25 min cost 27% battery - Captivate General

I unplugged the phone and got onto the bus. I read news with Captivate. Nothing fancy, just NY Times, Fox News etc. I got off the bus later, I only have 73% battery.
Yes, I just started my day and it's only 70% of battery.
#FAIL.

There are a few simple things you can do to increase battery life. Turn the screen brightness down and use a solid black background as a wallpaper. The screen uses the majority of the batter. so dimming the screen helps, when using a black background the amoled display does not light up black pixels so there is power drain.
I've been running on the same charge since 4pm yesterday. I've streamed music through pandora for about an hour while exercising, browsed the xda forums using the XDA App for 30 mins, made a few calls, browsed Facebook for 30 mins, surfed the web for a couple of hours before bed. Its now 10AM and I'm sitting at 36%. Not to bad really! The phone functions exactly the same at 36% as compared to 100%.

I wonder why everyone says to use a solid black background? Do most people use their phones primarily by staring at the home screen? I'm never at my home screen more than perhaps five seconds while switching apps
I've had pretty poor battery life as well, even after discharging, recharging, and deleting batterystats.bin. There are small tips here and there, like black background and screen brightness, but even following them all, my phone lasts me barely ten hours, and most of that time it's idle. For instance, I listened to local must (no streaming) with the screen off for about an hour and lost 10% of my battery life. What's up with that?

TimF said:
I've streamed music through pandora for about an hour while exercising, browsed the xda forums using the XDA App for 30 mins, made a few calls, browsed Facebook for 30 mins, surfed the web for a couple of hours before bed. Its now 10AM and I'm sitting at 36%.
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I am also shocked and confused by how people can use their phone so heavily.
I already killed those unnecessary processes (e.g., all AT&T crap). I have a static wallpaper. I have screen brightness at 60%. And all I have been doing is just reading news and surfing the web. It literally cost me 1% of battery for every 1 min of use. It's just ridiculous.

You are probably on your home screen a lot more than you realize.
Anyway it's a smartphone, they all eat through battery time. you will never get superb battery life unless you crowbar a 3000mah battery into your device.
edit:
set the screen on its lowest brightness setting, the only time I've had to increase the brightness is when I am outside in the sun.
if you are on a bus, if you are not using wifi, turn off the radio.

TimF said:
Anyway it's a smartphone, they all eat through battery time. you will never get superb battery life unless you crowbar a 3000mah battery into your device.
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You just said your phone is at 36% eighteen hours after charging! Compared to the 0% I'm at ten hours after charging...I'm not looking for superb battery life at all, just somewhat decent. I'm actually bringing a backup feature phone with me to college this semester in case I can't resolve this issue, because I will need to use my phone both in the morning and at night some days

TimF said:
edit:
set the screen on its lowest brightness setting, the only time I've had to increase the brightness is when I am outside in the sun.
if you are on a bus, if you are not using wifi, turn off the radio.
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I have Wifi, BT always off. And I don't listen to Pandora.
I think the key is you have the lowest brightness on your phone. It is going to save you a lot of battery 'cause half of the battery is for the screen.
But I just couldn't stand it. I wish I can set to 100% all the time. It looks so much better.

The phone radio is a huge consumer of battery - especially in weak signal areas. The bars are not that accurate either. that coupled with 3rd party apps that don't always behave nice, can equal rapid battery drain.
Putting the plain in Airplane mode is good way to see what battery life is like without the Cell radio always doing its thing. It is not a fix, but it can show that the battery/phone are not broken. There probably can be improvements and tweaks made by samsung, but I don't think the phones are defective.

mwxiao said:
I think the key is you have the lowest brightness on your phone. It is going to save you a lot of battery 'cause half of the battery is for the screen.
But I just couldn't stand it. I wish I can set to 100% all the time. It looks so much better.
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This is what you would call a trade-off I like the bright screen also but I like having longer battery life more.
The screen is still pretty bright on it lowest setting and you gt used to the lower brightness after a while.
magicdanw said:
You just said your phone is at 36% eighteen hours after charging! Compared to the 0% I'm at ten hours after charging...I'm not looking for superb battery life at all, just somewhat decent. I'm actually bringing a backup feature phone with me to college this semester in case I can't resolve this issue, because I will need to use my phone both in the morning and at night some days
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how are you using your phone? What apps are you running, are you using any emulators.

There's an app called Spare Parts, which will show you what is using your battery when the screen is off. Open it up and choose "Partial Wake Usage" from the drop down to see.
My Captivate appeared to drain battery very quickly, but with moderate to decent usage throughout a day I was trying to kill the battery it lasted me over 13 hours. I think it's a matter of the battery reporting taking a good while to calibrate properly.

I've had an issue twice now with absurd battery usage. Both times I charged the phone to full and disconnected it; after doing that the phone would lose 10% charge every hour sitting completely idle! Using the phone during that time drained it even faster. Both times powering the phone completely off and back on resolved the issue.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

magicdanw said:
I wonder why everyone says to use a solid black background? Do most people use their phones primarily by staring at the home screen? I'm never at my home screen more than perhaps five seconds while switching apps
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In AMOLED, black pixels dont use power. This is different from LCD where even black pixels still use power.

Have you guys tried fully charging, then fully discharing then repeating this step 3 more times? It helps with the battery life tremendously.

You gotta do a factory reset. Many people as well as myself had the same issue. For me, a side effect was also that the att start up swoosh was stupidly loud.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

I only did the discharge thing once, last week, and today I am going on a 21 hours with 28% left.

2g app
I was told there is a 2g / 3g application. Has anyone tried this? Apparently it puts the phone in 2g when no data connection is needed and then updates to 3g when a data process is required...

i'm on day two of not charging mine... and i'm at 25%...
i unplugged it from a full charge yesterday (monday) morning before i left for work and today (29 hours later) i'm at 25%... this is with advanced task killer auto killing tasks when screen is off as well as being aggressive about it. i've been listening to music from my sd card, browsing facebook and taking some pictures (and uploading them to fb). i guess i'm either super lucky not to have any problems with GPS or the battery, or i'm a very light user.

I dunno what happened to the main battery thread?
I just got a new phone two days ago because of the restart issue. This one has the same battery issue. Drains 2-4%/hour just being idle. I have nothing beyond launcher pro and google voice installed. Everything is on lockdown in terms of batt usage. The only thing I haven't done is turn off the cell antenna.
I've tried the tricks I knew: factory reset, calibration trick. These didn't help at all. My last phone just needed a factory reset and it was all good. Now I'm sad again :-( will it just improve itself when the phone "learns" the battery or something? I wish I could teach it

Several things you can do.
1) Use WiFi if you can use it, it uses less power. If you don't have somewhere to use WiFi, leave it off.
2) Same goes for BT- leave it off if possible.
3) Use this to get rooted and remove all the ATT crap that sucks battery life. Applying the lag fix also means you spend less time with the screen on, so that can also help you out.
4) Use Auto Brightness
5) Disabling haptic feedback and the tapping sounds (I find it more annoying regardless)
6) Use a static black wallpaper- or something really dark. IMO it looks great black and plus the AMOLED... Black doesn't use power.
7) Use Advanced Task Killer. I have mine on Aggressive and Moderate security every half hour. This will make sure hung apps, etc get killed and apps you haven't ran. Make sure you whitelist the apps that run your widgets and such though.
That's the best things to do to.
Edit- above all, remember this is a SMART phone, not a feature phone like the iPhone is. The simple fact this full blown SMART phone can even begin to rival just a feature phone like the iPhone speaks volumes to how much more efficient it is than what you think it is.

starwolf256 said:
I've had an issue twice now with absurd battery usage. Both times I charged the phone to full and disconnected it; after doing that the phone would lose 10% charge every hour sitting completely idle! Using the phone during that time drained it even faster. Both times powering the phone completely off and back on resolved the issue.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
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Click to collapse
I too have had issues with battery life but quickly realized what had been causing the issues, twice it had been snesoid not closing down all the way after use, and this combined with an app that was hurting battery life (word feud), I realized what my problem was.
I leave the brightness jacked all the way down. I believe the lowest it goes on the stock rom is like 15%, but there are ways to go lower than that.
I've not used my phone much the past two days since charging it, and i'm currently down to 35%, but most of my battery use is cell standby, with display being 3rd or so on the list.
You can always use a program like tasker to make the phone go into airport mode between certain hours of the day (IE: while you're sleeping) to help conserve the battery life.
There are also tons of other good tips in this thread.
And trust me, the phone can last; i've managed 3days on one charge

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. =)

New Idea for helping save battery...

I have a friend that sent me this message today, which sounds like a great idea:
I've been messing with setcpu and trying out some underclocking profiles. Underclocking while the screen is off as well as reducing the CPU power has gotten me 75% battery left after 8 hours. This is with constant emails but no wireless, bluetooth, or gps. This is better than I was getting under windows mobile.
Using a complete black background as your desktop background screen also helps with battery life. The black areas dont use battery power.
If you install one of the cpu meters, it will show that there is automatic underclocking... mine says it has been running at 100MHz for 76% of the time (1 day uptime).
Android System Info will tell you this.
Now, I'm not sure if this is the same as what you are doing though.
You know, I believe that is correct. I don't know if he is getting any advantage or not. I'll forward the info to him and see what he thinks.
ConceptVBS said:
Using a complete black background as your desktop background screen also helps with battery life. The black areas dont use battery power.
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That only helps if you spend a significant amount of time on your phone's home screen or hit buttons a lot when the phone is in your pocket.
I've found that the best way to save battery life is to use manual brightness. Auto brightness is just too bright. In fact some newer firmware hidden on samsung's site does make auto brightness a bit dimmer.
Using manual brightness I get about one hour and fifteen minutes of screen time per 10% of battery. I get about an hour per ten percent at work, where it's brighter. I get about half that with auto-brightness.
I think one good way to test which i am going to do to tonight is charge your phone and right before you go to bed unplug it and let it run through the night and in the morning see what sucks the most battery. i'm going to assume it should be "phone idle" but if its cell standby then something is sucking data, someone correct me if im wrong .
Just flash to jh2 out jh3. I'm on 16 hours and have 50% left
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
I know my 8525 (a precursor to the tilt) had excellent reception. It was far better than average. This captivate is not as good. In my experience the captivate has average reception. I've had much worse.
Well, my buddy that told me about the topic I used to start this thread just stopped by.
He is playing with an Android 2.2 ROM that has been installed on his HTC HD2, which also is undervolted a bit. And of course, tweaking with SETCPU>
He said he is getting email and messages etc as normal; has full CPU and good power when using it (BTW...the Quadrant readings on his phone is coming in at over 1700). His phone has been up for 24 hours, 15 minutes when he stopped in, and he had 58% battery left. Before he started tweaking (and I think before the undervolted ROM), he was getting 11-12 hours on a charge.
Sounds pretty good to me.

Battery life is surprising me lately.

My battery has been doing really good lately actually. It makes me feel good when people are like ah i need to charge my phone and i look and i still have around 80% and by the end of the day i still have around 50 or sometimes 60%. My old G1 would be at around 20 by the end of the day. Just thought i would share something positive amidst all the negativity
Sent from my captivate so excuse the spelling mistakes
Add me to that list. Ive been doing some tweaking to see how much battery life I can get . Just checked and after 8 hrs unplug time Im at 94%
what roms/tweaks have you done? how have you used your phone?
1. all black background
2. disabled syncing and background data
3. disabled gps
4. disabled sound and haptic feedback
5. launcher pro tweaks (less smooth animations)
6. threw it on airplane mode while i sat in class
7. eclair. i hear custom roms are huge battery drainers
8. brightness on lowest all the time (disable smart brightness option)
battery performance while on standby is surprisingly good. sure these settings may not allow you to get the most out of your phone but if you are ever in a situation where you have to get absolutely the most life out of your phone you know what to do.
disellusional said:
what roms/tweaks have you done? how have you used your phone?
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Click to collapse
I'm currently on a stock ROM after some trouble flashing something else i just went back to stock with ODIN, im too lazy to reroot right now haha, pretty much i just have GPS off, disable syncing, darker backgrounds, I use the Dark XDA theme,i turn Wifi on when i'm home but other than that i have it off. I', just using the stock launcher, turned off all screen animations- it makes everything seem faster- and thats about it that i can think of right now. i use my phone pretty moderate to heavily on a daily basis. mostly for texting and browsing the internet. I also play a few games here and there when i get bored. Hope this helps
I have found the battery life to reasonable on the phone unless I am using it heavily. For example, today I have had it on for almost 15 hours and still have 58% battery left. This is with background data on, monitoring 5 e-mail accounts, some FB usage, some browser usage, a few phone calls, screen brightness set to medium most of the time, some music player usage, and WiFi set to on all day. I very often during the day unlock the phone and sync my e-mail manually for one of my accounts as it is iffy on retrieving and I have been waiting for something to come in.
ONE THING I HAVE NOTICED TO DRAIN: I have had this issue a couple of times. I am running stock, and when I have experienced unusual battery drain it has been down to the same thing each time. The SnsService has been stuck 'restarting' under the running services list. Stopping the service has returned the battery life to where it should be for me (for example yesterday I was down to 50% battery after about 6 hours with virtually no use. Checked SNS and it was as described above, and stopping it brought the battery life back in line to usual for me).
I typically with light to moderate use get around 24 - 36 hours, but I usually recharge each night anyway.
same here
i even have a spare battery and i rarely use it.
if u disable 3g battery life can last u as long as 3-4 days, only if the captivate has that capability to go 2g with a tap of a button

[Q] Help with battery usage / drain, how to increase battery life

Ive searched around and this seems to be a common issue, I tried the factory reset even the htc battery conditioning where you charge fully turn off then another hour back on for 2min off again and charge for another hour with no positive results, I read online some ppl are getting -1/-2 mah an hour I have never seen single digit in my phone.
I included screenshots of my battery drain even adjusted the app to read 1500mah, anything else i missed in settings? Also went into phone information in the Tests menu set it to auto instead of GSM, also with SetCPU I tried underclocking with little change to mah usage, running out of ideas...
Currently its rooted with GingerBreak, and CM7 with #48 nightly installed, any help would definitely be appreciated.
How many hours is your phone lasting on a single charge?
Lately between 5-7hrs one had about 8 and half hours a handful of times
it's true that if you constantly use the phone nonstop like watching youtube, browsing, playing games, etc. the battery won't last longer than 4 hours without getting an extended battery, heck just using moderateley the battery will be about 50% by the end of an 8 hour workshift, but what I found that will extend the battery life with moderate use are these...
1. Turn of wifi, bluetooth, gps, sync. (contrary to what ppl say on this forum I find that wifi eats way more battery than being on 4G)
2 Disable background data. (The only thing I actually need background data checked is to use the android market or maps when I need to, with it off it's a huge battery saver)
3 In settings choose to use only 2G (This will increase battery life 4x and Tmobile 2G is pretty fast, just like 3G)
4 Download Opera Mini (Since you'll be using 2G to save battery you'll want to surf the web with a browser that is super fast using slow connections, and Opera mini is second to none. You can always turn on 4G when you want to have fast video streaming but then you eat alot of battery again.)
5. Install Auto Airplane Mode (you can turn auto airplane mode on when you're not gonna be expecting calls such as at work or when you don't want to be disturbed, hell, if you just want to save as much battery as possible. Since Auto airplane mode disables the radio and data completey which is the number 1 cause of battery bleed with it on from a full charge unplugged you'll still have a 100% when you wake up your phone after a day.)
6 Install juice defender (free is fine)
7 Don't use Lookout Antivirus (I've found Lookout drains the battery quick, if you want an antivirus that doesn't eat the battery try AVG. I prefer AVG because I notice it does not drain my battery like Lookout.)
This has made my phone last more than a day on stock battery with moderate to light use. If I think of more tweaks I'll add later
This is ridiculous. If you have to turn off all those features, then don't even bother getting a smartphone.
My tips are:
1- Set brightness to auto.
2- Avoid Skype and other apps that usually appear as On going on the status bar.
3- Get rid of any task killer. They actually make the battery life worse. Don't worry about tasks running in the background, the OS takes care of them. If you wanna quit an app, try to look for a quit button by pressing the settings button when the app is on the foreground. Otherwise, just press the back button below the screen until you get back to the home screen (for some reason this seems more efficient than just pressing the home button.)
4- If you don't use IMs, get juice defender and set it to disable data when screen is off. It will turn data automatically on once you turn the screen on by pressing the lock button on the top of your device. Note that this is different compared to auto airplane mode, with Juice Defender you can still receive phone calls and text messages when the screen is off.
Last but not least, consider purchasing an extra battery and/or car charger.
Mine usually lasts for about 12 hours with moderate to high use. Almost all smartphones have short battery life if used heavily.
Sent from my LG-P999 using XDA App
risho said:
Lately between 5-7hrs one had about 8 and half hours a handful of times
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Click to collapse
Yea that's awful. Do you by chance have your brightness set extremely high? And how is the cell coverage where you usually use your phone?
I think all of the advice above is valid and will save your battery. The question is to what extreme do you want to go? I tend to agree with donatello88 that there comes a point when you get so paranoid about battery life that you may as well not have a smartphone because you've turned off most of its features.
Get rid of any task killers, battery monitors, etc. They are simply churning thru clock cycles and that uses more battery. Set email, Facebook, etc to check for updates less frequently. Either use auto brightness or manually set your brightness to about 25-30%. That should b bright enough for everyday use unless your in bright sunlight a lot. Use juice defender if you like. And be wary of antivirus apps. I've heard some can suck ur battery dry.
If you do those simple things and are still getting only 5-6 hours then I'd be taking it back to T-Mobile ... unless of course you're on your phone without ceasing. In that case, what can you expect? Lol
Ok with the tips I just mentioned above, I got a chance to put it to real world test. I caught the bus to my son's grad ceremony and reached there at 4pm ceremony didn't start till 6pm so those 2 hours just surfing the web reading articles and forums I was down to 90% battery. Didn't know how long the ceremony was gonna be so called my sister on video chat using tango and spoke to her for about 20 minutes. Did some more browsing using opera mini set to only use 2g for another 2 hours, my don came out, I took some pics and video of him turned on 4g to video chat again with my duster for about 5 minutes, and after 4 non stop hours of consecutive use with screen on, I'm now at 71% battery life. I'm at the bus stop now on my 12 mile commute home and I'm confident the battery will give me more entertainment until I get home. Awesome! You don't have to believe me, just try out my tweaks and you'll be amazed.
Everyone thanks for all of the help and tips, today was the first day I saw 10hrs+(included screenshots), I had my screen on auto and after some reading saw that with CM7 it doesnt work well so I have changed it down to 20-40% depending on where I am, turned off background/auto sync only turn it on when I need it and uninstalled the app killer I was using also changed a few of the SetCPU profiles.
Im not really a heavy user just wondering if having 3email accounts set to update every hour would be a battery drain too? I mostly text/email during the day and talk about 1-2hrs depending how busy I am at work.
Again I thank everyone for pointing me in the right direction...unfortunately at home I have 1bar to none for service so I do depend on Wifi calling which im sure drains more juice, also at work since it in a high rise not too much cell signal so wifi on most of the day...
[Ultimate GUIDE] Increase your battery life on Android
risho said:
Lately between 5-7hrs one had about 8 and half hours a handful of times
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hello risho,
I was having the same kind of battery life... After 3 months of research, I collected all valuable tips.
"Valuable tips" means: tips that do not need constant involvement from your side (you don't need to go switch on/off things, etc..) and also that leave you with a very functional phone (you have location when you need it, you have e-mails flowing regularly enough, etc...)!
With these tips, I am now lasting from 6am to 11pm and at 11pm, remaining battery is 10% at least!
Go and check my thread: [Ultimate GUIDE] Increase your battery life on Android!
Enjoy!

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