Voice Call draining battery - Captivate General

Voice calls are using way more of the battery than anything else. I just finished a 26min call and the batter went down 14%. Under battery usage it saids 35min of voice calls accounts for 29% usage while display on time of 1h42min only acconts for 20%. Cell standby time of 2d 10h32min accounts for 29% with 0% for time without signal. I have the data turned off unless I'm browsing the web so shouldn't voice call w/o 3g use even less battery? I remember my LG Vu using way more battery when calling with 3g on. My reception ranges between 3 and 5 bars. Battery life is great if I don't do voice calls. I can go 3 days with moderate use if I don't do voice calls. Does this seem normal?

I think its normal for voice calls to drain the most battery. 14% for 26 minutes is not right though it should be like about 5 or 6ish% with no web browsing during calls. Check your percentage and then do a 25 minute call and see how far it goes down it wont be 14% if it is you got problems holmes
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

The official spec says 5 hours or so of talk time. So, 26 minutes using 14% battery seems close enough.

superballz00 said:
Voice calls are using way more of the battery than anything else. I just finished a 26min call and the batter went down 14%. Under battery usage it saids 35min of voice calls accounts for 29% usage while display on time of 1h42min only acconts for 20%. Cell standby time of 2d 10h32min accounts for 29% with 0% for time without signal. I have the data turned off unless I'm browsing the web so shouldn't voice call w/o 3g use even less battery? I remember my LG Vu using way more battery when calling with 3g on. My reception ranges between 3 and 5 bars. Battery life is great if I don't do voice calls. I can go 3 days with moderate use if I don't do voice calls. Does this seem normal?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Normal? Yes. Signal strength indicators can be misleading with respect to the amount of power the phone will consume while active. Signal quality will vary a lot depending on a number of factors which influences power consumption.

I just fully charged it and made a 30min call. Battery went from 100% to 85%. If the drain rate holds I can only get a bit over 3hrs of talk time with a full charge. That would made the Captivate by far the worse phone I've ever owned in terms of talk time. Good thing I rarely make calls or else I would return it for something else.

I have noticed awful battery use from calls too. Right now, my phone's Been unplugged since 630 am (it's now 930 pm). 26 minutes of calls used 29% battery. 2 hours 15 minutes of display on used 32%. Extrapolating the usage, that's about an hour and a half of talk time, ~1%/minute. Seems extreme.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

The current specs for modern smartphones I believe will radiate up to 1 Watt in the 1800/1900Hz band and 2W in the 850/900 band. If your signal is very strong (few obstructions) then you will not radiate that much power (minimum I think is 150mW), however if a signal fails, your phone will continually step up its power output to try to be able to send/recieve properly until it hits 2W or 1W (depending on which band you're on).
That's up to 2 Joules/sec.
The stock battery is 1500mAh, which is 5400 Coulombs (an Ampere being Coulomb/sec, a mAh being 3.6 Coulombs).
If I remember correctly, our phone runs at 3.7V (I believe most cellphones these days operate between 3-4V), which is 3.7 Joules per Coulomb (one Volt being one J/C).
That means that:
5400 Coulombs * 3.7 J/C = 19980 Joules
(19980 J) / (2 J/s) = 9990 seconds or 166.5 minutes of max talk time on max power.
14% of your battery would be 756 Coulombs (0.14 * 1500 * 3.6). That's 2797.2 Joules. At max power that's only 1398.6 seconds or 23.31 minutes.
So your rate of 35 minutes of voice calls for 14% of your battery is actually considerable under max power, and that's not even including other drains on battery (OS, speaker/mic, etc).
Note that this doesn't mean the Captivate is somehow horribly inefficient: these are standard ballpark figures for all phones. If you had to use up max power for a phone call, NO PHONE, not the Droid X, not the iPhone 4, not the Galaxy S line, would last very long. It's a simple matter of physics.
Note that the maximum talk time advertised by any company is well above that, as it should be, because it would be ridiculous for a phone to have to go 100% all the time. I believe for our phone, Samsung claims 350 minutes of talk time, which would mean somewhere in the neighborhood of half power in the lower band, which seems pretty reasonable.
Note that my simple math doesn't take into account a lot of little variables, but the ballpark figures seem very reasonable. I'm not an RF Electrical Engineer (yet, I'm actually about three semesters away from being one), so take my numbers with a rather large grain of salt.

@JPS81 - your logic is solid to me.
Most people don't understand that signal bars mean little, and low signal areas will really suck the juice from a phone - even when not on a call.
Just about all phones have a 1500 mAh battery these days and most are rated at about 5 hours talk time. This site (link below) actually tested the most popular phones and the Captivate did a bit better then its rating while the iPhone 4 did worse. I don't know if comparing different carriers together is valid, but certainly an iPhone versus a Captivate on AT&T in the same physical location is a valid test.
http://www.tested.com/news/manufacturer-cell-phone-talk-time-claimstested/955/

Related

Battery Life

So, I haven't seen this topic talked about yet, apart from manufacturer claims of the usual hundreds of hours of standby.
Having now had the TC for almost a week, I'm not at all happy with the battery life, and hoping it's either a faulty battery or something I'm not doing right.
Today, I've made a 2 or 3 short phone calls and downloaded a few emails, and it's down to 30% at 5pm! Most other days have been the same.
I do have bluetooth and HSDPA on, but not Wi-Fi. Surely, this won't be another case of, "buy this great phone with all the fast connections, but stick to 2G GSM because of the battery life".
Any help gratefully received, as I love the TC apart from this problem.
Data connections come from the "TalkTime" budget, not the "Standby" budget, so if you leave your HDSPA connection connected, or your Bluetooth on, it will drain the battery in about 7 hours.
My tests seem to indicate that HTC's estimates are reasonable within about 85%, if you understand what they're saying. If you leave your phone switched off, doing absolutely nothing in the background ("Standby"), then I've got about 200 hours out if it. But as soon as you start using the phone (which includes switching it on - the increased processor usage and backlight take more power than Standby) the overall battery budget is reduced.
An example - if you spend 1 hour online, you've used 1/7th of your TalkTime budget, but you've also used 1/7th of your Standby budget - the hour of talktime is equivalent to about 30 hours of standby...
It's marketing speak, sadly, but given USB recharging, etc., as long as the phone makes it to a laptop or socket each evening, I'm pretty happy with the battery life on my Touch Cruise - just remember to disconnect data connections when you're not using them, don't check for new mail every 5 minutes and only use IMAP IDLE when you really need it...
I too was first disappointed but I had almost everything that uses data switched on or on automatic like weather and emails.
So I set everything to manual and batt is good with some calls. Before when I tapped on the top bar there was always something connecting or showing connected for a x number of mins. But now it shows 'No data session active' and batt is holding up nicely for all my calls + what I need like GPS etc.
I do put TC on heavy use and I am quite satisfied with the fact that TC makes it through the day.. Most of the PDAs and phones I have used forced me to carry secondary battery with me..
I can only go on my heavy day to day business use with push mail 24h, 20+ calls, few hours of TomTom and bit of forum reading!! But it´s a very big improvement on my Kaiser which would be empty by 7pm. Whereas the Polaris is still around 50-45%
Can anyone tell me how much battery life can one expect for mp3 playback?
christonge said:
I can only go on my heavy day to day business use with push mail 24h, 20+ calls, few hours of TomTom and bit of forum reading!! But it´s a very big improvement on my Kaiser which would be empty by 7pm. Whereas the Polaris is still around 50-45%
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Something's either wrong with my hardware, battery, or config.
Are you in a 3G HSPDA area? I am, and wondering whether or not that's killing the battery.
If it's the battery, I doubt I'll get an exchange, seeing as most places are sold out of TC's still.
Do you use Windows Live? I don't have MSN Messenger running, but I think it syncs all folders on my hotmail every 2 hours.
I don't use Windows Live or the messenger. I'm now using HTC Mail which gives you a free 3 months trial of their Microsoft Exchange Server account. It works really well and seems to use less battery than the Windows Live, which I had previously used.... and most of the time I use the basic "G" (GPRS) connection although when surfing the net I change the connection to 3G.
Hmmm
Thats interesting
Im having a similar problem.
So far, mainly used mine for browsing through wi-fi but the battery drains so quickly. It only lasts a day and a half.
Same usage on my old orbit would last close to a week.
ps - Ive swicthed off all other comm functions
I'd be delighted with a full day! It's such a pain to have to keep plugging it in!
I've now switched off HSPDA, and if that doesn't work, I'll have to switch off 3G. Kind of defeats the object of having a 3G device.
BadTasteUK said:
I'd be delighted with a full day! It's such a pain to have to keep plugging it in!
I've now switched off HSPDA, and if that doesn't work, I'll have to switch off 3G. Kind of defeats the object of having a 3G device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
3G/HSPDA uses a lot more power than regular GSM. I keep my phone locked to GSM and only enable 3G when I want to go online, but then I primarily use my phone as a PDA so I don't access the network that often, even for voice.
I think there's a utility floating around these boards called something like BandSwitcher that does something to make it easier to toggle between 3G and GSM. As you can probably tell from my vague description (and I'm not even sure that I got the name right), I haven't got round to investigating this fully myself yet.
By the way, there is another thread here about battery life, started by me (what is it with us Brits and our obsession with battery life?), and called "Dissapointing battery life test" (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=356910&highlight=Julian+battery+life). The thread includes a link to a very useful tool written by Muyz and available here (http://www.vandenmuyzenberg.nl/PowerGuard/) that allows you to look at current drain on the device and I posted some data in that thread from my device so you could run the same tests and see if your current draw is comparable to mine. If you do this then please do post your data.
- Julian
aerokid240 said:
Can anyone tell me how much battery life can one expect for mp3 playback?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm afraid that's a very unhelpful "it depends". It really depends on (a) exactly how you've encoded your MP3 files (bit rate and CBR vs VBR) plus what player you are using to play them.
Having said the above though, I can give you two data points:
1) The Touch Cruise manual claims "Up to 8 hours (WMV). Up to 12 hours (WMA)." (This is on page 249 of the English manual under the power/battery specification.)
2) From measuring current consumption on my device while playing 64kbs AAC HE files I estimate that I'll get somewhere between 9 and 10 hours before I go from 100% charge down to the 10% warning level.
AAC HE is very CPU-intensive to decode. I'm not sure how WMA compares to MP3 regarding CPU intensity but I would expect your figures to be more comparable with the WMA figure quoted by HTC and, in light of my AAC HE real life experience, the HTC figure actually seems quite realistic (although nowhere near good enough in my opinion).
I hope that helps somewhat.
- Julian
My average day.
Off the charger at 6:15AM
Make about 5 to 7 calls each about 5 to 10 minuets
3G HSPDA on with exchange server running always conected
Back light at MAX off after 30 seconds of non use
30 or so text messages
Agile Messanger on all the time conected to AIM and Yahoo. About 2 to 3 comversations each day.
Around 10 to 15 minuets of web surfing to read the news and what not
Bluetooth always on but only used in my car (BMW iDrive) about 1.5 hous of driving
About 20 to 30 minuets of playing S Tris 2 (Yeah I know but I can't help it I love that game)
About 30 to 45 minuets of MP3 playing while at the gym
Ringer set to Vib then ring
Back on the charger by 11:30PM
DXL007 said:
My average day.
Off the charger at 6:15AM
Make about 5 to 7 calls each about 5 to 10 minuets
3G HSPDA on with exchange server running always conected
Back light at MAX off after 30 seconds of non use
30 or so text messages
Agile Messanger on all the time conected to AIM and Yahoo. About 2 to 3 comversations each day.
Around 10 to 15 minuets of web surfing to read the news and what not
Bluetooth always on but only used in my car (BMW iDrive) about 1.5 hous of driving
About 20 to 30 minuets of playing S Tris 2 (Yeah I know but I can't help it I love that game)
About 30 to 45 minuets of MP3 playing while at the gym
Ringer set to Vib then ring
Back on the charger by 11:30
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that's 11.30 pm, right?
Fixed post.. And yes
DXL007 said:
My average day.
Off the charger at 6:15AM
Make about 5 to 7 calls each about 5 to 10 minuets
3G HSPDA on with exchange server running always conected
Back light at MAX off after 30 seconds of non use
30 or so text messages
Agile Messanger on all the time conected to AIM and Yahoo. About 2 to 3 comversations each day.
Around 10 to 15 minuets of web surfing to read the news and what not
Bluetooth always on but only used in my car (BMW iDrive) about 1.5 hous of driving
About 20 to 30 minuets of playing S Tris 2 (Yeah I know but I can't help it I love that game)
About 30 to 45 minuets of MP3 playing while at the gym
Ringer set to Vib then ring
Back on the charger by 11:30PM
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's fantastic, my battery MUST be faulty! Oh, and thanks very much for taking the time to write all that down!
I'll leave it another week or so playing with turning things on and off, and if I can't get a full day, I'll order another battery, and be hardcore about the 16 hour charge for the first three charges.
When it comes to my batteries I am a stickler when it comes to conditioning them. I always do a full discharge and recharge for at least 3 cycles. It may be inconvenient the first few times because you can run out of power in the middle of the day when you really can’t wait for a recharge, but in the long run its worth it. On the weekend when I use my TC the least I get 2 full days out of it.
DXL007 said:
When it comes to my batteries I am a stickler when it comes to conditioning them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Looks like it's paid off!
I've had my second day now where it's lasted a day! Last night it had 40% on it at 0100, and so far at 1700 it's still on 70%. The reason? I turned off HSDPA on Sat, and it really seems to have made the difference. The internet still runs very fast as well.
DXL007 said:
When it comes to my batteries I am a stickler when it comes to conditioning them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi
Where did you get this info from? I've heard of ppl doing so for NiCd days, but never heard of doing it to LiOn or LiPoly batteries.
Hi all
someone knows, if powering OFF the TC suspends the WIFI-connection
so that it will not discharge the battery?
On my elder HP, I let the WIFI on, switch off the device,
and I couldn't remark a greater change in the battery after one nighgt.
On TC, when switching OFF the unit with WIFI ON,
the battery is empty after one night.
Tanks
St

Battery poll

How long do most of you go on battery ??
My Fuze with NATF's ROM goes for 2 days easily with medium-heavy data use on a H connection with 15 min auto refresh of 2 email accounts and moderate GPS use with Google Maps.
That's incredible! My old Hermes (8525) didn't make it through the day some times with 1 hr auto email refresh!
Just another happy TP user.
Is TF3D enabled?
Yup - all fully functioning
Just an amazing device...(Or mine is freekishly good...which would be quite nifty)
same here.. it lasts a lot longer than my tilt with its Manilla2d
for me on heavy usage, probably 5 or so hours of internet, games, and calling, i last roughly 12 hours or less... maybe it's the phone adapting to the charge or maybe i screwed up something nasty when i did the original conditioning
My battery life is about the same as my Tilt was. I get about a day's worth of use out of the phone. I am pretty heavy email user (3 accounts, including MS Exchange) and texter. If I don't charge my phone when I go to bed, I'd get an hour or two into the next day and it'd be dead. I was hoping for a better battery life, but at least it's not any worse than the Tilt...
I'm lucky to get a whole day using an hour of wifi and an hour of gps along with about an hour of voice, some texts and some 3G browsing.
I have the touch pro and it lasts about 15 hours with moderate use. 10 calls, 20 text, auto receive email ever 2 hrs, 45 mins to an 1 hr web surfing.
Actually is probably closer to 12-14 hours with moderate use. 20 calls, 30 texts, 45mins to 1 hr of web surfing. auto email receive every 2 hrs.
I use 50 percent battery per day rarely more and i use all of its features thoroughly.
I've gotta say, the GSM version of the touch pro (fuze) has WAY better battery life than the sprint version! What a difference! Returned the sprint one!
would the posters mention how they charged their device upon receiving the unit? the posters with high battery life may be doing something we are not doing resulting in low life
I am around 12 hours during the week with emails calls blueooth active sync. Weekends I get 48 hours easy as.
It's hard to get the most acurate time during the week as I charge the phone over night and never know when it's fully charged and and if it stays fully charged or stops charging.
I'm also using NATF's 1.1 ROM and getting great usage, about 2 days of average use before getting to 20%.
But even before the new ROM the battery was way better than my TyTn. I wanted to run the battery from full charge to dead battery auto-off and I ended watching YouTube videos for about 3 hours straight (to keep the 3G going a full speed). I made it through one full MST3K movie and lots of youtube surfing before it finally died; I got better power usage than my laptop watching DVDs.
Overall I'm a moderate user, and if I forget to charge over night I'm good the next day but will get low batt messages that 2nd night.
Wow, I wonder if there is a quality variance on the batteries that are shipping with the units?
I'm running the stock AT&T ROM still, and will get a 30% drop in battery in 3 hours without even making a phone call. Battery life is worse than with my Tilt. I'm in area that has spotty 3G coverage - it could be some strange interaction while switching between 2G and 3G over and over.
Or maybe there is something NATF is doing in his ROM that is helping battery life?
I'm getting about 15-16 hours with heavy use. I like to text, average at least an hour websurfing on HSDPA, maybe half an hour on WiFi, maybe 2 hours talk time, two e-mail accounts on refresh, and add maybe half an hour to an hour of random organizer/tasks/random crap usage.
If I don't charge at night, I'm pretty much screwed for the next day.
ATT Fuze
ROMeOS 1.4
Batt lasts approx 10hrs. Seems like it could last weeks in standby mode...I'll hit power button on top and come back hours later to find same batt %. During heavy use I can watch the % drop like a lead foot on a V8 throttle.
-No auto sync of emails (I manually dl 4 to 5x's per day)
-Very little GPS use (avg 10mins per day)
-30 mins of phone calls
-40 texts
-1 to 2 hrs web surfing
When I bought the device the battery had approx 40% charge. I ran it down to 10%, then fully charged and ran it down again, then fully charged.
Might try NATF's rom to see if there's an improvement.
thedogger said:
Wow, I wonder if there is a quality variance on the batteries that are shipping with the units?
I'm running the stock AT&T ROM still, and will get a 30% drop in battery in 3 hours without even making a phone call. Battery life is worse than with my Tilt. I'm in area that has spotty 3G coverage - it could be some strange interaction while switching between 2G and 3G over and over.
Or maybe there is something NATF is doing in his ROM that is helping battery life?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same for me. I can pull it off a charge and 12 hours later it will be 55% with no useage? I am running standard softwae minus bloatware using the trick. Installed Advanced config, Total commander, AE buttons Plus.
I've got a 1.93 rom.use my phone for only calls/sms.with and without tweaks, the battery lasts 24 hours-nothing more-thinking of getting an extended battery
I think that besides the usage, the battery time might also depend on the radio version which control the way your device interact with the service network. There're several radio versions which from: HTC, service providers (At&t, T-mobile...) but it's all compatible with the device. Then would it be possible that we take a look on our radio version and vote on which is the best one for battery life but must adapt all other usages (GPS lock, good signal strength...)?

What kind of battery life are you getting?

I am getting absolutely horrible battery life on my MT4G. I took it off the charger at 9:30am, I have since made one 5 min phone call and sent maybe 5 texts, and checked a couple emails that i just deleted, other then that screen has been off the whole time, its now 4:40 and im at 35% battery. On my Vibrant with this sort of use I would still be in the 70s.
Under accounts and sync:
facebook updating every hr (just changed it to every 4 hrs)
google syncing just gmail, no contacts or calender
news every 4 hrs
stocks not syncing
t-mobile syncing (tried turning off but it just turns itself on again)
qik video chat syncing
weather every 3 hrs
yahoo syncing
Are you on wifi or 3g? Brightness? Screen timeout? I have an N1 and the battery life is pretty poor so I'm just curious apples to apples in terms of what else you have turned on.
negreenfield said:
Are you on wifi or 3g? Brightness? Screen timeout? I have an N1 and the battery life is pretty poor so I'm just curious apples to apples in terms of what else you have turned on.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I leave 3g on but i always left it on on the vibrant as well, brightness is at 20%, screen times out within a couple seconds
wifi, gps and bluetooth off
I get great battery life. Then again I am coming from a Vibrant, my battery was horrible on that device. I take it off the charger at around 8 am and by 6 pm I still have 50%
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App
ever thought about turning off 4G? You don't alway have to have it on.
I get around 12-15 hours with heavy usage. My G2 usually gets 15-24 hours.
I saw this article the other day. I was thinking about trying it tomorrow.
http://androidspin.com/2010/11/06/double-your-battery-life-on-htc-droid-incredible-sprint-evo-google-nexus-one-and-possibly-others/
Don't bother with that battery charger hack, it's not going to do anything but waste your time...
I just installed SetCPU on my phone just for fun and have found that it recognizes a few lower clock cycles...I added a profile to lower the CPU when the screen is off otherwise at 1024-245 On Demand and I'm still plugging away at 20% battery when I would normaly be on the charger by now...could be a fluke, but so far so good...I'll keep this for a few days to see how it does.
oh, one other note, my battery life has continued to improve with every charge...the first few days I couldn't get through a full day and now I have battrey to spare...just had to get it conditioned with a few charges I guess.
I let the phone completely die last night and then charged it and at midnight I unplugged it. At 8:30 this morning when I left for work it was at 94% which was great but from 8:30 until now it has dropped to 83% and ive had one 3 min phone call and deleted some text messages, no browsing web, no listening to music, nothing. It seems like the phone will go through the 100-95% slowly but after that its in a marathon to get to 0%
I don't know how you guys are getting so many hours daily on heavy use. I get 7-8 hours on heavy texting, some web browsing and about an hour plus on the phone almost every night. 9 hours would stretch it and it would be on 10%.
I have my brightness all the way down and all the way down is just 11. Screen times out in 2 minutes and I have power saving on. I did the battery thing 3 times where I would let it go down to less then 14% or so then charge it fully without taking it off charge. Hopefully it improves as days go by, I'm just tired of carrying my charger to work.
myTouch4G (Glacier)
Down to 69% now at 11:15, have made no phone calls or texts since then, have just downloaded opera mobile but havent even played with it...lol this is riduculous
I can recommend that you guys take a look at what might be pinging the CPU. Watchdog (Lite) is great for this task. You can have it alert you when an app exceeds a preset threshold for CPU usage. Some apps just go rogue on you like Palin from time to time.
I've also noticed that there's wide variability in terms of how apps go into either idle or background states. Some apps will go into idle only if you hit the back key to go back to the home screen and will enter a background state (more active) if you hit the home instead. I've also noticed that the free, ad-supported apps require more CPU time. That's right. Hitting Google's ad servers, at least for some apps, and scrolling those ads, requires more CPU time than other apps, which do the same. I don't know whether to fault the devs in this case when coding for the ad retrievals or not. Just some things to consider.
I just got mine. I came from a Blackberry 8900 and an old 2g iPhone. Battery life on both of those was significantly better. I could talk for 8 hours a day on the BB and it would last until midnight-1am or so. The iPhone would only last until 10pm.
Using the MT4G, my battery life is REALLY bad compared to these other two devices. I can get about 5.5 hours of continuous talk time, tested yesterday on a conference call for work. But even with only calling for about an hour and some basic email checking, I can't go past 6pm without putting the phone on the charger.
Wifi is off, screen at 50%. Someone please make a big fat 2800mah battery for this thing. I use this thing for work, and I make over 4000 mins a month of phone calls. It's really annoying to have to plug it in whenever I have the chance.
im getting roughly about 15-17 hours and im using it (camera, blogging, facebook uploading)
this destroys the EVO i had
Heavy usage, I'll get around there, 7-8 hours...regular usage gets me around 20 hours..I'm using setcpu w/ profiles..
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App
did you have similar battery problems with your old phone while at work?
i notice my nexus 1's battery is significantly worse when i'm at work since getting a signal is a bit spotty (35th floor) so it keeps searching around. when i'm at home the battery lasts literally twice as long while idle.
dinan said:
did you have similar battery problems with your old phone while at work?
i notice my nexus 1's battery is significantly worse when i'm at work since getting a signal is a bit spotty (35th floor) so it keeps searching around. when i'm at home the battery lasts literally twice as long while idle.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes definitely right about that. I have better battery usage when I'm off work. My department at work is in the basement. So the signal switches on and off the whole time I'm there.
myTouch4G (Glacier)
dinan said:
did you have similar battery problems with your old phone while at work?
i notice my nexus 1's battery is significantly worse when i'm at work since getting a signal is a bit spotty (35th floor) so it keeps searching around. when i'm at home the battery lasts literally twice as long while idle.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think I only brought my G2 into work a couple times so cant really comment on that but in the 3 months ive owned the vibrant, if i used the phone a lot during the day....i mean play games, texts, web, etc..id leave with percentage in the 50s, normally in the 70s, at 4 today i was in the 30s with the mytouch with barely doing anything, since i want it to last until the night i just threw it on the charger. it shows I have full signal (4th floor by window)
My wife just got an mt4g (I have a nexus one). I've noticed that her battery life seems to be just over half what mine is, and I actually use mine more!
When I looked at her Battery Usage display, Android OS was near the top with almost 2h CPU time after being unplugged for 6h. For comparison, on my nexus one, CPU time for Android OS is 4m13s after almost 8h.
Any good way to break that number down more and find out the source of this crazy battery usage?

[Q] Battery Troubleshooting/Feedback

I am currently using a Galaxy S3 SCH-I535, stock, unrooted, and have noticed decreased battery performance over-time. I have already viewed many similar threads to try and pinpoint particular issues (wakelocks, troublesome apps, etc.). I was hoping for some perspective whether my battery life is up to snuff.
I have seen many describe their phone life with ~3+ hours of screen time with moderate usage. I use my phone intermittently throughout the work day to chat (Text messages, Hangouts), check e-mail, and browse the internet. I do not use Wi-fi, aside from when I am home in the morning or at night, and make sure to turn it off if not connected to a network. I have sync turned on, but the only accounts I have syncing are Google Now and Gmail. I have location services/GPS/Bluetooth turned off, and run in Power Saving mode with brightness at ~50% and haptic feedback turned on. My reception is subpar, usually about 2 bars and spotty 4g connections at work. I do not stream music, play games, or watch videos during typical use. No facebook, weather apps, etc. that can be culprits some times. At best, with the usage habits described, it is typical that I get 2 hours screen time over a single day (~16 hrs) before I get in the single digit battery %.
I've attached some screen shots I took of battery stats at ~50% drained (I didn't get a screen grab for it but at that battery % I had probably 1:05 to 1:15 hours of screen time). I just started using Wakelock Detector to find any problem apps - after tweaking some apps last week this has been pretty typical behavior. I have even swapped batteries with my wife's S3 to see if it was a battery problem, but did not notice a difference.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Are my expectations for battery life too high? Is this typical, or am I running lower than I should be?
That is pretty good but this comment is by someone who is rooted with a custom ROM and custom kernel since I bought the phone 7 months ago. I can't really say that is the average battery life for the device.
This looks pretty normal to me. You said you had spotty 4g coverage, while your phone is coming in and out of 4g service you'll get decreased battery life. Same happens with your mobile data and Wifi signals if they aren't strong connections.
It looks like your phone is running pretty well. People getting 3+ hours of battery life are either using their phone all the time and hit that threshold in something like 8 hours, have amazing coverage, and/or have no syncing services turned on. A key to run away Wakelocks are having a high battery usage that is coming from something other than your screen, such as media and android system. Other Wakelocks you can't do too much about. There's a thread that is titled the noobs guide to Wakelocks that gives you a pretty good direction trying to isolate Wakelocks and finding fixes for them.
I routinely get about 2-3 hours of battery life in a good coverage area in 16 hours, if I'm in a spotty area my battery will drop much faster. At a friends house with worse coverage I'll be lucky to hit 2 hours. I pretty much use my phone the same way as you.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

Hows your battery life?

I got my HTC One Mini yesterday and I'm getting pretty good battery life so far, how is it for you guys?
I'm using jmz's Stock Rooted Odex WWE Rom and Jmz M4 Kernel 9-04-13. I unplugged my phone around 9 AM this morning and it's now 1:45 AM and I'm at 48%.
I installed 12 apps, torrented a 315MB file using uTorrent @ about 600 kb/s, watched 23 minutes of 720p video using MX Player with hardware decoding, watched about 15 minutes of YouTube videos, went on Facebook for about 20 minutes, browsed the internet for about 5 minutes, browsed a forum using Tapatalk for about 15 minutes, made about 5 minutes of calls, sent/received about 20 texts, read a manga chapter, used it as a flashlight for about a minute, used it as a remote for XBMC for about 2 hours, flashed a kernel, and took a couple of pictures, a 30 second 1080p video, and a Zoe to test out the Camera. All of this was over Wi-Fi.
I think I could easily get 2 days out of the battery as my typical usage would be lighter. How is the battery life for you and what Rom/Kernal are you using?
Stock UK Vodafone Rom recently updated with the it's package.
Well...I am sadly unimpressed by the battery. I've had mine now for just under a month and don't get a day.
I use it to surf the BBC website (in mobile mode) over 3g and at other tines WiFi.
I make calls about 30-60mins a day and play a version of bubble breaker.
I can literally see the power drain when surfing the web. This us the single most draining activity...much worse than when I used my desire.
I have configured all power save options, disabled all non essential apps, and ensured the phone is not burning background or unnecessary apps.
Still it goes rapidly. It's a shame but I like the phone so will live with it.
2 days...yes if all you do is make calls. Anything more demanding not a chance I'm afraid. I have tried, a lot.
So it is now 1.10pm and I have 52% and at 9 am I had 100%. No video no gaming but a mix of BBC on WiFi and 3g (i have a femtocell so no burning power while looking for a signal).
Nice phone in so many ways but battery life, in call quality and control, are very poor.
All the best,
Sam
I am planning to buy HTC one mini, Wanted to get real idea of battery life, so this was helpful. Could you laso tell me if that 1GB RAM is a problem maybe once you have 60-70 apps ? I thinking of 2 years life at least so was concerned?
zopeon said:
I am planning to buy HTC one mini, Wanted to get real idea of battery life, so this was helpful. Could you laso tell me if that 1GB RAM is a problem maybe once you have 60-70 apps ? I thinking of 2 years life at least so was concerned?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For me it isn't too much of an issue, but they really should have equipped it with 2 GB of memory, 1 GB has been the standard for about 2 years. I have 42 user apps installed and most of the time I can have multiple apps open without any slow downs. Occasionally if I have multiple heavy apps running (Maps, Facebook, Pandora, Chrome ect.) it can slow down due to the lack of memory, but if I close one it speeds right back up. If you read any reviews you'll hear something along the lines of it's stupid that they only gave this phone 1GB of memory, but for most people it won't be a problem which I agree with. I'd suggest trying it out at a local store before buying it. Different people will see things differently, to some the HTC One Mini and S4 Mini will seem slow compared to the regular One and the S4, to others it will seem very fast.
ok guys please keep in mind that your mobile connection eats your power rly ****ing bad. I did a lot of tests with the mini and i'm was even able to get 5days with 25% left. Camera or wachting videos coast a lot of power as well but music is ok that does not need that much power.
Its all about your connections and how good the signal is, so if you want a longer battery life only use wifi.
The device has smaller screen size, lower resolution, half the number of cores, lower clock speed, lower powered GPU, half the RAM, no NFC or OIS. It should get *better* battery life than the full-sized one all things considered, though the smaller battery will definitely even this out somewhat. I wouldn't be surprised if under typical moderate-high usage involving CPU and screen this device should hold out similarly to the HTC One but in standby, etc it will be a bit lower.
Notebookcheck and GSMArena have done thorough battery testing, though notebookcheck doesn't test standby time and GSMArena's standby time testing method is a bit suspect.
Anandtech haven't published a review of the Mini yet but in their review of the Galaxy Note 3 you can see some battery tests they did of the HTC One Mini and it holds out pretty well considering it's not a phablet.
I bought mine two weeks ago. On the first week, my battery just last 10 hours at least and after a few days of experimentation of various settings and process monitoring, I can last 24 hours with still 20% remaining.
My daily usage can be define as quite conservative as I'm busy at work most of the day.
Here's my activities to give you an idea:
Call - at least 3 minutes a day
SMS - least 20 messages a day
browsing via HSPA / 3G - at least 1 hour a day
browsing via wifi - at least 1 hour a day
playing games - at least 30 minutes a day
reading / composing / sending emails - I set this to manual, at least 5 times a day (when I'm at home)
Frequently Used Apps:
Chrome
stock Calendar
stock Mail
Keep
stock Music Player
Cordy
Twitter
ES Task Manager
ES File Explorer
Google Play
Youtube
System Panel
Disabled Apps:
Facebook
Linkedin
SoundHound
7 Digital
Google Search
Google+
Hangouts
Kid Mode
Maps
Plurk
Hope this can help somebody to have an idea.
No matter what the phone, you tend to see battery life tests showing 8+ hours of web browsing battery life. However, real life never matches up to this expectation, with 3 or 4 hours of web browsing much more typical. This is the case with all smartphones - even a device like the Note 2 or Note 3 (albeit with higher expectations to begin with: - a Note 2/3 may tests 11+ hours web browsing but typically get 4.5+ in real-life conditions).
Unfortunately this leads many to believe that their brand new device (or its battery) is faulty. But in most cases this is not true.
I'll attempt to explain the real reason for the discrepancy.
Most importantly, the battery life tests are exclusively limited to that activity or task. For example, fully charging the smartphone, continuously web browsing for 8+ hours until the phone dies. In reality when we use our phones, the phone will be on standby, or doing other tasks, at other times. For example, 8+ hours of web browsing from a full charge is not the same as getting 8+ hours of web browsing over a 16 hour day. Those other 8 hours, even if the phone are on standby, are going to use up some of your battery, too.
The single biggest battery drain of a device is usually going to be the screen, unless you have specifically forced the screen brightness to a low (<33%) amount. At full brightness, a smartphone may burn through battery after only 3.5 hours of web browsing even if it could last 8+ hours at 40% screen brightness (the brightness control is not usually linear in terms of power draw). Review sites tend to standardise on a particular brightness level that is relatively low (the reason for this is often that allows fair comparison with devices that just can't get as bright). The bottom line is that 8+ hours of screen on time at lowish brightness might drop to half that or lower if you let auto-brightness bring up the brightness during the daylight hours or when outdoors, or if you prefer higher brightnesses.
Often, battery life tests will be done over wifi with mobile phone reception disabled entirely. This is not realistic as with a smartphone you're usually connected to a cell tower even while you're using wifi, so that voice calls and texts can still come through. Also, cellular uses a lot more energy while idle than wifi does. So even if you set the brightness really low and do nothing else with the phone, you still shouldn't be surprised that you can't get 8+ hours of web browsing if you also have the phone connected to a cell tower in the background. Some sites will conduct battery life tests over the cellular network instead of wifi, and typically these will get much lower battery life ratings (eg. 4+ hours, even with the same brightness level as for the wifi test).
Bottom line is, don't head back to the shop if you only get 3 to 4 hours screen on time during the day with web browsing. This is entirely normal for *some* usage patterns. You can improve it by:
Disable auto-brightness and set the brightness to a low-ish value, say 30%-40% of maximum. This might be able to double your screen-on time compared to full brightness.
Avoid using the phone much in direct sunlight. For the brightness to be high enough to read in direct sunlight, you'll be burning through your battery quickly, and if you've set the brightness manually to a low level as advised above, you won't be able to read it in direct sunlight.
Connect to wifi (but of course, only if you trust the wifi network to be secure and respect your privacy).
Realise that if you ever play CPU- or GPU-intensive games (most casual games shouldn't fit in this category) then a beefier battery or external battery booster may be a good investment. There's not much you can do about their battery use.
Only after considering the above should you hunt through battery usage analysers and wakelock detectors. In many cases even a misbehaving wakelock that keeps your phone partially awake all day has a low impact compared to having the screen on full brightness for just 20 or 30 minutes.

Categories

Resources