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Samsung Captivate on the Quest for the Greatest Battery Life!

I'd love to hear how people are finding the battery life on the Captivate, and what their usage patterns are. I don't have many apps on the phone to begin with, but on the train to work I can easily knock out a third of the battery just listening to music. While using the phone for five or ten minutes, I'll sometimes see the battery dop 2-3 percent!
For tomorrow, I'm going to try using the stock launcher instead of LauncherPro, no widgets. I got rid of the Android Central app just in case it was fetching data in the background. But my hopes aren't terribly high, I'm afraid.
I have rooted the phone, but the battery life was bad before rooting. Once rooted, I tried some apps like JuiceDefender, and there seemed to be no change.
If I continue having these problems, I may unroot and bring the phone to an AT&T store to see what they say. I've heard it mentioned that Samsung is sending out new batteries that are better than some current ones, but I don't know if that's true.
I'd love to hear any suggestions. I want to use my new phone, not worry about it all day!

I too have been getting very poor results. I have talked on the phone for less than 3 minutes, went to maybe 15 different website pages, one 3:00 youtube video, 10 minutes of GBC emulation gaming, and regular texting, and I'm at 10% with 8 hours. I've probably only used the phone for 30 minutes total today.

Smartphones always drain battery, if you want a phone that can be heavily used for like 4 or more days on one charge cycle, get a feature phone....the samsung captivate has given me the best battery time overall, against all my past smartphones.

I don't think it makes sense, though, that it should run out halfway through the day like mine is. My former devices were a feature phone and an iPod Touch. The feature phone lasted a week or so, and the iPod Touch with heavy heavy use lasted three days at least. So even if I had both pulling from the same battery source, and with light usage, shouldn't it last at least a full day?

Weird, I had wireless on almost all day, with push mail and doing tons of market downloading and I was only down to about 50% by early afternoon.
Seems about the same as my two year old HTC Touch Pro to me.

My battery is running fine too, even after streaming music from my house with subsonic, testing out a couple videos, messing with the gps, push email a bunch of app downloading, and a live wallpaper and i was still at 33% by the time I got home, even seems to be getting better.

"On the train to work..."
There's a bit of your problem, methinks. The 3G radio is burning a lot of power trying to connect to towers inside a metal box that moves to a new tower on a regular basis. Unless you need to get calls on the train, put it in Airplane mode during your commute.
Have you actually let the battery die completely yet?
My first battery burn-down, (starting with the charge on the battery as it was unboxed) I was showing zero percent battery for almost two hours before it actually shut itself off, moderate usage with WiFi on.
The next charge-up burn-down, it was showing zero percent about fifteen minutes before the end.
And the charge-up burn-down after that, it showed 0% about twenty seconds before it died.
See where I'm going here? The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.

Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.

smitty1 said:
Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.
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Yea I had one for two weeks and it was horrid. I would lose 6% just in standby time in between waking up and getting out the door to work in the morning!
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

I've had great results with the battery and I find it to be much better than my HD2. I watch quite a bit of youtube, text message a lot, and browse the web and the market on and off, not to mention all the time my wife plays solitaire, and I still have 30% battery at an uptime of 41:46. I don't use gps or live wallpapers, and I keep my display as low as possible, since it is still bright.

Bit better by the end of the day. 13 hours and 15 minutes

Croak said:
The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.
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+1
Definitely agree with the last part. I've been doing my best to kill it, but I don't want it to be dead. Been noticing the inaccuracy of the meter quite a bit, especially when it's charging, but I'm sure it'll get better over time.

Thanks for the informative replies! It hadn't occurred to me that the battery meter might be uncalibrated - I've been charging once it reached 10% or so. I'll try letting it die fully today.
One thing that seems to have helped, too, is the brightness settings. Turning OFF the "power saving" auto adjust ing brightness option allows the brightness to stay low, and a brightness control widget lets me set it lower than stock controls allow. I've seen some definite improbement from this alone!

These are Li-ion batteries, DO NOT let them die completely before charging.

Ok, so...is there a safer way to make sure the battery gets calibrated? I'm reading in a lot of places that Android phones fairly often misreport battery info unless calibrated.

The lowest I can get on battery status is 60% after a full days use. Admittedly I'm not a power user but I had my phone unplugged for 16 hrs and still had 95% I'd like to know what you have to do to get such low battery levels , start your car

All I've done today is listen to music for an hour (used 25%) and texted/browsed the web for perhaps two hours (another 5/% down.)
I read that LIons can be occasiomally discharged, since they have undercurrent protection circuits. One guide for Android phones suggested leaving the phone on until it shuts itself down, turning it on again, and then letting it shut itself down again. Then, with the phone off, charge fully. The guide said once a month or do is safe and beneficial. How does it sound?

Battery is good today. Been sending a few texts, checked email, facebook, and surfed these forums a bit. I'm at 2 hours with 98% battery left.

i hope the battery doesnt suck, i plan on getting this phone soon and want good batt life!!!

tysj said:
These are Li-ion batteries, DO NOT let them die completely before charging.
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I agree with you, however, the phone's hardware will NOT let the battery completely die.
So I wouldn't worry about that all to much.
Basically though, Li-ion batteries are 'memory' free so they can be recharged on a whim partially.
They also prefer partial charges vs deep charges.
There are questions about this that I don't have answers for such as: When the phone displays 0% or shuts off due to low battery, how LOW is the battery?
Obviously the phone battery can't be dead dead, but it is low enough for the hardware to take precautions.
Anyway Li-ions will at max last 500 charges.. If you want it more than that, You're going to have to buy a new battery anyway. =)

[Q] What is "normal" battery life?

I switched from an old WinMo 6.5 (Verizon Imagio) to G2x. Absolutely love it, except the battery life (there is backlight bleed too, but not too annoying).
But when I read thread here, seems my battery life is kind of okay?
1) Went to sleep at 1:20am. Phone had Gmail sync, Exchange sync every 15 minutes, News & Weather widget, and ScoreMobile widget. Checked battery at 5:40am, it was down 11%. So roughly 10% battery every 4 hours. This means 40 hours battery life if I leave the phone idle.
2) Today I wanted to drain the battery then give it a full charge. So I factory reset device twice (each time it automatically downloaded all 28 apps I installed before). A 1 minute phone call. About 1 hour web browsing. 10 minute Goolge Maps Navigation. Tweeked settings of my favorate text reader and read a novel for about 2 hours. Then watched YouTube for 30 minutes. Other time, phone was left in my pocket. Battery lasted about 11 hours.
So, is it normal battery life for G2x? With CM7, is it possible I can extend the battery life to 16 hours in scenario 2?
I think it is NOT normal battery life because when reading the novel (screen brightness at 20%), I can see 1% battery drop every 3 minutes!!! The text reader just displays static text until I flip page. My reading speed is about 2 pages/minute.
Compared to my WM 6.5 device, I barely notice any battery drain when using the same text reader app (WM version of course), same book and same reading speed.

Well people have found that the only issue with android really is the damn battery! some live through it, some buy extended batteries (like myself) and others just don't feel it since they are used to charging regularly. When compared to winmo 6.5 android is just doing so much more in the background comparitively even though winmo 6's multitasking is pretty neat. I guess other thigns to consider would be your screen resolution and that damn 14.whatever hsdpa chip you got in there!
Btw if you are using a app killer, i suggest try taking it off and see if you feel any diffrence.. i did.. i just found out the rogue app and said good bye to task killers and my battery was a little bit more promising then since it was on an aggressive kill certain app more earlier.
One thing though if you were to put the phone on a stanby time you will notice that it could really last but when doing something you can as you said practically seen it burn fuel, I guess the advancements in tech/screens/etc are just way beyond todays batteries!
I found my stock 2.1 doing much much MUCH better than CM7 or 6 even though people say Cyanogen was doing much better on some phones in terms of battery.

Can somebody post the battery life of their Vibrator compared to this phone?
I'm so mad, U mad?

I had mine off charger for maybe a total of 15mins cause I was deleting stuffoff the sdcard and battery was full it dropped 3% within 15mins
I had my myt4g with miui rom idle with wifi on for awhile yesterday and it didn't drop a % until I used it but even then it still hardly was draining. This LG drains way to fast!!

The battery life WILL improve over the first few charges. My Nexus S was TERRIBLE when I got it. 8-10 hours max. After 2 weeks or so, I was getting 25-30 hours of moderate usage.
The G2x I got ~ 14 hours of usage right out of the gate. I'm on full charge cycle 3 or 4 now, and I'm already over 19 hours. Hoping I can end up at around 25 hours or so.
The batteries AND the OS need time to 'learn' each other. The batteries need to break in as well with a full COMPLETE charge cycles. IE charge too 100% and use it until it dies, then charge fully. It also helps to leave it on the charger for about 8 hours PAST it hitting 100% the first time for some reason.

[Q] Battery life, the most important question about the Sensation...

Is the battery life shorter than the life of a fly? I'm coming from a HD2, which I was constantly wanting to turn into a bomb and ship it back to HTC because of it's poor battery life, until I upgraded to CyanogenMod.
The other thread about the phone is filled with silly, useless blabbering about benchmarks, so if you have the phone, could you please spare us drudging through that thread and post your battery life results here?

+1 to T.S
If the Sensation can run more than 8 hours on Battery I'mma pre-order this beast on Handtec asap

Good initiative. Change the topic title to 'battery life' or something similar otherwise people interested won't think to look in this topic.

the phone only came out yesterday, it always takes a few charge/discharge cycles to get it conditioned properly, so any comparisons that are done after just one day aren't going to be very accurate. give people a chance!!

For who?
Don't expect any better battery life than present phones. It's dual core. I don't have it but I think it's predictable. You will get 1 or 2 days depends on how you use it. I'm saying that might be 2 days because for normal usage it will run only one core which is new chipset etc. so it will spend less power than 1 core phones when one core is running. It will spend more power when you play gamse etc. because of 2 cores.

As long as it's better than my Desire (AMOLED), I'm happy.
I've installed CM7 and undervolted it and when I run my usual set up (Podcasts/Music, Trillian (Battery Saving Mode), GTalk, Latitude activated) it can happen that it doesn't really reached the end of a typical work day. When I had certain widgets installed, it didn't really reach the end of the day.
I don't need it to last 2 days, but easily one full day with nearly heavy use would be somehow nice...

Had my phone for 3 hours, battery life is about 10 billion times better than my HD2 was. Been using it pretty constantly since, and my battery would have gone down by about 25-30% on my HD2 (mental!!) but battery has gone down by about 5-10% and I haven't even charged it yet. Very happy soo far! .

I unplugged my phone after it's first charge cycle 7h 38m ago. It's gone from 100% to 23%.
During that time, my phone has been used almost constantly, including benchmarking, taking screenshots, as well as the usual few phonecalls, facebook updates every hour and Twitter updates every hour. Plus, of course, all the mucking around that we all do when we get new phones!

sjgore, great news! I have a question about your signature, how could you possibly be holding both your phone and your baby at the same time in each hand?

sjgore said:
I unplugged my phone after it's first charge cycle 7h 38m ago. It's gone from 100% to 23%.
During that time, my phone has been used almost constantly, including benchmarking, taking screenshots, as well as the usual few phonecalls, facebook updates every hour and Twitter updates every hour. Plus, of course, all the mucking around that we all do when we get new phones!
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Thats is very promising, waiting for my Sensation! Have to wait a damn week though!

This thread is relevent to my interests...

A good reliable benchmark will be good only after everyone stops playing with their new phone for 23 hours out of the day!
Can't wait to get mine when it hits the US soon!
Also, battery conditioning isn't applicable to these kind of batteries. The first charge is as good as the 50th or the 100th. Of course, this is pending the lifetime of the battery. They do wear out!

I have been using my phone since 8am this morning, the battery is at 53%
My HD2 would have easily been dead by now!

SeanCorky said:
I have been using my phone since 8am this morning, the battery is at 53%
My HD2 would have easily been dead by now!
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thats promising

Could please more users comment regarding battery experience so far? Even though you might still hope for an improvement after several charges, I'd like to know how it has been for you guys for the first couple of days. Thanks

I charged mine about half 5 yesterday, been using it as normal and had WiFi turned on, and its just hit 25%.
A lot better than my Desire HD.
Sent from my HTC Sensation

Mine's been off charge since about 9:30, and today I've been recording some 1080p video clips, taken some photos, playing Angry Birds and general usage. It's currently at 65%. So I'm pretty happy all in all!

Ok people who say "I've been off the charger since XX:XX and I'm at XX%, my YYY phone would've been dead by now!" please stop... people use their phones every differently and moderate/heavy usage varies greatly among different people.
If possible just look at your battery graph and report how long it says it's been off the charger, and also press display to see the DISPLAY TIME ON. Also, if you've made a lot of calls, report the voice call time as well. Signal strength is another major factor.
With Gingerbread it's MUCH easier to see battery life performance because of that new graph. Signal strength, display on, awake, etc. are very important in determining how long the battery will last and also if your phone isn't getting as much juice as you think it should.

20 hours 5 mins off charge, 100% to 39%, display time 1 hour 26 mins. WiFi on all that time. Is that any use?
Edit: Forgot to say, my phone's on its third charge cycle now.

Thanks. Did you make many calls? 1.5 hours of screen on time seems like light usage for 20 hours off the charger. The battery life on this phone seems quite average... on par with other 1500mah phones I guess.
More data is always welcome =)
sjgore said:
20 hours 5 mins off charge, 100% to 39%, display time 1 hour 26 mins. WiFi on all that time. Is that any use?
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Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App

Objective battery life test

While I can get through the day without it dying, using heavy apps runs it flat in two hours, while some report 8 hours.
This needs an objective test that uses all the phone hardware the same way. Considering some units tend to heat a lot and others don't, there's something just flat out wasting power in some units.
At least looking at processor power usage, I hear from some that they can get 6-8 hours of Angry Birds Rio, while that runs me down in two hours from a max charge. At least on this fairly objective metric, play this game actively from a full charge and see how soon you get the 15% warning, and post findings. "20 hours with moderate use" is hard to understand as browsing pulls 1000x the energy of standby and it is very ambiguous how much reading vs scrolling vs rendering flash vs data is actually being used.

An hour or so of Grave Defense HD took me from full to 5%!

im getting the best battery life ive ever gotten out of this phone on eblood 2.3.3 after battery stats wipe...

Max battery life with GB - 4 or so hours with the phone sitting idle. I've watched battery indicator for from 100% to 2% watching a half hour of a movie.
I'm going back to using a Rzar. Seriously. Windows Moblie is the only OS for smartphone I will use from now on.
[Yes, I've tried different roms and battery calibration - I'm too damn old and have too busy of a life to be doing Androids and LGs jobs. If its not correct out the box then its crap.]

Damn, I wish it was this easy, but there are just too many variables. Today, my G2x has been off charger for almost 6 hours and I have 93% battery!!! I have wifi on and google update, weather bug and score mobile all doing background updates. Under the exact same conditions yesterday I had a "get pretty warm with reboot" about 4PM and my battery was then at 50%. And then there are the days I get the "get real hot by the camera with BSOD needing a battery pull". Depending on how quickly I realize that, I can lose my whole battery. I running stock 2.2.2.
Too many errant pointers. I don't believe I can blame it on the hardware...

Battery Life & SOT

Been getting about 14 to 16 hrs of battery life and about 4 hrs of SOT for the week. Main usage is web surfing, emails, whatsapp, YouTube and music streaming, no gaming.
Two days ago, I enabled the boost+ app and optimize most apps that don't need to run at full resolution. The screen on time seems to have improved a lot. Got 5hr 56mins of SOT with 14hr 46mins battery life.
This is much better than my HTC 10 after the nougat update. SOT approx 4hrs. I have boost+ running too.
Will monitor for a few more days to see if it is a one off performance.

RSK01 said:
Been getting about 14 to 16 hrs of battery life and about 4 hrs of SOT for the week. Main usage is web surfing, emails, whatsapp, YouTube and music streaming, no gaming.
Two days ago, I enabled the boost+ app and optimize most apps that don't need to run at full resolution. The screen on time seems to have improved a lot. Got 5hr 56mins of SOT with 14hr 46mins batteries life.
This is much better than my HTC 10 after the nougat update. SOT approx 4hrs. I have boost+ running too.
Will monitor for a few more days to see if it is a one off performance.
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Pretty good life!! mine gets about 3.5 hrs SOT, and about 13 hour standby, I also have boost+ on too. Curious as to what your brightness setting is, mine about 50% with adaptive on. I am rather heavier on my battery and network, so it doesnt surprise me that you're getting better life. (mine was better when I was on holiday with a better network connection).

About 45% level with adaptive on too. I think setting boost+ to run almost every app at HD resolution, excluding photo apps, helps a lot.
Good network is key too.

I am very satisfied with battery life when on WiFi 4,5-5 hours SOT), but when on LTE I get around 3 hours of SOT. I just enabled Boost+ to see if it improves battery life at all. I don't want to enable though FullHD for apps.
Do you use location services in high accuracy mode?

Here is mine, Charged up to 96% used until now.

Battery had become a bit crazy lately after updates to tons of apps. Just updated the firmware yesterday. Will monitor again.

Hi guys, hope everyone is doing good.
I wanted to ask that from past 2-3 days I'm facing very quick battery drain on u ultra. I'm hardly getting 2.5 hrs of Sot. Phone is heating too much.
Before this I was seeing around 4 hrs+ SOT that too with 1hr+ of casual gaming. I don't know what is wrong but I'm worried. My device is heating that's all what I'm able to notice. Any suggestions are most welcome. Except this, love the device.
Thank you.

It happened to me after updates of some apps.
The only way I solved it was to shutdown the phone completely. Wait for about a minute before powering up again.

Thinking about getting the U Ultra. Do you feel that the battery life is good enough?

flipp0 said:
Thinking about getting the U Ultra. Do you feel that the battery life is good enough?
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Actually depends on what your daily usage looks like. If I'm on holiday or the whole day at home, one charge easily lasts for 2-3 days. But at university with every sync /bt/WiFi etc enabled and 50% brightness I get about 8h with high amount of screen on time (50-80%)

ChavezD said:
Actually depends on what your daily usage looks like. If I'm on holiday or the whole day at home, one charge easily lasts for 2-3 days. But at university with every sync /bt/WiFi etc enabled and 50% brightness I get about 8h with high amount of screen on time (50-80%)
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I usually use the phone for 2-4 hours per day but more hours during travel.
How much does the battery drain during standby? For instance, I you leave the phone in standby during the night, how many percent does the battery decrease?

Mine loses about 4% overnight (8 hours) which I think is exceptionally good!

For me it highly depends on which ROM and which apps I have installed. Recently the battery drain was about 1%/hour (150 apps, all syncing etc on), but right now after cleaning up a bit and nstalling greenify I'm back at ~3-6% per night.

I can get the black U Ultra for €291.99 here: https://www.eglobalcentral.eu/htc-u-ultra-64gb-4g-dual-sim-sim-free-unlocked-black.html
Tested the phone yesterday at a local shop here in Sweden, felt great in the hand and I really like the design. However, the battery life may be a deal breaker. Most of the phones I have used during the last 2 years has droppped 1-3 percent during night and I usually got 6 hours SOT over 24 hours. The last phone I used with weak battery life was Nexus 6, it gave med 3-4 hours SOT during 24h and that was slightly annoying. I get the impression that U Ultra is comparable to Nexus 6 in the battery department. :-/

That's actually a very accurate comparison. I replaced my Nexus 6 with the HTC Ultra and I'm getting almost identical SOT and battery life.

Julian1961 said:
That's actually a very accurate comparison. I replaced my Nexus 6 with the HTC Ultra and I'm getting almost identical SOT and battery life.
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how much do you get bro ? and what is your usage ?

tornido067 said:
how much do you get bro ? and what is your usage ?
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I get about 24 hours of mixed usage, which means I need to charge it up every morning, but I never seem to be able to get more that 4 hours SOT. Also, the rapid charger is slower than the Nexus 6. It takes about 1 hour and 50 minutes for a full charge.

I installed and configured kernel Adiutor/CPU Kernel state #on_demand and turned off #core_4. Now my battery/system working 2 whole days before charging!

Guys if i go to optimize apps and turn it on, Wen I leave it turns off again. Is this normal? I restart the phone and I already did a factory reset because the phone was updated alot the first time I use it, but it's the same. I'm getting about 3-4 hours off sot depending on the use. Maybe less. What do you guys think?

i got 5hrs and a few mins with the first charge (light use, browsing, installing apps, tweakin settings and 35mins spotify)