Battery notifications are the worst - Verizon Samsung Galaxy S6

I am new to Samsung, and there are a few annoyances.
First and foremost is the battery charging/full notifications that you can not seem to disable.
I just got wireless chargers, and sometimes it drains after a full charge and then starts charging again. This results in repeated screen turning on and beeping all the time to tell me it is wireless charging and beeping when full in a constant cycle.
I am now reading that this has been a complaint for a long time and it hasn't been changed. (Samsung, Why you no listen?)
Second is the reduced battery stats. Why is it missing the awake history, screen on history, wifi/charging history?
The whole thing feels a bit dumbed down.

pittss1c said:
I am new to Samsung, and there are a few annoyances.
First and foremost is the battery charging/full notifications that you can not seem to disable.
I just got wireless chargers, and sometimes it drains after a full charge and then starts charging again. This results in repeated screen turning on and beeping all the time to tell me it is wireless charging and beeping when full in a constant cycle.
I am now reading that this has been a complaint for a long time and it hasn't been changed. (Samsung, Why you no listen?)
Second is the reduced battery stats. Why is it missing the awake history, screen on history, wifi/charging history?
The whole thing feels a bit dumbed down.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same issue here with the phone waking. It sucks.

pittss1c said:
Second is the reduced battery stats. Why is it missing the awake history, screen on history, wifi/charging history?
The whole thing feels a bit dumbed down.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
rather then call it dumbed down i think its better to say that as an educated techy phone user you would like more. i say this because i would easily lay down some cash on a bet that says that roughly 70% of the owners dont even open up the battery section more than once when they first get it.
also keep in mind that a great thing about Android is that if you dont like the stock results then there is probably an app for that and in this case many of them.

Well maybe as you said you are a new user then thats the problem.. you aren't used to samsung..

johny1980 said:
Well maybe as you said you are a new user then thats the problem.. you aren't used to samsung..
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Click to collapse
Great response... When I am an experienced user I will learn to embrace being woken up in the middle of the night with an audible notification and a bright screen. I will learn to appreciate the break in my sleep. (and waking my wife up sometimes too.

Related

Battery Life Claims vs. Reality

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

Samsung Captivate on the Quest for the Greatest Battery Life!

I'd love to hear how people are finding the battery life on the Captivate, and what their usage patterns are. I don't have many apps on the phone to begin with, but on the train to work I can easily knock out a third of the battery just listening to music. While using the phone for five or ten minutes, I'll sometimes see the battery dop 2-3 percent!
For tomorrow, I'm going to try using the stock launcher instead of LauncherPro, no widgets. I got rid of the Android Central app just in case it was fetching data in the background. But my hopes aren't terribly high, I'm afraid.
I have rooted the phone, but the battery life was bad before rooting. Once rooted, I tried some apps like JuiceDefender, and there seemed to be no change.
If I continue having these problems, I may unroot and bring the phone to an AT&T store to see what they say. I've heard it mentioned that Samsung is sending out new batteries that are better than some current ones, but I don't know if that's true.
I'd love to hear any suggestions. I want to use my new phone, not worry about it all day!
I too have been getting very poor results. I have talked on the phone for less than 3 minutes, went to maybe 15 different website pages, one 3:00 youtube video, 10 minutes of GBC emulation gaming, and regular texting, and I'm at 10% with 8 hours. I've probably only used the phone for 30 minutes total today.
Smartphones always drain battery, if you want a phone that can be heavily used for like 4 or more days on one charge cycle, get a feature phone....the samsung captivate has given me the best battery time overall, against all my past smartphones.
I don't think it makes sense, though, that it should run out halfway through the day like mine is. My former devices were a feature phone and an iPod Touch. The feature phone lasted a week or so, and the iPod Touch with heavy heavy use lasted three days at least. So even if I had both pulling from the same battery source, and with light usage, shouldn't it last at least a full day?
Weird, I had wireless on almost all day, with push mail and doing tons of market downloading and I was only down to about 50% by early afternoon.
Seems about the same as my two year old HTC Touch Pro to me.
My battery is running fine too, even after streaming music from my house with subsonic, testing out a couple videos, messing with the gps, push email a bunch of app downloading, and a live wallpaper and i was still at 33% by the time I got home, even seems to be getting better.
"On the train to work..."
There's a bit of your problem, methinks. The 3G radio is burning a lot of power trying to connect to towers inside a metal box that moves to a new tower on a regular basis. Unless you need to get calls on the train, put it in Airplane mode during your commute.
Have you actually let the battery die completely yet?
My first battery burn-down, (starting with the charge on the battery as it was unboxed) I was showing zero percent battery for almost two hours before it actually shut itself off, moderate usage with WiFi on.
The next charge-up burn-down, it was showing zero percent about fifteen minutes before the end.
And the charge-up burn-down after that, it showed 0% about twenty seconds before it died.
See where I'm going here? The software needs to be calibrated at zero and 100, and it can't do that if you don't let it reach zero a few times. Once you're sure the meter is accurate, then you can start making informed conclusions about battery life.
And like I've posted elsewhere, you've got 'Newshiny-itus', which is proven to suck extra life out of a smartphone battery. And it's hard forcing your new toy to die...for one thing, if it's dead, you can't play with it. Tough it out, kill it. At least twice.
Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.
smitty1 said:
Well if you want to find truly terrible battery life try the EVO.
I had one for a month and that thing really ate the battery fast. The capti is stellar in comparison.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+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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Click to collapse
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. =)

25 min cost 27% battery

I unplugged the phone and got onto the bus. I read news with Captivate. Nothing fancy, just NY Times, Fox News etc. I got off the bus later, I only have 73% battery.
Yes, I just started my day and it's only 70% of battery.
#FAIL.
There are a few simple things you can do to increase battery life. Turn the screen brightness down and use a solid black background as a wallpaper. The screen uses the majority of the batter. so dimming the screen helps, when using a black background the amoled display does not light up black pixels so there is power drain.
I've been running on the same charge since 4pm yesterday. I've streamed music through pandora for about an hour while exercising, browsed the xda forums using the XDA App for 30 mins, made a few calls, browsed Facebook for 30 mins, surfed the web for a couple of hours before bed. Its now 10AM and I'm sitting at 36%. Not to bad really! The phone functions exactly the same at 36% as compared to 100%.
I wonder why everyone says to use a solid black background? Do most people use their phones primarily by staring at the home screen? I'm never at my home screen more than perhaps five seconds while switching apps
I've had pretty poor battery life as well, even after discharging, recharging, and deleting batterystats.bin. There are small tips here and there, like black background and screen brightness, but even following them all, my phone lasts me barely ten hours, and most of that time it's idle. For instance, I listened to local must (no streaming) with the screen off for about an hour and lost 10% of my battery life. What's up with that?
TimF said:
I've streamed music through pandora for about an hour while exercising, browsed the xda forums using the XDA App for 30 mins, made a few calls, browsed Facebook for 30 mins, surfed the web for a couple of hours before bed. Its now 10AM and I'm sitting at 36%.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am also shocked and confused by how people can use their phone so heavily.
I already killed those unnecessary processes (e.g., all AT&T crap). I have a static wallpaper. I have screen brightness at 60%. And all I have been doing is just reading news and surfing the web. It literally cost me 1% of battery for every 1 min of use. It's just ridiculous.
You are probably on your home screen a lot more than you realize.
Anyway it's a smartphone, they all eat through battery time. you will never get superb battery life unless you crowbar a 3000mah battery into your device.
edit:
set the screen on its lowest brightness setting, the only time I've had to increase the brightness is when I am outside in the sun.
if you are on a bus, if you are not using wifi, turn off the radio.
TimF said:
Anyway it's a smartphone, they all eat through battery time. you will never get superb battery life unless you crowbar a 3000mah battery into your device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You just said your phone is at 36% eighteen hours after charging! Compared to the 0% I'm at ten hours after charging...I'm not looking for superb battery life at all, just somewhat decent. I'm actually bringing a backup feature phone with me to college this semester in case I can't resolve this issue, because I will need to use my phone both in the morning and at night some days
TimF said:
edit:
set the screen on its lowest brightness setting, the only time I've had to increase the brightness is when I am outside in the sun.
if you are on a bus, if you are not using wifi, turn off the radio.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have Wifi, BT always off. And I don't listen to Pandora.
I think the key is you have the lowest brightness on your phone. It is going to save you a lot of battery 'cause half of the battery is for the screen.
But I just couldn't stand it. I wish I can set to 100% all the time. It looks so much better.
The phone radio is a huge consumer of battery - especially in weak signal areas. The bars are not that accurate either. that coupled with 3rd party apps that don't always behave nice, can equal rapid battery drain.
Putting the plain in Airplane mode is good way to see what battery life is like without the Cell radio always doing its thing. It is not a fix, but it can show that the battery/phone are not broken. There probably can be improvements and tweaks made by samsung, but I don't think the phones are defective.
mwxiao said:
I think the key is you have the lowest brightness on your phone. It is going to save you a lot of battery 'cause half of the battery is for the screen.
But I just couldn't stand it. I wish I can set to 100% all the time. It looks so much better.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is what you would call a trade-off I like the bright screen also but I like having longer battery life more.
The screen is still pretty bright on it lowest setting and you gt used to the lower brightness after a while.
magicdanw said:
You just said your phone is at 36% eighteen hours after charging! Compared to the 0% I'm at ten hours after charging...I'm not looking for superb battery life at all, just somewhat decent. I'm actually bringing a backup feature phone with me to college this semester in case I can't resolve this issue, because I will need to use my phone both in the morning and at night some days
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
how are you using your phone? What apps are you running, are you using any emulators.
There's an app called Spare Parts, which will show you what is using your battery when the screen is off. Open it up and choose "Partial Wake Usage" from the drop down to see.
My Captivate appeared to drain battery very quickly, but with moderate to decent usage throughout a day I was trying to kill the battery it lasted me over 13 hours. I think it's a matter of the battery reporting taking a good while to calibrate properly.
I've had an issue twice now with absurd battery usage. Both times I charged the phone to full and disconnected it; after doing that the phone would lose 10% charge every hour sitting completely idle! Using the phone during that time drained it even faster. Both times powering the phone completely off and back on resolved the issue.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
magicdanw said:
I wonder why everyone says to use a solid black background? Do most people use their phones primarily by staring at the home screen? I'm never at my home screen more than perhaps five seconds while switching apps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In AMOLED, black pixels dont use power. This is different from LCD where even black pixels still use power.
Have you guys tried fully charging, then fully discharing then repeating this step 3 more times? It helps with the battery life tremendously.
You gotta do a factory reset. Many people as well as myself had the same issue. For me, a side effect was also that the att start up swoosh was stupidly loud.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
I only did the discharge thing once, last week, and today I am going on a 21 hours with 28% left.
2g app
I was told there is a 2g / 3g application. Has anyone tried this? Apparently it puts the phone in 2g when no data connection is needed and then updates to 3g when a data process is required...
i'm on day two of not charging mine... and i'm at 25%...
i unplugged it from a full charge yesterday (monday) morning before i left for work and today (29 hours later) i'm at 25%... this is with advanced task killer auto killing tasks when screen is off as well as being aggressive about it. i've been listening to music from my sd card, browsing facebook and taking some pictures (and uploading them to fb). i guess i'm either super lucky not to have any problems with GPS or the battery, or i'm a very light user.
I dunno what happened to the main battery thread?
I just got a new phone two days ago because of the restart issue. This one has the same battery issue. Drains 2-4%/hour just being idle. I have nothing beyond launcher pro and google voice installed. Everything is on lockdown in terms of batt usage. The only thing I haven't done is turn off the cell antenna.
I've tried the tricks I knew: factory reset, calibration trick. These didn't help at all. My last phone just needed a factory reset and it was all good. Now I'm sad again :-( will it just improve itself when the phone "learns" the battery or something? I wish I could teach it
Several things you can do.
1) Use WiFi if you can use it, it uses less power. If you don't have somewhere to use WiFi, leave it off.
2) Same goes for BT- leave it off if possible.
3) Use this to get rooted and remove all the ATT crap that sucks battery life. Applying the lag fix also means you spend less time with the screen on, so that can also help you out.
4) Use Auto Brightness
5) Disabling haptic feedback and the tapping sounds (I find it more annoying regardless)
6) Use a static black wallpaper- or something really dark. IMO it looks great black and plus the AMOLED... Black doesn't use power.
7) Use Advanced Task Killer. I have mine on Aggressive and Moderate security every half hour. This will make sure hung apps, etc get killed and apps you haven't ran. Make sure you whitelist the apps that run your widgets and such though.
That's the best things to do to.
Edit- above all, remember this is a SMART phone, not a feature phone like the iPhone is. The simple fact this full blown SMART phone can even begin to rival just a feature phone like the iPhone speaks volumes to how much more efficient it is than what you think it is.
starwolf256 said:
I've had an issue twice now with absurd battery usage. Both times I charged the phone to full and disconnected it; after doing that the phone would lose 10% charge every hour sitting completely idle! Using the phone during that time drained it even faster. Both times powering the phone completely off and back on resolved the issue.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I too have had issues with battery life but quickly realized what had been causing the issues, twice it had been snesoid not closing down all the way after use, and this combined with an app that was hurting battery life (word feud), I realized what my problem was.
I leave the brightness jacked all the way down. I believe the lowest it goes on the stock rom is like 15%, but there are ways to go lower than that.
I've not used my phone much the past two days since charging it, and i'm currently down to 35%, but most of my battery use is cell standby, with display being 3rd or so on the list.
You can always use a program like tasker to make the phone go into airport mode between certain hours of the day (IE: while you're sleeping) to help conserve the battery life.
There are also tons of other good tips in this thread.
And trust me, the phone can last; i've managed 3days on one charge

[OBSOLETE] Recalibrating Your Battery Stats...

***
Due to further information from both the hardware and OS side of the house, it has been determined that this process is completely unnecessary for the Captivate.
You may still follow this procedure if you like or if it makes you feel good.
Good luck and God bless.
***
So, you are having trouble with your battery seemingly draining too quickly, especially after having flashed many ROMs/Kernels/etc...
It is possible that the problem (or part of the problem) is not necessarily the phone using too much power, but rather the phone not really knowing how much power you have left, or where 100% or 0% really are. If this is the case for you, you should see some results from doing the following:
(Do at your own risk. If your phone runs away and joins the circus I am not responsible)
1. Connect the phone to the charger with the phone powered on, and allow the phone to charge until it shows 100%
2. Disconnect the phone from the charger, and power it off.
3. Reconnect the phone to the charger with the phone powered off, and allow the phone to charge until the battery indicator shows 100% (you can use vol-up/vol-down to make the indicator come back up when the screen goes to sleep).
4. Disconnect the phone from the charger and power it on.
5. Use the phone as normal until it shuts off, then plug it in, turn it on and use as normal, charging whenever you like.
You should only need to use this sequence one time.
Hope this helps.
...
10 char
Thanks for posting this, I remembered seeing it in another topic but I couldnt find it anywhere.
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KJPDX said:
Thanks for posting this, I remembered seeing it in another topic but I couldnt find it anywhere.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
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Click to collapse
Yeah, I had it in a text file on my computer from a little while back, and was going to bump the topic but I couldn't find it anymore.
This may have to be done again after ROMs and stuff, so either bookmark this post, or copy-paste it into a document on your computer you can refer back to later.
Also, this give creedence to the age-old, often-debated theory that you should give your battery a full charge before turning on your phone for the first time...
It makes me sick when we have to do all this crap.
mwxiao said:
It makes me sick when we have to do all this crap.
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Click to collapse
Sorry, it's a price we pay for messing with the software/firmware on the phone.
Also, if people did an actual full charge before using their phone for the first time, there would probably be fewer "Battery Life Sucks" threads...
Dont forget to boot into recovery after you full charged (adb reboot recovery or Power off the phone and then hold the volume up + Volume down + the power key. When it goes black the 2nd time release the power button and keep holding the volume buttons.) wipe stats Clockworkmod recovery -> advanced -> wipe battery stats.
Question for ya's.when I got this phone the att dude just turned it on and gave it to me without allowing for a full charge.should I go back slap him in the face and get a new battery and fully charge it before first use, cause its almost been two weeks and my batt life still seems kinda poor to me.
Also if I do that should I unroot and restore the att apps or will they not notice or bother to check that
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Recalibrating may help slightly, but the Captivate just has a ****ty battery life. Read here, it was the worst in the entire test. No coincidence, the S-AMOLED's came in last in battery life and the S-LCD's came in first.
http://androidheadlines.com/2010/08/android-phones-battery-tests-are-in-and-we-have-a-winner.html
derek4484 said:
Recalibrating may help slightly, but the Captivate just has a ****ty battery life. Read here, it was the worst in the entire test. No coincidence, the S-AMOLED's came in last in battery life and the S-LCD's came in first.
http://androidheadlines.com/2010/08/android-phones-battery-tests-are-in-and-we-have-a-winner.html
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Click to collapse
Without any details of how that test was performed, the results are meaningless.
I get battery life as good as my old iphone with the captivate. I wish it was better but it seems very competitive to me.
derek4484 said:
Recalibrating may help slightly, but the Captivate just has a ****ty battery life. Read here, it was the worst in the entire test. No coincidence, the S-AMOLED's came in last in battery life and the S-LCD's came in first.
http://androidheadlines.com/2010/08/android-phones-battery-tests-are-in-and-we-have-a-winner.html
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Something doesn't make sense since the Epic 4G has better battery life than the Captivate. Me thinks they didn't test these properly.
k2snowboards88 said:
Without any details of how that test was performed, the results are meaningless.
I get battery life as good as my old iphone with the captivate. I wish it was better but it seems very competitive to me.
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Click to collapse
I can't even come close to the same battery life on this captivate as I did with my old iphone. I have to charge this phone every single night, where with my iphone I only had to charge it 2 or 3 times per week. I take it off charge every morning and by 10pm its down to around 20%. My old iphone I could go 2-3 days, and I do the same things on both phones. Checking facebook and twitter, playing a little bit of kingdoms live, a little websurfing, and checking emails, as they come in.
Same usage and 1/2 to 1/3 of the same battery life. Not so good.
Also, you cant say the test was meaningless because they dont tell you how they tested it. As long as they ran the same test on all the phones then a direct comparison of battery life is very legitimate and meaningful. But I agree, I would like to know what their testing methods are.
derek4484 said:
I can't even come close to the same battery life on this captivate as I did with my old iphone. I have to charge this phone every single night, where with my iphone I only had to charge it 2 or 3 times per week. I take it off charge every morning and by 10pm its down to around 20%. My old iphone I could go 2-3 days, and I do the same things on both phones. Checking facebook and twitter, playing a little bit of kingdoms live, a little websurfing, and checking emails, as they come in.
Same usage and 1/2 to 1/3 of the same battery life. Not so good.
Also, you cant say the test was meaningless because they dont tell you how they tested it. As long as they ran the same test on all the phones then a direct comparison of battery life is very legitimate and meaningful. But I agree, I would like to know what their testing methods are.
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Click to collapse
By old iPhone, do you mean 1st gen EDGE only iPhone? If that's the case, you can disable 3G on Captivate and get similar battery life.
k2snowboards88 said:
Without any details of how that test was performed, the results are meaningless.
I get battery life as good as my old iphone with the captivate. I wish it was better but it seems very competitive to me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you go to the actual Laptop magazine post it explains
The test itself is fairly simple. Avram, our tireless Web director, modified the LAPTOP Battery Test we use for notebooks, and created an Android App that does much the same thing: It opens the phone’s Web browser to one of 60 popular Web sites, remains there for 60 seconds, closes the browser, then reopens the browser to next Web site on the list. It does so until the phone’s battery dies, all while recording the time elapsed.
Here’s how we set up the phones before we tested them:
First, we download My Settings and Advanced Task Killer, two free apps that are useful regardless.
Then, we open My Settings, and do the following:
Turn screen brightness to 40%, and turn off auto brightness.
Turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS location, cell location, and auto sync.
Deactivate screen timeout; that is, make sure the screen stays on indefinitely.
In the Web browser, we turn off Flash support and plug-ins.
We placed the phone in an area that was receiving at least 4 bars of service.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/android-battery-test-reveals-droid-x-lasts-longest-amoled-handsets-trail
Sounds about right to me although I dont think I could get 4.43 hours web. Most screen usaged I have gotten is up in the 3hour range.
I've done this on my captivate.. and I think it made it a little worse..
to be honest.. just leave it be and charge when you can.. lol hope for the best!
maybe other people will have better luck..
Many people also seem to have success with fully discharging their battery before charging it again for the first 2-3 times. Seems the battery learns its 'boundaries'. Many are reporting 20-30 hours after that with moderate usage.
mterrence5 said:
If you go to the actual Laptop magazine post it explains
The test itself is fairly simple. Avram, our tireless Web director, modified the LAPTOP Battery Test we use for notebooks, and created an Android App that does much the same thing: It opens the phone’s Web browser to one of 60 popular Web sites, remains there for 60 seconds, closes the browser, then reopens the browser to next Web site on the list. It does so until the phone’s battery dies, all while recording the time elapsed.
Here’s how we set up the phones before we tested them:
First, we download My Settings and Advanced Task Killer, two free apps that are useful regardless.
Then, we open My Settings, and do the following:
Turn screen brightness to 40%, and turn off auto brightness.
Turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS location, cell location, and auto sync.
Deactivate screen timeout; that is, make sure the screen stays on indefinitely.
In the Web browser, we turn off Flash support and plug-ins.
We placed the phone in an area that was receiving at least 4 bars of service.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/android-battery-test-reveals-droid-x-lasts-longest-amoled-handsets-trail
Sounds about right to me although I dont think I could get 4.43 hours web. Most screen usaged I have gotten is up in the 3hour range.
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Click to collapse
I think that turning all of the screens to 40% brightness invalidates the results. To equal the playing field, the screens should be set to equal luminance.
My battery meter has been flashing 0 for 10 minutes now. Should I be worried? Should I return my phone? True story.
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Still here. Battery hasn't died.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

The Battery Life ROCKS

So, I flashed Black Dragon 4.0 last night, and I gotta say, the battery life is pretty incredible. I've used it a good bit this morning for texting, a call, and a music app, and I've barely gone 15%. The idle life is what's truly impressive. I think it dropped only 1% overnight (8 hrs).
Even WITH sense, it's still pretty good. But it's nice to have all those useless HTC and T-Mobile services/apps gone. It definitely makes a bit of difference on performance and batt life.
Is there anything broken on that ROM or is everything up and running? GPS, Camera, gallery, etc etc.
i'm on the stock batter, it's 3 here, i've used it regularly, texts, calls, internet, maps, and i'm at 76%. it's so nice having a battery that lasts
One of the advantages of having a non-user-replaceable battery is the fact that they can make them bigger and in different shapes. Apple's laptops are this way, and when they made the switch, the increase in batt life was pretty drastic.
It'll be interesting to see this thing taken apart on iFixIt or somewhere else.
Is there a way to know if the battery is done charging with the phone off? The orange LED just seems to stay on forever...
I would suggest it hasn't fully charged or there is a fault - I charge mine overnight and it's always green in the morning
Mitigation - I never switch it off: screen off, phone on.
SFP said:
I would suggest it hasn't fully charged or there is a fault - I charge mine overnight and it's always green in the morning
Mitigation - I never switch it off: screen off, phone on.
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Click to collapse
Literally 5 minutes after I posted that, it went green. First time it's had a proper full charge, when I tried to charge it while on the battery meter just fluctuated up and down all over the place! Gonna let it run down and charge it again before I get worried that there's something wrong.
I got mine from T-Mo yesterday on my way to school and i must say the battery life on this phone is crazy good. After my second charge cycle, i really think this phone was design for raw power and most of all great battery life. I'm also enjoying the beauty this piece of equipment. . Right now i have the screen on auto-brightness, gmail, yahooo, hotmail, facebook, dropbox and weather on auto sync. I'll say no more results in the pictures below.
cyberchuck9000 said:
Is there a way to know if the battery is done charging with the phone off? The orange LED just seems to stay on forever...
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Click to collapse
yup, def turns green after its full
NYC1992 said:
I got mine from T-Mo yesterday on my way to school and i must say the battery life on this phone is crazy good. After my second charge cycle, i really think this phone was design for raw power and most of all great battery life. I'm also enjoying the beauty this piece of equipment. . Right now i have the screen on auto-brightness, gmail, yahooo, hotmail, facebook, dropbox and weather on auto sync. I'll say no more results in the pictures below.
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Click to collapse
Not sure which phone you've been using but the stats that you've posted aren't impressive in the least... pretty bad if u ask me.
viper_79 said:
Not sure which phone you've been using but the stats that you've posted aren't impressive in the least... pretty bad if u ask me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd tend to agree with this. I'm sure you meant well with the pictures, but my Nexus S beats this and the battery in it is old. I don't think that was a great metric right there. My real world use has been drastically different.
I was going to post a pic, but my ROM crashed or something (no biggie, it's expected with new ROMs) and my battery usage got reset. I took it off the charger ~10 hrs ago and have used it for quite a bit of twitter, text, calls, web, and fiddling around, and I'm just down to 73%. The stand-by life is what will truly impress you, at least from what I've seen.
The screenshots seem very impressive to me. I have an HTC Amaze with the 1900 mah Anker battery and I'll get around 2 hours of on screen time. And the One S is getting almost four!? If anyone is getting better then that I would love to see screenies of it. Only screen on time though as I could get very high numbers as well by not using my phone. Can't wait till my One S gets here!
Love this phone...S4 ftw
Yesterday I got.
12 hours and 50 min with 2 hours and 40 minutes screen time and I still had 41% left.
Off topic: didn't want to make a new thread, and I've searched but nothing found.
I'm really considering this phone but when the battery reaches the end of its life how much will a replacement battery be likely to cost fitted?
I know I'll probably have a new phone by this time but I keep all my electronic devices well looked after and don't sell them so just curious as it seems like a pretty deep task.

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