Batterys, how bad is it to... - General Questions and Answers

charge them before they are depleted?
Its a bit of a boring question, but Im curious
With one of my older non WM phones, i had it plugged into the mains quite often, and then slowly the battery performance degraded until I could only get just under a days worth of mild usage before the poor thing would give in.
Im now rather paranoid to charge my Elfin before the battery dies so I dont reduce the battery life. Im currently getting two days out of it with quite frequent usage.
When its low on juice at the end of a day, but not completely empty, I end up turing on the bluetooth and wifi, play music on both windows media player and the audio manager, play a video on coreplayer and play the falling sand game, just to get the CPU usage up. This then eats up the battery so it will become empty so I feel I can feel I can put it on to charge before I go off to sleep.
Im just really wanting to find out if charging before its empty really does have an effect, or if its just my brain playing tricks, and has anyone else had experiences like my old phone?
Thanks, Cris

I have had my elfin for almost a year and a half now and put it on the charger in my car every time I get in and charge at home almost every night and have never had a problem. If I forget to put it on the charger at night, I still don't have any problems, battery easily last over a day. I have recently gone away on a trip and forgot my charger and with average useage was able to get over three days use before I started getting worried about low battery.

cris_rowlands said:
charge them before they are depleted?
Its a bit of a boring question, but Im curious
With one of my older non WM phones, i had it plugged into the mains quite often, and then slowly the battery performance degraded until I could only get just under a days worth of mild usage before the poor thing would give in.
Im now rather paranoid to charge my Elfin before the battery dies so I dont reduce the battery life. Im currently getting two days out of it with quite frequent usage.
When its low on juice at the end of a day, but not completely empty, I end up turing on the bluetooth and wifi, play music on both windows media player and the audio manager, play a video on coreplayer and play the falling sand game, just to get the CPU usage up. This then eats up the battery so it will become empty so I feel I can feel I can put it on to charge before I go off to sleep.
Im just really wanting to find out if charging before its empty really does have an effect, or if its just my brain playing tricks, and has anyone else had experiences like my old phone?
Thanks, Cris
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falling sand ppc game?! please post a link!

You are thinking of the old NiCad ( nickel cadmium ) batteries, which had a definite memory to them. If you did not cycle them through a full charge everytime, they would develop a capacity " memory ", The new Lithium Ion batteries have no such " memory " and can be partially deplited and charged again with no ill effects.

cris_rowlands said:
charge them before they are depleted?
Its a bit of a boring question, but Im curious
With one of my older non WM phones, i had it plugged into the mains quite often, and then slowly the battery performance degraded until I could only get just under a days worth of mild usage before the poor thing would give in.
Im now rather paranoid to charge my Elfin before the battery dies so I dont reduce the battery life. Im currently getting two days out of it with quite frequent usage.
When its low on juice at the end of a day, but not completely empty, I end up turing on the bluetooth and wifi, play music on both windows media player and the audio manager, play a video on coreplayer and play the falling sand game, just to get the CPU usage up. This then eats up the battery so it will become empty so I feel I can feel I can put it on to charge before I go off to sleep.
Im just really wanting to find out if charging before its empty really does have an effect, or if its just my brain playing tricks, and has anyone else had experiences like my old phone?
Thanks, Cris
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A good reference: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=979817&postcount=29

Thanks guys, youve been great help and taken a load off my mind
also, heres the link for that falling sand game
Clicky Or Clicky

There is one point to notice tho.
you should NEVER completely run your battery out of power or it'll die.
Lithium batteries should be taken to 95-99% charge and then used to about 5%...

Related

Battery Life Claims vs. Reality

I stopped by an AT&T corporate store to get a hands on with the Captivate. The salesperson there tried to tell me that the standby time on the device was 15 days if you kept apps from running by downloading an app killer. I asked if he really meant 15 days if no radios were running. He said "nope, 15 days is pretty easy".
Really, folks... what is reality here? Is it similar to other smartphones, where a day with moderate use is reasonable?
There is no way the phone will last 15 days in standby even with a good task killer. How can the sales rep tell you this if he only had the phone in store for 2 days?
That's a very good point... but he was very sure of his claim. I pulled out the "I'm very skeptical" response and walked away. Oh well, looks like once again, truth is in the internets somewhere, not in someone who should know such things.
Another element to this is whether an upgrade to 2.2 will increase battery life. I work away from any ability to charge and really need a phone to hold up all day.
ekruse said:
That's a very good point... but he was very sure of his claim. I pulled out the "I'm very skeptical" response and walked away. Oh well, looks like once again, truth is in the internets somewhere, not in someone who should know such things.
Another element to this is whether an upgrade to 2.2 will increase battery life. I work away from any ability to charge and really need a phone to hold up all day.
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Well, my N1 holds charge for about 1 day with moderate use. As soon as I play with the GPS and google's built in nav system I get maybe 4 hours worth of usage. Another issue I have with my N1 is that my car charger cannot keep up with the drain, so even plugged into the charger the battery percentage is decreasing. Sure hope the Captivate is better in that respect.
Froyo did increase battery life a bit but it is not earth shattering. The advantage of this phone is the larger capacity battery and hopefully a less power hungry samsung processor than the qualcom snapdragon.
I am sure within the next few days we will have some folks with more concrete consumption estimates.
i don't know... while the 15 day claim is a bit much, mine was fine with heavy usage all day yesterday on the half charge that it came with from AT&T... given that, i think that it should last 2-4 days easily with only light-moderate usage.
My battery lasts me all day. It's just marginally worse than my 3GS I think... My 3GS always had extra at the end whereas my Captivate seems to run out when I'm going to bed.
So... It lasts all day. That's really all that matters to me.
My battery has not been able to make it through the day. Don't know why yet. I have my email accounts set to 30 minute sync schedule, have Wi-Fi and bluetooth off. Don't know what is going on. Still researching. Will see how it goes for a week. Might be a bad battery.
i find that dark backgrounds help. Also keep unecessary things off and dl an app killa. I had a new captivate today at 10am and with its half charge and heavy usage it lasted me till 6
by heavy usage i mean constant surfing and dling shiz. I didnt use gps wifi or play a movie. also played that free mario game for bout an hour.
After about 11.5 - 12 hours of very light browsing (maybe like 1/2 hour 3g surfing, no calls, all apps killed with task killer every once in awhile) with Bluetooth and Wifi off I am at 68% left. This is with auto brightness.
I'd say if you don't do anything you might be able to get 3-4 days out of it. According to my battery stats 78% of all my battery usage has been the screen. Keep that thing off / or low brightness and you are going in the right direction.
i bet by standby att means the phone being not used and turned off for like 4 days lol
systoxity said:
i find that dark backgrounds help. Also keep unecessary things off and dl an app killa. I had a new captivate today at 10am and with its half charge and heavy usage it lasted me till 6
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Thanks systoxity, I will try that
systoxity said:
i find that dark backgrounds help. Also keep unecessary things off and dl an app killa. I had a new captivate today at 10am and with its half charge and heavy usage it lasted me till 6
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By dark, he means a background that has a lot of black in it. This is really helpful because the Super AMOLED screen on this phone turns off power to pixels that are black, so basically that part of the screen isn't using any power. A black background is almost like turning the screen off.
magicman0 said:
By dark, he means a background that has a lot of black in it. This is really helpful because the Super AMOLED screen on this phone turns off power to pixels that are black, so basically that part of the screen isn't using any power. A black background is almost like turning the screen off.
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this, thanks for clarifying.
note: it further helps if you apply a static one.
I was able to listen to music for 6 hours at work, show off my phone (I only showed it directly to one co-worker - I had 5 other guys come to check it out after he told them about it lol!), did some light surfing, downloaded a few apps and generally fiddled around with the phone and ended up at 43% battery. Not great, but not terrible either. Screen was the big killer here. GPS and WiFi off except to test Layar.
We'll see if battery life improves, but it enough to make it through one day easily for me. Forget to charge it and it'll be flat early into the next day though. I'm a bit disappointed, considering benchmarks on the Galaxy S came up with nearly 8 hours of constant video playback. I think they had brightness at 50% and I kept setting mine to max to show off the screen and then forgetting to set it back, so that could be part of it. I was definitely expecting more though. I'm clearly not the most demanding user here, so I was hoping to potentially eek out two days of usage (just in case I forget to charge it).
One of the reasons I went with the Captivate instead of waiting for the Epic is that the form factor seems to be a bit more amenable to adding an extended battery. Hopefully we'll start to see some 2500mAh or even 3Ah batteries show up - even if it means getting a new backcover. THAT should just about do it
anosis said:
Well, my N1 holds charge for about 1 day with moderate use. As soon as I play with the GPS and google's built in nav system I get maybe 4 hours worth of usage. Another issue I have with my N1 is that my car charger cannot keep up with the drain, so even plugged into the charger the battery percentage is decreasing. Sure hope the Captivate is better in that respect.
Froyo did increase battery life a bit but it is not earth shattering. The advantage of this phone is the larger capacity battery and hopefully a less power hungry samsung processor than the qualcom snapdragon.
I am sure within the next few days we will have some folks with more concrete consumption estimates.
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Click to collapse
Also the Super AMOLED Screen sucks alot less Juice as well...
My friend has the Vibrant and has had it for about 4 days. He is a power-user like me, and he said with his task killer, he can run the phone for 2 days on a full charge. This is outstanding for a smart phone... I ordered my Captivate today, should be here on Wednesday so I'll also put this to the test!
better battery life is coming once devs hop aboard. Also, your phone will need training over the next few days so it can only get better from here for you. I also recommend just leaving brightness on auto detect. You wont have to play with it as much and forget it on super bright.
Some more tips:
idk if you guys like haptic feedback but i think its annoying as all hell. Turn it off to save an iota of battery.
Also tone responses for menu clicks? ANNOYINNGG turn that shiz off for a squirt of juice.
Lastly, unless you live by your email, turn sync off and only sync manually when ur curious about it.
I wonder about some of the widgets. I have Weather And Toggle Widget (which I prefer over Beautiful Widget), and have it set to update the weather every 30 minutes. Wonder if that's too often. The weather in Iowa can be very unpredictable and change quickly, but I'm inside all day so it doesn't really matter. I guess it's just eye-candy mostly.
I also wonder how WATW compares to BW in terms of battery consumption.
I turned haptic off (I agree, it was annoying). I turned the tones off, though I doubt that will affect battery life. I wish I could keep the tones for dialer and kill it for the keyboard.
EDIT: I keep reading about this idea that you train your battery (or device) to your usage, but I'm not sure that I understand/buy it. I could see perhaps something to do with the memory effect if these batteries are susceptible to it, but this idea of "training" it strikes me as very odd. Does Android have some kind of battery optimization algorithm that adjusts services based on your usage or something?
from what i understand, calculating battery life is like a guessing game. calibrating your device by letting it drain out and then fully charging it and draining it out again completely gives your phone an idea of just how long it can last on a single charge. Until you do a few cycles like this it will incorrectly display batter life percentage giving the user a false sense of security or panic. There may be more to it that has to do with the actual battery itself but idk the rest of the details.
and 30 min updates is a bit much lol. u should update like once a day and manually refresh if you need to know b4 u go out.
I'm getting very good battery life on my phone. As good as any iphone I've had and better than any of my windows mobile phones before that. I don't have any widgets constantly pulling down data though and only have my google account syncing contacts and calendars and an exchange account running.

Samsung Captivate on the Quest for the Greatest Battery Life!

I'd love to hear how people are finding the battery life on the Captivate, and what their usage patterns are. I don't have many apps on the phone to begin with, but on the train to work I can easily knock out a third of the battery just listening to music. While using the phone for five or ten minutes, I'll sometimes see the battery dop 2-3 percent!
For tomorrow, I'm going to try using the stock launcher instead of LauncherPro, no widgets. I got rid of the Android Central app just in case it was fetching data in the background. But my hopes aren't terribly high, I'm afraid.
I have rooted the phone, but the battery life was bad before rooting. Once rooted, I tried some apps like JuiceDefender, and there seemed to be no change.
If I continue having these problems, I may unroot and bring the phone to an AT&T store to see what they say. I've heard it mentioned that Samsung is sending out new batteries that are better than some current ones, but I don't know if that's true.
I'd love to hear any suggestions. I want to use my new phone, not worry about it all day!
I too have been getting very poor results. I have talked on the phone for less than 3 minutes, went to maybe 15 different website pages, one 3:00 youtube video, 10 minutes of GBC emulation gaming, and regular texting, and I'm at 10% with 8 hours. I've probably only used the phone for 30 minutes total today.
Smartphones always drain battery, if you want a phone that can be heavily used for like 4 or more days on one charge cycle, get a feature phone....the samsung captivate has given me the best battery time overall, against all my past smartphones.
I don't think it makes sense, though, that it should run out halfway through the day like mine is. My former devices were a feature phone and an iPod Touch. The feature phone lasted a week or so, and the iPod Touch with heavy heavy use lasted three days at least. So even if I had both pulling from the same battery source, and with light usage, shouldn't it last at least a full day?
Weird, I had wireless on almost all day, with push mail and doing tons of market downloading and I was only down to about 50% by early afternoon.
Seems about the same as my two year old HTC Touch Pro to me.
My battery is running fine too, even after streaming music from my house with subsonic, testing out a couple videos, messing with the gps, push email a bunch of app downloading, and a live wallpaper and i was still at 33% by the time I got home, even seems to be getting better.
"On the train to work..."
There's a bit of your problem, methinks. The 3G radio is burning a lot of power trying to connect to towers inside a metal box that moves to a new tower on a regular basis. Unless you need to get calls on the train, put it in Airplane mode during your commute.
Have you actually let the battery die completely yet?
My first battery burn-down, (starting with the charge on the battery as it was unboxed) I was showing zero percent battery for almost two hours before it actually shut itself off, moderate usage with WiFi on.
The next charge-up burn-down, it was showing zero percent about fifteen minutes before the end.
And the charge-up burn-down after that, it showed 0% about twenty seconds before it died.
See where I'm going here? The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.
Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.
smitty1 said:
Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.
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Yea I had one for two weeks and it was horrid. I would lose 6% just in standby time in between waking up and getting out the door to work in the morning!
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
I've had great results with the battery and I find it to be much better than my HD2. I watch quite a bit of youtube, text message a lot, and browse the web and the market on and off, not to mention all the time my wife plays solitaire, and I still have 30% battery at an uptime of 41:46. I don't use gps or live wallpapers, and I keep my display as low as possible, since it is still bright.
Bit better by the end of the day. 13 hours and 15 minutes
Croak said:
The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.
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+1
Definitely agree with the last part. I've been doing my best to kill it, but I don't want it to be dead. Been noticing the inaccuracy of the meter quite a bit, especially when it's charging, but I'm sure it'll get better over time.
Thanks for the informative replies! It hadn't occurred to me that the battery meter might be uncalibrated - I've been charging once it reached 10% or so. I'll try letting it die fully today.
One thing that seems to have helped, too, is the brightness settings. Turning OFF the "power saving" auto adjust ing brightness option allows the brightness to stay low, and a brightness control widget lets me set it lower than stock controls allow. I've seen some definite improbement from this alone!
These are Li-ion batteries, DO NOT let them die completely before charging.
Ok, so...is there a safer way to make sure the battery gets calibrated? I'm reading in a lot of places that Android phones fairly often misreport battery info unless calibrated.
The lowest I can get on battery status is 60% after a full days use. Admittedly I'm not a power user but I had my phone unplugged for 16 hrs and still had 95% I'd like to know what you have to do to get such low battery levels , start your car
All I've done today is listen to music for an hour (used 25%) and texted/browsed the web for perhaps two hours (another 5/% down.)
I read that LIons can be occasiomally discharged, since they have undercurrent protection circuits. One guide for Android phones suggested leaving the phone on until it shuts itself down, turning it on again, and then letting it shut itself down again. Then, with the phone off, charge fully. The guide said once a month or do is safe and beneficial. How does it sound?
Battery is good today. Been sending a few texts, checked email, facebook, and surfed these forums a bit. I'm at 2 hours with 98% battery left.
i hope the battery doesnt suck, i plan on getting this phone soon and want good batt life!!!
tysj said:
These are Li-ion batteries, DO NOT let them die completely before charging.
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I agree with you, however, the phone's hardware will NOT let the battery completely die.
So I wouldn't worry about that all to much.
Basically though, Li-ion batteries are 'memory' free so they can be recharged on a whim partially.
They also prefer partial charges vs deep charges.
There are questions about this that I don't have answers for such as: When the phone displays 0% or shuts off due to low battery, how LOW is the battery?
Obviously the phone battery can't be dead dead, but it is low enough for the hardware to take precautions.
Anyway Li-ions will at max last 500 charges.. If you want it more than that, You're going to have to buy a new battery anyway. =)

[Q]Mango Battery Life?

All right, so here's the big question. Okay, one of the big questions. For all yous who have DL'd and installed the Mango beta, how's the battery life?
I have a NoDo'd DVP and I generally can get 9 and a half to 12 and a half hours on a single charge depending on what I'm doing. Games being the biggest battery vampire I've found, thus far. Streaming vid a close second (perhaps tied).
Can't tell any difference. Never been an issue on my Arrive. It says I have 16 hours left(with battery saver kicking in if it gets critically low), and it has been 12 hours since my last charge.
I play a few games a day. Some web. Music. Testing of Mango features. Getting features to work. Lot's of texts. And my 3 email accounts syncing frequently.
I do have wifi disabled as that was preventing speech recognition from connecting to MS servers for some reason. So that may have improved battery life a little.
Good to know. Figured it would be about the same. The real test is how it will do once the LTE/HSPA+ devices hit.
I'm actually noticing better battery life. I definitely have been playing with the phone a lot since Mango, even more than normal, and the battery has been pretty awesome so far. Course its not scientific, but it appears that I'm getting more hours out of it than pre-Mango.
I think it's better in Mango but it's hard to say how much and if any better at all. If I had 2 windows phones I'd love totest it to find out.
Anyway I'm really happy with mango, I have to stop using facebook chat or I'll not get any work done today!
the battery life is better,just remember that multitask is in now
In previous version you don't have it
In my situation (lg optimus 7) battery life seems a little bit shorter than NoDo...
I turn on the phone in the morning (8-9 am) and I've to plug in for charge at night (11pm-12am)..
I've 2-3 live tiles active in the home screen... with NoDo i Could permform 1 and a half day of usage... I think this is a mango bug, or my battery just need a recalibration for the new O.S.
I'll check it in the upcoming days
I feel like my battery life has gotten worse, but I have 4 live tiles running and facebook chat on, although I had the same on my nodo device save facebook chat. And I think the battery saver option basically just allows you to turn the feature off. Wasn't the whole stopping push notifications done automatically in nodo when the battery was low? Now you just have to option to disable and kill your battery faster.
Hmm, I too have the feeling the battery life is worse. I just recharged to 100% and battery saver says I have 23 hrs left. After 1 hour without doing anything I have 80% (17 hours) left . I turned on airplane mode and disabled location now to see if it's getting better.
I also feel the battery life got worse. However, remember this is a debugged build, it's logging alot more as you are using it and I'm sure there's still alot more optimizations to go.
With that being said, I'll gladly take 2-3 days instead of 3+ days on a single charge for the features added. For those only getting 12+ hours, somethings wrong with your phone. There's not that much more getting executed vs NoDo until more devs take advantage of background services and live tile updates.
Hmm, yeah maybe my battery is quite exhausted already. I use the phone daily listening to music at the train, playing a game or two and browsing. That is, I recharge every single night and sometimes again in the afternoon. So I guess I have recharged the phone ~300 times since I purchased it last year.
Overall, better. I did opt for the 1800mah battery for my Trophy and it did help a little (keep the OEM one always charged, just in case). I think it works better
Its quite a bit better for me. I can usually go through a full day with battery saver generally kicking in near the end of the day (9-10pm). Bluetooth headsets for music does kick it down a bit but not terribly, usually my BT headset runs out before my phone.
Focus/mango.
redviper666 said:
Its quite a bit better for me. I can usually go through a full day with battery saver generally kicking in near the end of the day (9-10pm). Bluetooth headsets for music does kick it down a bit but not terribly, usually my BT headset runs out before my phone.
Focus/mango.
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Interesting, I knew back in WM 6.5 using a BT headset would take a 12 hour battery and make it last no more than 6 and that was if you didn't talk on the phone much.
Is Bluetooth better with WP7 where it's a very minor battery loss ? ( might pick up a new bt headset)
Mine is better. But only slightly. Eg. 45min to 1 hr better.
I'm using a Focus
cohowap said:
I also feel the battery life got worse. However, remember this is a debugged build, it's logging alot more as you are using it and I'm sure there's still alot more optimizations to go.
With that being said, I'll gladly take 2-3 days instead of 3+ days on a single charge for the features added. For those only getting 12+ hours, somethings wrong with your phone. There's not that much more getting executed vs NoDo until more devs take advantage of background services and live tile updates.
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Click to collapse
how do u know that its doing logging??
if yr sim card is more than 2 years old y will experience battery drain
There is definitely a bug in battery saver
There are to things to think about: The first one is that we have update our phones to Mango, but not the manufacturer so we have old drivers with new OS. And the second is that at least I, i've been so far 8 months with my HTC Trophy so the battery also losses capacity (mAh) in this time. In 1 year usually a battery only has 80% of its original capacity.
I have actually feel the better battery life.

I heard a lot about it yet I'm still blown away

Ok, I realize this is beating a dead horse, but the battery life in my Droid Pro is beyond pathetic. I actually burn through a battery (with light to moderate usage) faster than I can charge one lol. I am on my third battery today and it's not even noon. I'm in the red on the third one and the first is still not done charging (using a separate external wall charger). This is stupid.
Androids going through battery really quickly has always been a complaint, actually I hear that complaint about almost every smart phone. In my android experience, If I pull my phone off the charger at 8am, it should be about dead by 8pm, if I have only used the phone minimally. If I'm listening to radio, or playing some games, or just keeping my phone awake for a while, my phone will be dead by 3-4pm.
Your case seems a little extreme, and all I can recommend is using a power widget to turn on and off all your basic stuff. turn the brightness all the way down if you don't need it, or try auto. Keep bluetooth, wireless, and GPS off until you need it. Also, personally, I only let my phone sync while wifi is on, otherwise leaving sync on all the time kills my battery. All I can say is do the basic things people recommend to extend your battery life. I know with my first android phone, I kept everything on, all the time, and the battery sucked horribly, but turning them on and off through settings was really annoying to do everytime, so with a widget on the desktop for that stuff I don't mind it at all anymore.
You also just may have an app or two that's destroying your battery. I can't recommend anything off the top of my head, but there are apps that give you a general idea of where all your battery is going.
Yeah, I keep GPS and bluetooth off. Also, I downloaded the app killer and hit that several times a day. What I don't get (total droid newbie here) is why, when I hit the app killer, it says that it killed 13 apps. 13 apps? Why in the world are 13 apps running? The phone is just sitting there. I'll hit the app killer again (20-30 minutes later) and another 12 or 13 apps get KO'd. It's crazy. But yes, I know I've got something stupid going on but I guess I'm just too dumb to figure it out. I've only had this for a couple of days and, as my ID suggests, I came from Blackberry.
Get rid of app killers, Android 2.2 and beyond do not need it, you're doing your battery worse.
frombb2droid said:
Ok, I realize this is beating a dead horse, but the battery life in my Droid Pro is beyond pathetic. I actually burn through a battery (with light to moderate usage) faster than I can charge one lol. I am on my third battery today and it's not even noon. I'm in the red on the third one and the first is still not done charging (using a separate external wall charger). This is stupid.
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This battery life issue is what's going to bring Android down. Google needs to get a handle on it because the more and more people who come to Android from iPhone or something else and experience this issue will inevitably have a less than content experience.
You are right, this could be a deal breaker for me. Yes, the blackberry browser sucks, but I'm seriously teetering on whether or not that is the lessor of two evils. I'm on day four with the droid. Granted, I haven't spent a ton of time dissecting this device, but I don't really have a ton of time to give...nor do I want to carry a half dozen batteries with me
I Am Marino said:
Get rid of app killers, Android 2.2 and beyond do not need it, you're doing your battery worse.
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Does the newer software kill the app when you leave it? I know with the Blackberry, you had to close the app or it would keep running in the background. I really have no clue how the droid works. Forgive me for being so droid retarded, but I've had no formal training lol.
And, BTW, this is the first electronic device I've bought that came with no manual. To me, that's super funny!
Android 2.2 only kills the application if the memory goes below a certain threshold to keep the system from clogging up.
yeah...android phones' battery is a bitterly troublesome issue!
Honestly, sounds like some faulty batteries here. I have a Desire HD and I listen to 2 hours of music and play close to an hour of games with another hour of web browsing a day on it. I tend to make perhaps 10 minutes of phone calls and I have autosync on for my gmail (but nothing else) and I dont have to charge it during the day at all. I am however in strong signal areas which makes a massive difference.

Battery sucks! Faulty unit or crappy software? HELP

I have used this tablet for 2 days now and almost everything works perfect (thanks to latest ota) but there's one thing that is bothering me. Battery life. I had ipad 3 for 2 months but I finally sold it and bought the infinity. Now I know ios sucks on phones AND tablets. But the battery life was amazing. I could use it to browse and for games for 9 hours at least. But on the infinity I am lucky if I get 4 hours browsing. 4 hours sucks on a tablet. But I think that wifi is the problem. I have added 2 pictures were you can see I used the tablet for 1 hour last night then I used it for almost 3 more hours today. Now the battery is at 10%. But I was wondering why the battery uses 62%? On my galaxy nexus wifi is using 5%.
Have I got a faulty unit or is it like this for everyone? If so please let me know fast so I can send it back before it's too late.
Somethings not right there. Tests/reviews done by some major outlets (thinking PC World or Engadget) reported 9 hours of video play over wifi with screen at 50% brightness. iOS has always had good battery life due to their stict contols over the OS, but you should be seeing more then 4 hours. Hell I was at 40% and played WindUp Knight for hours straight last night which takes up much more battery then a movie. I usually don't suggest using task managers, but there is one built in by asus, I'd use it and see if you can kill some processes. Also be mindful which profile is being used. I stick to balanced most of the time and switch to low when the battery starts getting low (24%ish)
http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/25/asus-transformer-pad-infinity-tf700-review/
The TF700 packs a 25Wh battery rated for up to nine and a half hours of runtime. Indeed, it lasted nine hours and 25 in our battery rundown test, which involves looping a video with WiFi on and the brightness fixed at 50 percent.
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Thanks for the reply. I am always on Balanced and i am seeing over 20% down in an hour. Maybe i have a faulty unit?
I wouldn't be so sure. I was playing nova 3 on performance mode though.
jdeoxys said:
I wouldn't be so sure. I was playing nova 3 on performance mode though.
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Hmm so i'm not the only one. I hope Asus fixes this fast or im gonna have to return, but i can't see any tablet better then this atm.
armanisafarai said:
Hmm so i'm not the only one. I hope Asus fixes this fast or im gonna have to return, but i can't see any tablet better then this atm.
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Well, what do you expect? It's going to take some power to push all the pixels on this massive resolution.
jdeoxys said:
Well, what do you expect? It's going to take some power to push all the pixels on this massive resolution.
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Exactly, it all depends on what your doing OP. The movie scenerio in the review doesnt take much juice in that it uses the low power single core. I don't know for sure, but web browsing may require all 4 cores to kick in depending on exactly what your doing. Regardless, your wifi being a big consumer is easy to deal with. Somewhere in the settings is an option that automatically turns wifi off when screen is off.
Chief Geek said:
Exactly, it all depends on what your doing OP. The movie scenerio in the review doesnt take much juice in that it uses the low power single core. I don't know for sure, but web browsing may require all 4 cores to kick in depending on exactly what your doing. Regardless, your wifi being a big consumer is easy to deal with. Somewhere in the settings is an option that automatically turns wifi off when screen is off.
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Well, all i was doing was using chrome... I think it's pretty bad when i cant browse for more then 4 hours on a tablet. I thought it had to do something with WiFi since its using over 62%. I did the same test with my nexus where i i just used chrome and when i looked in battery , wifi only used 10%. Maybe there is a bug with wifi?
Try Battery HD for some averages/estimates.
I tend to get about 9+ hrs of reading, balanced mode, WiFi off, and about 7 hrs of browsing over WiFi (undocked, dock charges me about 2/3 full), but it all drops down drastically for gaming, which is about 4 hrs you mentioned.
If you get 4 hrs of pure browsing, I'd consider re-flashing, wiping data and - if these don't help - returning your device.
Chief Geek's point has much merit, and you could always look at (for example) GreenPower or some other time-/screen-based toggler. They do pretty well, and you do not even lose out anything except direct push functionality. (Does it really matter for 99.9% of mail when it comes in once every 15 or 30 minutes? When it does (when you're buying a house or something), shut down the toggler for the time being and cope with some battery drain, then when the situation has resolved, enable it again.
And try using BetterBatterStats for your statistics -- the main battery stat app Android offers has some quirks to prevent meaningful interpretations of many scenarios. Let that get a few charging/discharging cycles and then look at the stats.
So battery hd tells me I should get 8 hours of browsing and 9 for video playback. Will do another test tomorrow with screen on whole time and see how long it will last watching videos. Also battery hd tells me I can play 3d games for only 2 hours. Eh
MartyHulskemper said:
Chief Geek's point has much merit, and you could always look at (for example) GreenPower or some other time-/screen-based toggler. They do pretty well, and you do not even lose out anything except direct push functionality. (Does it really matter for 99.9% of mail when it comes in once every 15 or 30 minutes? When it does (when you're buying a house or something), shut down the toggler for the time being and cope with some battery drain, then when the situation has resolved, enable it again.
And try using BetterBatterStats for your statistics -- the main battery stat app Android offers has some quirks to prevent meaningful interpretations of many scenarios. Let that get a few charging/discharging cycles and then look at the stats.
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I installed betterbatterystats last night, will do more testing.
armanisafarai said:
So battery hd tells me I should get 8 hours of browsing and 9 for video playback. Will do another test tomorrow with screen on whole time and see how long it will last watching videos. Also battery hd tells me I can play 3d games for only 2 hours. Eh
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Remember that these are just averages for your device, at least in the beginning.
If you mistreated your battery upon receiving it, it can kill battery life. You are suppose to plug in your asus tablet for at least 8 hours (well beyond the tablet would say the battery is 100%) the first time you get it. This is sound advice for any new Lithium Ion Battery.
Then you can start using it. Letting the battery die at 0% also decrease the life of the Li-Ion battery every time it happens (ignore old sites that say you should do a full discharge cycle every 2 weeks, that was for old Nickel Cadmium batteries).
Juice Defender is typically a phone app but you can run it as well to detect if any background processes are eating up your battery life.
I get almost 10 hours on my TF700 with moderate usage (mix of browsing, video playback, reading, etc.).
Diogenes5 said:
If you mistreated your battery upon receiving it, it can kill battery life. You are suppose to plug in your asus tablet for at least 8 hours (well beyond the tablet would say the battery is 100%) the first time you get it. This is sound advice for any new Lithium Ion Battery.
Then you can start using it. Letting the battery die at 0% also decrease the life of the Li-Ion battery every time it happens (ignore old sites that say you should do a full discharge cycle every 2 weeks, that was for old Nickel Cadmium batteries).
Juice Defender is typically a phone app but you can run it as well to detect if any background processes are eating up your battery life.
I get almost 10 hours on my TF700 with moderate usage (mix of browsing, video playback, reading, etc.).
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All correct -- there is a lot of disinformation going on with batteries (especially regarding the charging cycles, although a single, long, full charge and then draining to zero charge actually helps calibrate the battery indication algorithms in the device). The optimum minimum charge level seems to be about 40% or so I've read.
Juice Defender and Greenpower toggle WiFi on either time- or location-based profiles, and that works on tablets as well. Recommended!
Your phone doesnt actually discharge a battery to zero. The thing with lithium batteries is they maintain voltage untill nearly the end. This is a very large benifit for modern devices. Once the voltage starts to drop the phones circuitry cuts it off and prevents it from powering on with the LVC circuit that checks the battery before allowing phone to power on then immeditately cuts it (first attempting a power down then all out power cut). This happens to protect the battery. So what the phone considers a dead battery is simply an exhausted battery ready for charge. If a lithium is actually dischardged completely it will damage the cell and prevent it from taking a charge. The power being given to it is then converted to heat. The battery then ignites and very very bad things happen such as your house burning down. The point of all that is to point out that discharging your phone to "zero" isn't actually doing any damage past the normal wear and tear on the battery. I buy batteries that cost hundreds for some of my RC hobbies and have learned the hard way about how lithium batteries work. (bypassed LVC and ruined a $80 3S2P pack)
Diogenes5 said:
If you mistreated your battery upon receiving it, it can kill battery life. You are suppose to plug in your asus tablet for at least 8 hours (well beyond the tablet would say the battery is 100%) the first time you get it. This is sound advice for any new Lithium Ion Battery.
Then you can start using it. Letting the battery die at 0% also decrease the life of the Li-Ion battery every time it happens (ignore old sites that say you should do a full discharge cycle every 2 weeks, that was for old Nickel Cadmium batteries).
Juice Defender is typically a phone app but you can run it as well to detect if any background processes are eating up your battery life.
I get almost 10 hours on my TF700 with moderate usage (mix of browsing, video playback, reading, etc.).
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i have actually read that Li-Ion batteries can be used out of the box. Sp i turned on my infinity right away. I put the charger in, but i still used the tablet. It was about 25% when i got it out of the box. So what you're saying is that i have basically ****ed up the battery? If so, then i will return and get a new one. But i dont understand why most people say that you can usre a device with Li-Ion battery staright out of the box without needing to charge it first.
Chief Geek said:
Your phone doesnt actually discharge a battery to zero. The thing with lithium batteries is they maintain voltage untill nearly the end. This is a very large benifit for modern devices. Once the voltage starts to drop the phones circuitry cuts it off and prevents it from powering on with the LVC circuit that checks the battery before allowing phone to power on then immeditately cuts it (first attempting a power down then all out power cut). This happens to protect the battery. So what the phone considers a dead battery is simply an exhausted battery ready for charge. If a lithium is actually dischardged completely it will damage the cell and prevent it from taking a charge. The power being given to it is then converted to heat. The battery then ignites and very very bad things happen such as your house burning down. The point of all that is to point out that discharging your phone to "zero" isn't actually doing any damage past the normal wear and tear on the battery. I buy batteries that cost hundreds for some of my RC hobbies and have learned the hard way about how lithium batteries work. (bypassed LVC and ruined a $80 3S2P pack)
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Nothing to add, technical and extensive, but fully correct, sir. I think we may have had a slight misunderstanding, however: my point was that discharging your phone to 'zero' (and as you rightfully point out, that is not an actual fully discharged battery state) is a required step in calibrating most device's algorithms (some devices, such as my SGS2 do not need this because of advanced hardware). I'd rather not fully discharge any Li-Ion batteries either.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T
armanisafarai said:
i have actually read that Li-Ion batteries can be used out of the box. Sp i turned on my infinity right away. I put the charger in, but i still used the tablet. It was about 25% when i got it out of the box. So what you're saying is that i have basically ****ed up the battery? If so, then i will return and get a new one. But i dont understand why most people say that you can usre a device with Li-Ion battery staright out of the box without needing to charge it first.
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A typical case of RTFM, an affliction I sometimes suffer from as well, as do most men. Hahaha! Do you think ASUS put it in the manual for laughs, or just to give you a few more hours of painful desire to use your device while you cannot, yet? Nah, it's there for a reason. Sometimes, though -- and again that's SGS2 experience -- just running a few battery cycles might make the readout correspond to the actual battery level again. You could at least give it a try, right?
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T
armanisafarai said:
I have used this tablet for 2 days now and almost everything works perfect (thanks to latest ota) but there's one thing that is bothering me. Battery life. I had ipad 3 for 2 months but I finally sold it and bought the infinity. Now I know ios sucks on phones AND tablets. But the battery life was amazing. I could use it to browse and for games for 9 hours at least. But on the infinity I am lucky if I get 4 hours browsing. 4 hours sucks on a tablet. But I think that wifi is the problem. I have added 2 pictures were you can see I used the tablet for 1 hour last night then I used it for almost 3 more hours today. Now the battery is at 10%. But I was wondering why the battery uses 62%? On my galaxy nexus wifi is using 5%.
Have I got a faulty unit or is it like this for everyone? If so please let me know fast so I can send it back before it's too late.
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Click to collapse
I see the same picture here. Looking at the battery stats I see WIFI using >90% of the battery when surfing in balanced/50% backligt mode.
Hope they fix this.

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