Help Question on battery life

[Deleted User]

I bought a Galaxy Nexus for Sprint on eBay. I have had it for a couple of days and the battery life is pretty bad. Sprint sent me an extended battery for free and today was the first day using it. I charged my phone all night and these screen shots show what I saw today. Is this normal?

 

[mogelijk]

While that seems low to me, the screen can be a power hog. Personally, I can get about 4 hours of screen on time on the normal battery (I have a GSM Nexus with the 1750 mAh battery). OTOH, I keep the brightness fairly low and try to use dark backgrounds. And those are two things that are highly recommended to improve battery life; using dark or black backgrounds and keep your brightness low.

 

[Deleted User]

Thanks for the reply. I do have a dark background and the brightness is low. I am wondering if it is bad hardware in the phone (and thus why someone sold it on eBay).... I will monitor it a for a few days and see how the battery life is.

 

[jhawkkw]

Another thing that can really kill the battery is radios for data and cell reception. Do you have Sprint LTE in your area? If not, I would set the phone to CDMA mode to prevent it from trying to search for it. Also if regular cell reception is poor, that can eat at the battery as well. If you don't mind adding some minor fat to your phone, you can buy a bigger battery for it and that is sure to help. Some can be had rather cheap on Amazon. I bought the 3800mAh Hyperion battery on there and it's amazing.

 

[Deleted User]

Another thing that can really kill the battery is radios for data and cell reception. Do you have Sprint LTE in your area? If not, I would set the phone to CDMA mode to prevent it from trying to search for it. Also if regular cell reception is poor, that can eat at the battery as well. If you don't mind adding some minor fat to your phone, you can buy a bigger battery for it and that is sure to help. Some can be had rather cheap on Amazon. I bought the 3800mAh Hyperion battery on there and it's amazing.

Thanks for the tip. Sprint hasn't officially rolled out LTE here, but based on s4gru.com and the Sensorly app some towers are enabled. I will switch to CDMA only and see how that goes. I looked at the mobile network signal and I do have poor reception. My speed tests are pretty sad, around 0.1 Mbps....

Although, a coworker has a Galaxy Nexus and doesn't experience the battery drain like me, so that made me wonder if it could be a hardware problem on my phone.

Also, I will look into clearing battery stats. I think you can do that without being rooted...

 

[jhawkkw]

If I recall correctly, battery stats can be cleared by taking out the battery on the phone. The more full proof way is to factory reset, but that wipes all data. You can simply wipe stats in recovery if you are rooted with custom recovery installed as well.

 

[ioconnor]

You might want to carry around a wide rubber band and cover the top of the phone so that the light sensor thinks you are in the dark. This helps when you are running applications that like to keep the screen on yet you don't need the brightness. Like when running google navigation, pandora, and podcast software.