I bought my phone 2 days ago, I fully charged it, let the battery drain completely, fully charged it again during last night, pulled it off charge about 6:20 this morning, and I have about 6% remaining now (5:50pm)
Battery use shows just over 11 hours.
That is with the screen on auto brightness,
a few short calls,
some texts,
checking facebook once or twice,
checking the headlines on my news and weather widget,
about 10 minutes of angry birds
everything on apart from bluetooth with widgets/email updating every 2 or 3 hours,
downloaded 2 or 3 apps at home through wi-fi.

How are some people getting over 18 hours???:eek:
Oh, and that is with the phone on silent mode, no vibration.

Is there anything I could do to help my battery more?
Click to expand...

Make sure you're not leaving Facebook's crappy chat online. When they updated their app to include chat, my battery life went to hell until I found that their chat service was the culprit.
 
I drained the battery for the second time, fully charged it and so far I have about 60% remaining.
Its been about 9hrs so far so I'm doing ALOT better than yesterday.
Only change was that I turned wifi off. Been using the 3G network all day though and regularly checking the football updates with my bbc/sky app (FA Cup rounds today lol)
 
Hi Everyone

I thought I would share my Nexus S batter experiences with you. I've had the phone for just over 2 weeks. My initial power consumption experience was very disappointing, with no more than about 8 hours. The main problem I found was that the Gallery was using around 35% of the battery, however having checked Android Forum, I picked up the trick of turning off the Picassa synching (I don't even use Picassa anyway). I don't have things like Bluetooth or GPS on unless I'm using them.

Having tried four complete full charge and drain cycles I'm now please to say that I can get around 24 hours on battery with moderate usage, and have no problem getting 18 hours with heavy usage.

One of the things that I did notice is that when I was at work I was having great difficulty in connecting to the Vodafone (UK) 3G data network. Having checked with some colleagues, this was a common problem with the network in the location of our office (a low floor surrounded by lots of tall buildings, so no surprising). I've now made sure that I switch the 3G network off when in work, and using 2G only. This might result in slower data speeds when surfing and checking Facebook etc, however it's considerably more reliable, and has also stopped the common feature of dropped calls (which I suspect was caused by the poor 3G signal).
 
willbill0587 said:
I drained the battery for the second time, fully charged it and so far I have about 60% remaining.
Its been about 9hrs so far so I'm doing ALOT better than yesterday.
Only change was that I turned wifi off. Been using the 3G network all day though and regularly checking the football updates with my bbc/sky app (FA Cup rounds today lol)
Click to expand...


Keeping wifi on all the time drains battery faster than 3G. I have no clue why, but it's always been that way for me.
 
I got 14hrs today, and that was with quite heavy use.
Phone calls, texts, browsing, loads of apps, downloaded and installed a few things, deleted a few things, played loads of games.
The phone has just turned itself off so I've put it on charge.
Hopefully tomorrow, I'll see around 16 or 17hrs with medium usage.
I find that the first 5 or 6 hours the drain is pretty low, then all of a sudden, it will get past 8 or so hours and then the drain becomes higher.
My old nokia did that, I could have 5 battery bars all day, then 4, and as soon as it went to 3, the battery ran out really fast.
 
I managed to improve my battery life by about 25% yesterday by doing one thing: switching my network provider from 3 to Vodafone.

It was a pretty astounding increase and really illustrated to me just how much your battery can be drained by having a bad mobile signal.
 
I have been reading peoples posts and I am extremely disappointed in my Nexus S. I can barely get through the day sometimes. And I hardly use it any more. I'm in med school so not much chatting.

My battery usage says Android OS as the main consumer of my battery life. The next one is cell standby - the building I am in doesn't have great 3G signal so I imagine it is searching for a signal alot. What is Android OS doing and how can I stop it? There is another item called Android System that is a big user. Is there something happening in the background that I don't know about?
 
I consider myself a very moderate phone user, 3g, brightness on auto, very light chatting, very light browsing, after 12 hours i usually sit around 40%

I turned on bluetooth over the weekend because I was car shopping and testing the bluetooth feature, now i'm below 30% battery usage after 5 hours... amazingly disappointing
 
Had my Nexus S for one week now and i'm getting a good 24 hours use from the phone between charges.

I have 3G and Wi-Fi on constantly, the phone is not muted, vibrate is turned on and the brightness set to auto.

The first day i had the phone i struggled to get 12 hours use so i turned off the live wallpapers and GPS....also after every use i quickly go into 'settings' and see what apps are running....then stop any i'm not using before putting it on standby.

A huge amount of problems people encounter is from poor battery management at the beginning....i have let the phone run down to less than 10% before charging it each time, i have always believed this develops a healthy, longer lasting battery....maybe nonsense but its always seemed to work for me.

A friend has the Desire HD and was paranoid about having no charge....from the beginning her phone was always charging...in the car, from the mains, via the USB....she would panic if her phone was showing half a battery symbol....the end result is a phone that i reckon now has a damaged battery and she struggles to get 8 hours use from it....ridiculous.

Battery use on this phone should be pretty good as its a pure Android install with no manufacturer skin over the top sapping power....i'm hoping that another week of draining my phone down to 10% and then fully charging again will get me close to 36 hours use between charges.
 
jgallagh said:
I have been reading peoples posts and I am extremely disappointed in my Nexus S. I can barely get through the day sometimes. And I hardly use it any more. I'm in med school so not much chatting.

My battery usage says Android OS as the main consumer of my battery life. The next one is cell standby - the building I am in doesn't have great 3G signal so I imagine it is searching for a signal alot. What is Android OS doing and how can I stop it? There is another item called Android System that is a big user. Is there something happening in the background that I don't know about?
Click to expand...

Obligatory: "Hi, first post here".

I just joined this forum after reading posts here since buying my first Android phone a few weeks ago. I'm coming up to speed on what's causing my Google Nexus S to have poor battery life - meaning it would go critical & shutdown in the evening after light usage if I didn't plug it in to my PC's usb port at work to trickle-charge it a bit in the afternoon.

Like @jgallagh, I was also seeing the AndroidOS as the top user of battery. I had already tried to roll back sync times on email, facebook, twitter, news+weather widget etc to bare minimums (every 4 or 6 hours) and still wasn't seeing an improved battery life. I just didn't understand how it could be that bad.

Reading lots of forums led me to three other "smoking guns" with workarounds that I *think* are effective, although it's only my 2nd day since implementing them.

I read that there's an issue with suspend mode or the /init process chewing up CPU, and that turning on USB Debugging can help:
Issue 11126 - android - "suspend" process runs continually in background at ~40% CPU on HTC EVO 4G - Project Hosting on Google Code
Issue 13130 - android - The process "/ INIT" uses between 70% to 98% CPU - HTC Legend Froyo - Project Hosting on Google Code

Someone else had a theory that establishing any alarms in the built-in clock app can trigger the runaway /init issue:
Android 2.2 (FRF85B) /init process always eating 100% CPU - Android Help

Many folks have pointed out that Picasaweb album-sync-to-phone-gallery is a major battery hog. I know I have well over 1,000 photos online & was worried that my battery was draining just trying to make sure all those albums in my phone's Gallery were in sync with Picasaweb. More info:
Battery life observations.. - Page 2 - Nexus One/Nexus S Forum - Google Phone Forum

I'm still not sure which (if any) of these problems was the major contributor to my battery problem, but I went ahead and...
(1) Enabled USB Debugging
(2) Deleted all my alarms from the built-in clock (even though they were previously all inactive)
(3) Stopped syncing my Picasaweb albums by disabling it in my gmail account settings

I started out 7.5 hours ago at 96% and I'm at 70% now. This is much better than a few days ago when it seems like I'd be plugging the phone in at 50% or less around this time. I don't know the battery percentage where auto-shutdown happens, but it *seems* like I'm on track to do about 24 hours or more before running to 0%. I've had a text message or two, checked email five or six times, surfed nytimes.com a bit, peeked into Facebook twice, spent a few minutes looking at the map. Wifi off, 3G on, GPS off, Bluetooth off, I even have sync OFF now also.

Battery use is:
Display 39%
Cell standby 17%
Android OS 11%
Voice calls 10%
Android system 8%
Phone idle 7%
Facebook 4%
Maps 3%
OSMonitor 2% (a great app that details running processes, cpu load, memory load etc, which I had on for only about 5-10 minutes today)

One more minor point here: I never opened up the OEM Nexus S charger that came with my phone. Instead I've been using my old Blackberry micro-usb-ported AC charger and the aforementioned USB trickle charge from my desktop PC. Airplane mode every night while the AC charger was working. Just yesterday I opened the OEM charge and, boy, it seems to pump out the charge much faster.

Obviously this isn't very scientific - I'm changing too many variables to know what's helping the most here. And I've been so paranoid about battery drain rate that I honestly haven't been letting it get much below 50% recently before charging. Today & through the weekend I'll be trying to let my Nexus S go all the way to auto-shutdown before charging so I can quantify my results with these new settings. I'll reply to this thread when I have more data.
 
Hi, I'm new also. I was an iPhone 3GS owner until last week. I have now got a Nexus S and have to say I'm incredibly disappointed.

My primary problem is the batter life. It lasted 7 hours yesterday:
Display: 39%
OS: 33%
Dialer: 44%
Cell standby: 6%
Android System: 5%

I reduced the number of widgets yesterday to calendar and astrid. I constantly have a good signal for both 3G and cell. I can't remember but I think I had location and wireless turned off most the day and I'm on auto brightness.

I trained the battery several times since I get it. I have a live wallpaper in the background and facebook and twitter synching.

I used if for some browsing yesterday (perhaps an hour?)

Any suggestions please? I'm running it fairly skeleton there in my opinion and it seems extremely disapointing. So much so I'm considering perhaps swapping it out for another phone, perhaps a HTC or even another iPhone...
 
Im currently getting 2 days of operation out of mine, not 48hrs, but 2 usage days between charges (ie charge overnight tonight and then id need to charge it tuesday overnight, so 40hrs on straight).

This is acceptable to me, but doesnt include heavy usage and my setup is fairly minimal. I have wifi on most of the time (but set to turn off in standby) and my usage includes couple phone calls, some texting, little bit of surfing and a bit of games but we're talking minutes not hrs. Even in that time the display is far and away the biggest eater of juice - usually i get a figure of around 40%.
 
I could routinely go through a full day (a good 16 hours) and have 40%-60% of my battery left over, depending on usage, though generally what I would consider moderate. I recently installed Words with Friends though, and now it barely makes it through a day. Words with Friends doesn't even always show up on the Battery Use chart, but I know it's what was causing the problem.

I've since been fiddling with the settings in Words with Friends (it has like two settings you can change and gives you no information on what the settings do), and I've managed to improve my battery life a bit more. It's pretty new to the Android Market, so I expect it just needs to be optimized some more. It just goes to show how just a single app can kill your battery life though. Odds are it's not the phone itself.
 
Wanted to report back about the changes I described in my earlier post. I'm amazed at how well the tweaking has improved my Nexus S battery life & I wanted to share the gory details for anyone else who wants to compare.

I unplugged my phone from my old Blackberry charger on Friday morning about about 645am and allowed it to run until auto-shutdown - which I learned really is at 0%, because I was listening to Pandora when it was at 1%. I drained the battery by Saturday around 2pm (about 31 hours total), and I had listened to Pandora via 3G for the final 1.5 hours of that initial session after tweaking my settings.

One interesting thing I noticed was the battery graph was almost flatline while I slept on Friday night. It only dropped from 37% to about 32% between 11pm Fri and 8am Sat. I'm suspecting part of that is lack of calibration in the battery gauge in that range, since I've been afraid to let it get that low since getting into the "red zone" a few times the first days I owned the Nexus S. But it's also possible that's really how little battery is consumed when the phone goes into its suspend state, even with 3G and sync left running. Guess I can stop putting the phone into Airplane Mode like I was doing before I changed my settings.

I charged up using the supplied OEM A/C charger for the 1st time ever, and had a full charge by around 7pm Sat night (I had to unplug it few times between 2pm and 7pm to actually use the phone). It's Monday morning at 9:15, and I'm at 35% after 1d14h15m according to the battery graph - over 38 hours! I would say I used the phone very lightly on Sunday. Not much web surfing, a couple of texts, but I did take a dozen or so pictures at a local museum, cropped a couple, uploaded them to Facebook, uploaded 6 photos to Dropbox, and checked out some FB friends too. My usage in this session:

Display 29%
Cell standby 29%
Android system 13%
Phone idle 11%
Android OS 6%
Browser 6%
Gallery 4%

I did notice that yesterday before the museum visit, "Cell standby" was the highest percentage item and display was quite low, because from Sat night until Sun noon-ish I hardly looked at the phone.

I haven't rooted my phone but during this "second session post tweaking" I'll try to take a photo of the battery graph before it resets after 100% recharge.

__________________________________________________________________________

[ UPDATE - It's Monday afternoon, 230pm CST ]

Battery at 23%
Running on battery 1d19h33m = 43.5hours

Since 9am I've used the (voice) phone for only a minute or two, sent & received a few text messages, surfed the web a little more during a meeting (heh), checked FB status, turned phone on to watch that battery gauge like a hawk ;) Yes it's very light use, but right now I'm trying to get to at least 48 hours before charging this bad boy! Currently ---

Display 31%
Cell standby 27%
Android system 13%
Phone idle 11%
Android OS 6%
Browser 5%
Gallery 3%
Swype 2%

[ UPDATE - It's Monday evening 815pm CST ]

Battery at 7%
Running on battery 2d1h10m = 49.1hours

OK, last post about this test. Will probably need to recharge when I hit 50 hours.

Display 31%
Cell standby 25%
Android system 14%
Phone idle 10%
Android OS 6%
Browser 4%
Voice calls 3%
Gallery 3%
Swype 2%
 
d3zapped said:
Obligatory: "Hi, first post here".

I just joined this forum after reading posts here since buying my first Android phone a few weeks ago. I'm coming up to speed on what's causing my Google Nexus S to have poor battery life - meaning it would go critical & shutdown in the evening after light usage if I didn't plug it in to my PC's usb port at work to trickle-charge it a bit in the afternoon.

Like @jgallagh, I was also seeing the AndroidOS as the top user of battery. I had already tried to roll back sync times on email, facebook, twitter, news+weather widget etc to bare minimums (every 4 or 6 hours) and still wasn't seeing an improved battery life. I just didn't understand how it could be that bad.
Click to expand...


Hi,


How do you do the above?
 
virtualsalmon said:
Hi,
How do you do the above [reduce sync rates in various applications] ?
Click to expand...

It's a setting that's configured for each application. You have to hit the menu button & try to find it.

In the email application, where you can add just about any email server you use (IMAP etc), you have to drop into each account & then change that account's settings. It's Menu-->AccountSettings--->Inbox check frequency.

In Facebook, you have to be at the main (top) page of the app and it's called "Refresh interval".

You have to dig around --- too bad they don't gather every app that does any background syncing on to a single page under the primary phone settings. That would make it heckuva lot easier to inspect & control.
 
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