Battery Drain and 4g/3g - Thunderbolt General

I just wanted to make a quick note and share my experience.
With my Thunderbolt constantly connected to 4g, starting it fresh around 7:30 in the morning, the phone would hit 9% or less by 8pm (around 12 hours, not bad at all.)
Keeping the phone on 3g while making no other changes at all and maintaining my usage habits, I turned the phone on at 7:30 this morning and at the time of writing this (10:30 PM) my phone JUST now hit 40% battery.
Just some other random notes, my screen is set at about 45% brightness and auto-syncing is off.
I'm assuming the way 4g is connected now is a rather large drain on the battery, and hope/assume this will improve as the technology is perfected (I'm sure minor updates to the software can fix these issues.)

HTC has admitted that this is a problem and said that this and the GPS issues "should" be fixed when they release the next OTA.

Related

Again with the Battery

Is anyone that is having battery issues running Adao Task Manager and Battery Status Pro?
I just factory reset my phone and I got 24hours of batter life. About 8 standby but a good deal of texting, web, some calls and some you tube.
I installed Task Manager and Batter Status Pro last night and my battery this morning went down 15% in about 1hr.
I uninstalled these today and will post again but has anyone else seen big battery drain from these apps or does anyone that is having issues running something similar?
I have been playing with the battery for about a week now.
For me this phone runs pretty good during stand-by. I would have about 2-3% drop for a whole night (7 to 8 hrs), with Google (push), Twitter and weather syncing.
The problem is when you use it, it drops like crazy. When I read news or surf the web, it would drop 1% every 1 or 2 min.
This morning I read an ebook, with black background for about 30 min, it dropped about 3%.
So basically i think the screen, data connection, and non-black background are the ones that kill the battery.
Yea, I agree, the S-AMOLED screen in this thing is an energy hog. OLED's are supposed to be more energy efficient than typical LCD's but I'm just not seeing it. Whenever I look at battery usage stats it shows the display at 70-75% of battery usage. Thats ridiculous. I have until the 18th, but I'm quickly leaning towards returning this and just getting an iphone4. This phone is becoming more and more disappointing the longer I have it.
This morning I have been uplugged 4.75hrs and used 16% no battery monitor and no app killer. Basically done the same things I did yesterday. Some Bebbled,texting, email, phone calls .
I will update tomorrow with total hours battery life for today. Would be happy if I can replicate the 24hours I got the day before installing those apps.
I got like 45 hours of battery with moderate usage during the two days. Seems fine to me, I occasionally used system panel to monitor if anything was using high and constant CPU
This is pretty typical of a 1ghz phone My nexus would last a day of heavy usage, 2 days if i use it lightly. We need to wait for undervolted kernels to be developed xD
Also, it really helps if you disable 3G when you don't use it. This allows me to get 3-4 days of light usage out of my nexus. I haven't played with the Captivate long enough to know how much of a difference this makes on this phone though
when you guys refer to "stand by", what exactly do you mean? Just screen off/phone idle? The battery usage on my phone when I use it seems to be OK even if not amazing, but it continues to sap life from the battery when I'm using it at an alarming rate.
Standby is when the phone is idle/screen off/locked.
The display is definitely power hungry. Using the Power Control widget that comes installed definitely has helped with battery life. It will let you toggle WiFi, BT, GPS, Data Sync, and Brightness (at 3 levels). When I'm not using anyone of those, I turn it off. When I'm indoors, I'll set the brightness to the lowest level. I'm usually at my desk when I'm streaming music, so I'll have it plugged in.
derek4484 said:
Yea, I agree, the S-AMOLED screen in this thing is an energy hog. OLED's are supposed to be more energy efficient than typical LCD's but I'm just not seeing it. Whenever I look at battery usage stats it shows the display at 70-75% of battery usage. Thats ridiculous. I have until the 18th, but I'm quickly leaning towards returning this and just getting an iphone4. This phone is becoming more and more disappointing the longer I have it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually they are more energy efficient on black screens, But screens with a lot of white in them suck battery bad.
alphadog00 said:
Actually they are more energy efficient on black screens, But screens with a lot of white in them suck battery bad.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is true the white screens burn the battery etc. I just wanted to let everyone know what I did to make my battery last more that 24hrs.
First, read the Wiki guide and apply some of the battery saving tips.
Second, UNINSTALL a program called "gReader" created by noinnion. This program is a huge battery hog! At least it was for me.
Hope this helps.
Well I guess I am one of the "lucky ones" Im running a live wallpaper and have not run my battery down since the 1st day. Right now Im at 40% life and at 15 Hrs 30m since unplugged. This is with checking facebook, twitter, email, phone calls, internet browsing\video watching and following the steps for the GPS fix. The only thing I have done is install ATK on the phone, besides that its all stock.
One thing I know is a huge battery drain is Time without Service. Check that stat and see if you have anytime at all without service, if so, I am pointing to that as a major drain on the battery. I know currently I have 0% Time without signal, my fiancee however is usually in the 20+% range and her battery drains like many reports I have seen here (she has an EVO).....
Yesterday I only managed 16 hours. Web, Email, A bluetooth file transfer, short bit of gaming. I have about 5% of the cell standby time (26%) without signal. My girlfriend has the Aria which is running Android 2.1 also, has all sorts of widgets, haptic feedback on and can make it at least 24 hours. I get that it has a smaller screen but it is also an LCD. Shouldn't the Super Amoled be saving our battery some display consumption.
i get about 14 hours or so moderate usage and at the end of the day, i have about 35% left at night.
If you detail the "Display" usage in the battery usage details how many minutes has your screen been on? Mine says 1hour 2mins ...this is for 8 hours of running time. My display is using 50% of the battery (which is at 68% now).
W00t W00t today I have reached a new high 2 Days 6 hours and 29 minuts with 12% battery left.....
What I have found is keeping Wifi on while I am at work and home like almost doubled my battery life. Which is great that I can use Wifi all day and not drain the battery so fast like my Fuze. Right now been off charger since 7:30am and I have 84% left. Yesterday after 9 hours I was still over 50%. For me its better than any other smartphone I have owened.
I used manual brightness, (swipe notification bar), turn off GPS/BT. black wallpaper and set Wifi to never sleep. Also the power saving mode in settings is off for other reason and doesn't affect battery.
At 18% right now and it's been off the charger for about 30 hours. I noticed yesterday that while I was connected to wifi at home (with Y5 app), it was draining faster than when I was connected to 3g. Did some tested back and forth and JuicePlotter clearly had a noticeably steeper downward slope for when wifi was connected than when it was using 3g. Weird :\

[Q] Losing 30-40% battery overnight

I had this problem once when I first got my captivate, but then it went to normal (lose ~5% overnight). Overnight I keep wifi connected and airplane mode off. I was happy, lasted 10-15 hours daytime depending on how heavy I used it, etc.
I recently ordered a two spare batteries with an extra micro usb cord as well as an external battery charger (charges batteries while not inside the captivate). I use the new microusb cord to charge sometimes too because for some reason it doesn't work with PC to connect micro sd card, and I charge my batteries mostly using the external charger.
I recently started losing 30+% overnight. I don't know when exactly (if it were apps or the new batteries, but it happens with my old battery and the new ones). I installed spareparts and battery history and tried turning off background data but I still lose this much overnight. I don't really know how to read spareparts to try to isolate an app. My daytime battery life is not drastically lower than before (10+ hours), but I think it is a bit lower than before. Does anyone know how to fix this problem?
tl;dr:
- used to lose <5% battery overnight
- got new batteries, now use external charger
- suddenly started losing 30%+ overnight, don't know why
- help please!
thanks!
I personally lose more than that overnight when I have wifi enabled. However when I have it off I lose less than 5%. So I guess I'm in the opposite situation as you.
Since you already have spare parts installed and used to have better life the only thing I can suggest is recalibrating http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=765656. Sorry if you have already done this before. It's just that when you pull the battery and switch it I'm assuming the battery stats file may not adjust accordingly. It's worth a shot.
I seem to be having the same issues as you. I made a thread over at the Q&A section which may be of some help.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=829285
As for losing more than 30%-40% overnight with wifi enabled, there has got to be some lingering issue on your phone if it is losing that much. I don't think any phone, no matter how bad the battery life it has, should lose that much overnight, granted that you don't have a TON of data intensive activities running on your phone.
30-40% WOW!
I get 36-48 hours in between charges on my phone.
Wifi is always on, sync is always on, no live wallpaper, weather and email updates every hour. I'm not on it every minute of every day but enough use for sure.
over night I lose about 5% on average.
Calibrate your battery...but you can't change batteries or you need to calibrate all over again.
Sent from my FroYoed Sprint Hero
As I posted in this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=829285, I did a factory reset and my phone seemed to be working fine as it slept when the screen was off (checked by using *#*#4696#*#*). It was good until approximately 50% when all of a sudden I checked and it wasn't sleeping once again. Checking the partial wakelock "Android System" was taking up an increasing larger amount of this section. I didn't do anything on my phone as I was sleeping and periodically, when I'd wake up, I'd check on my phone status. When I reboot the phone once this happens, it sleeps once again.
Keep in mind, my phone is stock. Didn't install any apps or anything at all since the factory reset. Now I'm not sure if I have a defective phone. Maybe the Android OS is set up to run like this? There's no such thing as a defective OS is there? Can't be anything on my end because I didn't touch the phone nor did I install any bad apps (or any apps at all for that matter). Can it be a battery issue? I can't see how a bad battery can cause the phone not to sleep. Is there something in the Android OS that turns on automatically after a while that may be causing it?
I'll try to recalibrate my battery but I don't know how that would alter if my phone sleeps or not, but I'm willing to try. I'd rather not take this phone back and get another one as that's a hassle.
Mine will loose 40% over an 8 hour window easy with absolutly 0 use if its near the "edge" of either wifi coverage or data coverage.
IE, sit the phone down with a weak att signal and walk away. It'll die on its own unless you airplane mode it within half a day.
I have to religiously turn the phone on airplane and switch to wireless at home, and turn to airplane and turn wireless off at work (can't connect to work VPN with 2.1 !)
If I leave it on full in either location, it's bloody dead next time I touch it.
However, with good home wifi, I can actually get 4 days of email checking, use as alarm clocks, some other sms stuff without plugging in.
This things is helaciously sensitive to wonky radio connections.
hmmm. I guess I'll try it with wifi on tonight. I don't think recalibrating would cause it to have a 10x difference in idle battery usage, but I'll try that if all else fails
I use Setting Profiles app and have it set wireless to Airplane mode from midnight to 6am. Still, I'm finding my battery down by 30-50% at night.
Looking at Battery Usage, my Display, Cell Standby and Phone Idle we all using the majority of the battery power. I'm not sure if these numbers are reset after the phone comes off the charger or how it is calculated.
I just turned off wifi altogether and have seen huge improvements. I don't even use it anymore despite being in my house with a wireless connection. Data usage isn't that much slower so not much of a loss. At least it can sleep.
i only get like 24 hours on my phone :/
fshalor said:
Mine will loose 40% over an 8 hour window easy with absolutly 0 use if its near the "edge" of either wifi coverage or data coverage.
IE, sit the phone down with a weak att signal and walk away. It'll die on its own unless you airplane mode it within half a day.
I have to religiously turn the phone on airplane and switch to wireless at home, and turn to airplane and turn wireless off at work (can't connect to work VPN with 2.1 !)
If I leave it on full in either location, it's bloody dead next time I touch it.
However, with good home wifi, I can actually get 4 days of email checking, use as alarm clocks, some other sms stuff without plugging in.
This things is helaciously sensitive to wonky radio connections.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's not just this phone. My wife's iPhone does the same thing, as did my Q9H. The constant switching from 3G to Edge will kill a battery.
SiL3nTKiLL said:
i only get like 24 hours on my phone :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
24 hours is normal.
Sent from my FroYoed Sprint Hero
I turned off wifi and have seen an improvement. It's still not where it was before, though - I used to lose 5-10% with wifi on. I wish I knew what happened.

Love The Phone but...Battery Rant

Hey Guys,
I am usually just a silent observer on the boards and try and gain knowledge from all these amazing developers but my experience last night has pushed me to vent. I live Atlanta, and a Vendor had offered us some suite tickets to the Falcons Ravens game. Of course I would take those. Knowing this phone does not get the best battery life, I made sure to have the phone fully charged before I departed. I left the office at 5pm with a full charge. Throughout the night I would send a txt here and there and take a photo, nothing too strenuous I thought. As the game was coming to an end I looked down and saw that the phone was already in the yellow, not terrible since it should last me till I get to the car. I’m not thrilled because this means the phone charge has only lasted 6 hrs. I get off the mass transit station and go for my car key…..and it’s not there. I check all my pockets to find nothing. I am now screwed. No car, no phone, no charger. To cut the story short, I had to find a payphone (needle in a haystack) and call collect to my father, who has the only spare key. Needless to say he was not too please coming down at 2 am to get me out of the jam. I am just so furious that the phone died so quickly on me. It seems if I ever go out at night, if I’m not near a charger, that phone is dead within hours. Sorry for the rant, but its just the one major flaw about this phone. My old Tilt would last a couple days ( I know I know, small screen low processor) But a solid day out of these phones would be nice.
Do you manage the battery consumption by turning off unneeded features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi? Have you set the screen timeout to a few seconds of idle time? The display is the biggest consumer of battery power. Finally, when I know I'll be away from a power source for more than 6 hours, I put a fully charged spare battery in my pocket.
FYI the Galaxy S has one of the best batteries for a smart phone. With careful use and battery management, I routinely get 16 hours before a yellow warning.
I had much of your same problem in the first few weeks of having the captivate, prompting me to go buy two extra batteries and a charger off ebay ($10). I feel that upgrading to cognition 2.2 and using the task manager to stop facebook and such from always updating has saved a lot of life, and my phone will last a day to a day and a half on a single charge, so long as I put it into flight mode at night. then I just shut the phone down, switch out batteries, and turn it back on.
I have the screen set at the lowest possible brightness (11%). When i am out i never have bluetooth or wifi on. Perhpas there was a runaway app that was draining the battery. I have never gotten 16 hrs though. My max is about 12, and thats if i dont make any phone calls. You start making calls, it just kills the battery life on my phone. I did use to have a spare battery on my tilt, i might have to do the same with this phone.
It's most likely because your phone is not sleeping when the screen is off.
Download the "Spare Parts" app or just enter *#*#4696#*#* in your dialer and check out the "Battery History". If the Running % is almost full (around 80%-100%) during a day's use, your phone isn't sleeping when the screen is off which means battery is draining. Give it a reboot when that happens, but the known cause I've found was that WiFi causes this issue.
Are you sure you weren't losing signal when you were in the arena? When you lose signal the phone constantly searches for a signal causing your battery you drain.
I know in arenas you don't get a strong signal...
Just a thought
Turn on airplane mod when ur not really using your phone..
I have a great battery life. Especially when not using HSUPA. Try deleting your battery stats.
I typically see 12 to15% per hour drain with constant use.... meaning display is on all the time and I am on internet, phone laying idle overnight... 1%/hr tops. I do have a nice signal at home though... ranges from –70 to –85 so the modem is not working hard at all.

battery life

anyone feel as if their battery life sucks? I do have 4g on at all times but I didnt think it would make that big of a difference in terms of battery life.
See my post here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=839935
Try installing a monitoring app and see if your init process is hitting the CPU hard. I haven't heard from any other mt4g users with the same problem, but lots of.desirehd users have it.
I also have seen my suspend process eating 50%+ CPU when the phone is locked/screen off. Haven't found a fix for that yet though.
I'm getting a full 24 hours of heavy texting, moderate phone calls. Battery life is better than my magic... im having no issues.
Yes, I woke up this morning and my phone was already blinking and battery is on 8%. I left it overnight with more then 60%
A big problem also is that SetCpu cannot force the scale. If limit to 768 Mhz it still scale to 1024. So not I am sure that my ScreenOff profile with 245 Mhz DOESN'T WORK!
THAT'S SUX!!!
QUEDRO said:
Yes, I woke up this morning and my phone was already blinking and battery is on 8%. I left it overnight with more then 60%
A big problem also is that SetCpu cannot force the scale. If limit to 768 Mhz it still scale to 1024. So not I am sure that my ScreenOff profile with 245 Mhz DOESN'T WORK!
THAT'S SUX!!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Weird I leave my phone at full overnight and its still at full when I wake up.
Try disabling the preflock that might help before I did that it wasnt scaling properly now afterwards it is.
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App
I have frozen a few apps and use advanced task killer every time i start up 9a lot of apps come on at start-up).
The result is pretty good battery life. I have only gone dead when I had a few apps (like GPS navigation) running in background and forgot about them.
I'm having 0 issues with my battery. It easily beats out the battery life on the Samsung Vibrant I had.
I'm having issues too. My battery life today was 40% at 1 PM, and when I left this morning, it was full. I hardly even used the phone except to check email :/ I have brightness on auto and wifi off. Not sure what the issue is.
My battery life has been really good. A typical cycle is charge to full and disconnect power at 10:00 pm. Up at 6:00 AM, battery is still on 100%. Today my use has been moderate to heavy. It's now 2:30 PM and I have 68% left. I typically have around 30 percent left when I put in back on the charger. I'm happy with that.
Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, etc., are kept off until I use them. I do however leave Background data and Auto-sync on all the time.
I turned on USB Debugging as recommended and my battery life is much better. Right now it hasn't been charged in 9 hours and is at 79%. I've downloaded 2 apps, updated 3 apps, sent multiple emails, light internet use, and 3-4 calls. I'm unrooted and don't use any task killers.
LAVS1 said:
I turned on USB Debugging as recommended and my battery life is much better. Right now it hasn't been charged in 9 hours and is at 79%. I've downloaded 2 apps, updated 3 apps, sent multiple emails, light internet use, and 3-4 calls. I'm unrooted and don't use any task killers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's awesome. I'm going to turn on USB Debugging mode and see if I can squeeze a little more juice out of it.
I have had intermittent battery-drain issues too. On Saturday morning my battery went from 100 down to 76% in a matter of an hour or two with hardly any use. I did a restart and it seemed better. I've also gotten into the habit of restarting my phone once a day, right before I take it off the charger in the morning. I've turned off quick boot, which I read somewhere in the forums can affect battery life. It's been pretty good the last few days. I'm at 68% now off charger for 9.5 hrs with moderate amounts of wifi, web browsing, email, and 3G network usage. I'm new to android devices so I don't have much to compare that to, but it's working for my schedule.
heavy user - fully charged phone at 7am ... start using after 7:30am
check emails, fb, txt, barely to no calls.....phone will be down to about 20% at 1:30~2pm....
yes the battery is lame...but this is a known issue with HTC...the 3.8 screen drains a lot of battery also the constantly searching for HSPA+ and 3G...
I do notice when screen is off....this phone still drains battery !!! bad =(
left over night at about 65% left in the morning I got red blinking led saying phone is below 10% .... 50% gone!!!
I think restarting the phone after a full charge is a good idea....also maybe turn off quick boot?
*update* yes I found that when you have a bad signal and it's jumping between E and H ... this eats up battery
also installed Advance Task Killer (for froyo) this helps~ now from 8am my phone can last until about 4pm getting about 3~3.5hrs more life
Mine lasts all day with everything on, playing games, email, text, etc, etc.
It is great, best phone I have had. Not sure what the issue is unless it is root.
It depends where you live.
If you get a good antenna signal, your battery will last.
At my apartment signal is low, so phone is constantly between UMTS and GPRS, plus phone is trying to hold H, so that drains the battery.
My signal strength parameters:
between -101 dBm and -107 dBm (where -110dBm is the edge of the signal/loosing signal)
3 asu and 7 asu

P20 Sudden massive improvement in battery life

My wife has had the P20 from the week it was released in the UK. The battery life has been really poor, she is what I would consider a light user on a 4GB contract which she rarely troubles and with a tablet for use at home. She has taken to carrying a portable charger with her to make sure she got through the day. I had checked for any obvious drains, even turning off bluetooth, gps etc. But from a full charge in the morning, she would struggle to have any battery left by the evening, compared to me (a slightly heavier user) having about 40-50% left on my Samsung S9.
However at some point in the last week something has changed, she is suddenly going to bed with about 60-70% battery left.
Anyone else had similar? Has there been a significant update recently (to either the phone software or some other app)?
Craig
My mate 10 after a few updates, i actually use my phone to work, work 8 am to 6 pm get home and i forgot to charge the phone last night, woke up with 72% battery and was wondering if i should bother charging.
I think it has to do with the npu
I experienced the same after the last update. Before the update it would not last more than 4h sot with 1h voice calls. Now i can get 5h sot with 1.5h voice calls and still have like 30% remaining.
i have experienced increased temperature heat. dont know what is causing it.
Same here! But I just noticed it last night before going to bed (had it on full charge), woke up 8 hrs later and the battery only drained by 1% (only Wifi is on). Not even sure if the update was even downloaded without me knowing. But before this the battery for me was performing quite well, coming home in the evening with still 40-50% left.

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