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[GUIDE] Battery Management for noobs

Hey guys,
So after many months with the XT720 and alot of flashing and trying to get the most out of my battery, i've come up with a few conclusions about battery life in general and how to extend it. I thought I'd share here. This is mostly aimed at people who are new to android and have not experimented like some of the more advanced users we have on this forum. Hope you find this helpful and please feel free to make additions.
General Battery Info
The XT720 was my first android phone, and I came from a long line of typical nokia phones whose batteries would last for ages. I had no idea the kind of power an android device would use. When I started out using it, i was surprised at how quickly the battery would die. You'd think with advancing software we'd have better batteries but sadly batteries are lagging behind in technology. Generally speaking you can expect the following battery life from your XT720.
Heavy use: 10-14 hours
Moderate use: 16-20 hours
Light use: 1 day - 1 day 12 hrs.
Note: New batteries improve with each charge cycle. It is recommended to go through a few complete charge cycles when you buy a new phone. After that, complete discharges are not recommended and its smart to start charging your phone when it hits the 20-25% mark.
How to improve battery life
1: Battery Calibration
If you've ever flashed a new ROM, you must have noticed a sharp decline in battery performance. This is partly due to old battery statistics left behind from your old ROM. Android is a smart OS and collects information over time. The more you use it, the more accurate it gets. In the same way it collects information from your battery usage and reports your battery percentages according to that. When you flash a new ROM, sometimes android thinks that your battery is 100% when its really lower than that and that causes relative reduced battery performance. To deal with that it is recommended that you use a nifty free app called Battery Calibration from the android market. What this does it removes the old battery stats and allows your new ROM to create its own battery stats. Charge your battery to full, use the battery calibration. Drain once till phone turns off by itself and charge to full again. You will notice a sharp increase in battery life.
2. Battery Managment
We all know that android has its own battery management built in but it usually doesnt give complete information about the phone. For that you need to dive deeper into the settings. Usually if you experience battery drain its because of a rogue app and believe it or not some common apps you wont think off drain unnecessary battery. To see your complete Battery Stats input this code into the dialer.
Code:
*#*#4636#*#*
This will take you to a bunch of options. What you're interested in is Battery History. When you tap that it will show you two drop down menu's.
1) Other Usage
2) Since last unplugged
Other usage shows you how long your phone has been running and how long it has been asleep. Also shows you how long your wifi has been on and running and how long your screen has been on. It is important to see how long your phone has been running. For example if your phone has an uptime of 20 hours and its been running 5 hours out of that. Your run time is 25%. Which is very good. Sometimes an app can run even when your phone screen is off. This will represent a longer run time even when you have your phone lying on a desk or something. See this setting and correlate with the amount you have used your phone. Does it seem normal? If no then use the first drop down menu and select
Partial Wake:
Partial wake is basically, any app which takes your phone out of sleep mode to use the CPU even when youre screen is off. These are apps which need to sync or use the phone resources. In this you will see a list of apps and how much they have caused a partial wake lock. See anything unsual? For me one app that caused unsual drainage was latitute. Yes, i had simply signed into it and i didnt know it was updating my location every 5 minutes. Extreme battery drain for me even when my phone was idle. See which app was draining your battery and either tweak the settings or remove altogether.
GPS, Sensors, CPU:
You can also see these in the first drop down menu. Certain apps like screeble use the sensors alot, and hence cause drain. Obviously games, camera, will stress the CPU. See if anything is causing drain in that and adjust accordingly.
Miscellaneous Information
After you have dealt with rogue apps that you don't use that drain youre battery your battery life will depend on how you use your phone. But hopefull these tips will help you with increasing your battery life. I do have some more information on different settings and supposed battery saving applications.
Autosync: When you enable auto sync, you allow google and other accounts to sync on a regular basis. This is important for people who need to use push email etc. It does not drain battery IF you tweak what you need synced. In google for example you can have your contacts, calendar, google+, google reader, gmail all to sync by default. If you just need email, please untick the rest. This will help you save battery life. Increase your update times for facebook and google+ if you dont recieve many updates all the time or turn them off altogether. If you have many services syncing at the same time you will get battery drain.
Wifi Sleep Policy: This is sort of a hidden menu. If you go into wireless & networks >> Wifi settings >> settings key >> advanced >> wifi sleep policy. This has three settings. Never close down wifi, never close when charging, or close with screen off. If you choose never your wifi will always be on, which will in turn crunch the **** out of your battery. If you use it off with screen off, remember it takes about 5 minutes to turn the wifi off. I personally use the never with plugged in. Its an intermediate. So when im plugged in wifi always stays on and when im not it follows the screen off protocol.
Wifi Vs Mobile Data: Having mobile data on all the time, does not drain battery. The only time the battery gets drained is when the data connection is active i.e you have many apps on autosync youll see your battery going down. If you arent doing anything and your phone is connected to Edge or 3G your battery will drain regularly. 2G networks drain less than 3G keep that in mind. If you are actively using your connection, wifi will take less battery because speeds are faster and you will be using it for a little time. Also your signal strength has alot of effect on battery. If you have crappy 3G signals your radio will actively be searching for a connection the same goes for wifi. That is important to keep in mind.
Control Background data: By selecting this option you can allow or disallow apps to connect to data without any permission. Some apps require this like the android market. If you uncheck this apps wont be able to sync automatically in the background.
Milestone Overclocking: This is fairly obvious. The higher you overclock with higher vsel the more battery drain you will have. Some use set cpu with profiles but I found that if i set the setcpu too low while idle It takes time for the cpu to charge up when i recieve a call or turn the screen on. Ringtones lag etc etc. I let android do my CPU management and its fine. and comfortable setting would be 850 MHZ, 56 vsel but you can change according to your phone usage.
Juice Defender/ Screebl / Task killers:
In my personal experience with juice defender ultimate I found that with the above precautions juice defender didnt make much of a difference and actually used more battery. First off theres an extra process going on in the back. Second activating and deactivating the connection everytime the screen goes off uses more juice because your radio has to search for the signal hundreds of times as compared to not having it in the first place. Screebl is good if you dont want your screen to annoyingly turn off while youre doing something but it surely doesnt save battery life. Task killers are a no no for android. They kill tasks which start up anyways, its better to use autokiller memory optimizer which tweaks androids internal memory settings and allows for more free ram without killing processes without reason.
System Apps:
Some system apps run uselessly in the background specially with stock ROM's this is called bloatware. Remove all unused system apps with titanium backup to stop them from running in the background for no reason at all.
A final word
Finally after all this tweaking, just use your phone as normal. Dont worry about the battery all the time checking how much its drained, itll mess your head up and make you enjoy your phone less. Battery temperature also changes battery life. Keep your phone out of the sun or in hot places.

Thanks, good article.

Very detailed and useful
Sent from my Milestone XT720 using XDA App

Thanks for this interessting article!
Could you make a list of the bloatware that can be safely removed?

I figured this would just list all the usual stuff I've heard. I'm glad to say I was wrong! A bunch of useful info here I now plan to put to use. Many thanks
Might want to mention the display being the biggest drain of battery on this phone. Setting it to automatic brightness or lower will increase battery life. I love the screen at full brightness so I don't really follow that, but for those looking to squeeze some extra time and don't mind less brightness...

Thanks guys, glad you people found it useful.
syrenz said:
Might want to mention the display being the biggest drain of battery on this phone. Setting it to automatic brightness or lower will increase battery life. I love the screen at full brightness so I don't really follow that, but for those looking to squeeze some extra time and don't mind less brightness...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes! Can't believe I missed that one out. In the start id use the lowest brightness setting, which would be fine indoors. But outside it was impossible to see the phone because of its insanely reflective glass. Since we have an ambient light sensor I use it on automatic and it does a good job. Full bright strains my eyes abit thats why I dont keep it on full bright So for people really wanting to save the juice you can keep your brightness on the lowest level. Also when you take the phone out of your pocket and use it, its better to put the phone to sleep with the power button than let it timeout by itself. Those 10-15 seconds for each time you use phone count towards many minutes of unused display time in the end and does make a difference.

This is a very gd post with lots o useful info!! ok i have a qn, is using the phone a lot while the charging good for the battery? And if u let the battery charge even though its already 100 percent for an hour good? srry if it is noob qn...

androidlover123 said:
This is a very gd post with lots o useful info!! ok i have a qn, is using the phone a lot while the charging good for the battery? And if u let the battery charge even though its already 100 percent for an hour good? srry if it is noob qn...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. Using your phone while charging does not affect your battery life, and is neither good nor bad. It is perfectly normal to use your phone while charging and is sometimes recommended while doing battery intensive tasks for example navigating while driving, wifi tethering, playing memory intensive games and finally outputing video through HDMI.
2. Overcharging was a phenomenom is older lithium ion battery. New batteries have bypass circuits. So when your phone reaches complete charge, it does not charge any further. So you should not be worried about overcharging your XT720.
Hope this helps.

Excelent article and good quality info. Thanks and best regards!

awesome article! Great information. Thanks a lot for putting that together. I have already started using a few of the tips mentioned.

u da maaan dude, thanks for a very detailed and informative article

Wakelocks

Any ideas on managing the wakelocks on Android and specifically on the Infinity?
I've checked the option of switching off WiFi with screen-off, but in my battery usage stats I still see that over 10% of battery is consumed by Google Services with 672 wake locks & device waked 77 times (WiFi drain itself is 13,5%, so quite OK). This is what GSam Battery Monitor shows. Android stock battery management (in Settings) shows 51% drain by Google Services and 26% by WiFi (but I believe these stats are wrong most of the time or just measure a different thing, as they show tablet inactive with 2% bar and it has been inactive most of the time actually).
I have google auto-sync on and I need it, but I still think this is too high a number. I don't get 672 e-mails daily, so these shouldn't be PUSH notifications etc.
I'm not sure if I'm the only one seeing these high numbers there?

Have you tried CPUspy for finding out how much time in deep sleep you have?
Better Battery Stats is also a needed tool to find more about wakelocks
Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda app-developers app

Yes, I'm looking at it from time to time, but thanks for this. I had some issues when I started this thread, after wipe and re-flashing new firmware it seems OK in the stats: Deep Sleep 44%, 102MHZ 16%, 1500MHz 24% (running on balanced mode, interactive governor).
I'm still curious to get to know how to manage wakelocks under Android from (low) system level however.

[Q] About Battery Life

Hi,
I have a question regarding battery life of the OPO. I'm still not sure whether I have a defective battery, or some apps drains my battery like crazy (or both?). I hope you can help me with this.
In the first 2 weeks since I got it, I use my OPO for mid to heavy activities (a lot of Whatsapp, Youtube, streaming music, etc). I always start the day with 100% battery and I thought it was normal to see the battery drops to at least 20% at the end of the day. To be honest, I didn't check the battery stats in Settings even once in this time frame, and due to my heavy usage, once again I thought this was normal.
Until one night I decided to plug the charger earlier than usual, unplug it around 11pm (w/ 100% battery), then I fell asleep. I was shocked the next morning (8am) when I saw the battery has decreased to 65% with no activities whatsoever. I check the battery usage in Settings and then saw Google Play Services (GPservice) at the top of the list with 45% usage, with "keep awake" time almost identical to total time on battery. I did some research and found some advice including 1) denying GPservice abilities to "keep awake" and "wake up" via privacy guard (from this thread http://forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-one/general/guide-google-play-services-battery-t2832525), 2) turn off location, 3) turn off sync, but none of them seems the solution to my problem. Since then, I always check the battery usage and reset it, to see if GPservice still at the top. Sadly it still there. After I reset the stats, go to sleep directly and check it about 1 hour later, GPservice uses 40% - 60% of the battery usage, draining about 6% battery / hour.
With screen on a few minutes, it easily drops to 5th or 6th place with ~7% usage, with screen and main apps I use on the 1st and 2nd place. When I googled about this using Firefox, that's when I start worrying about something else, the battery itself. With wi-fi and low brightness (less than >20% if I convert it from the slide bar), browsing with Firefox decrease the battery 1% in 2-3 minutes, no or low usage drains 1% in about 5-6 minutes. In contrast, charging increase the battery 1% in 1 minute. Is that normal? IDK, usually bad battery increasing faster when charging and decrease significantly when in use.
Please help, especially about the excessive GPservice battery usage. And if it's possible, I prefer non-root solution for it. Thanks and sorry for my bad English.
OPO - stock rom (unrooted XNPH44S)
Google Play Services 6.7.76 (reverted back to 5.0.89 factory version but things pretty much the same)

cliffflip said:
Hi,
I have a question regarding battery life of the OPO. I'm still not sure whether I have a defective battery, or some apps drains my battery like crazy (or both?). I hope you can help me with this.
In the first 2 weeks since I got it, I use my OPO for mid to heavy activities (a lot of Whatsapp, Youtube, streaming music, etc). I always start the day with 100% battery and I thought it was normal to see the battery drops to at least 20% at the end of the day. To be honest, I didn't check the battery stats in Settings even once in this time frame, and due to my heavy usage, once again I thought this was normal.
Until one night I decided to plug the charger earlier than usual, unplug it around 11pm (w/ 100% battery), then I fell asleep. I was shocked the next morning (8am) when I saw the battery has decreased to 65% with no activities whatsoever. I check the battery usage in Settings and then saw Google Play Services (GPservice) at the top of the list with 45% usage, with "keep awake" time almost identical to total time on battery. I did some research and found some advice including 1) denying GPservice abilities to "keep awake" and "wake up" via privacy guard (from this thread http://forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-one/general/guide-google-play-services-battery-t2832525), 2) turn off location, 3) turn off sync, but none of them seems the solution to my problem. Since then, I always check the battery usage and reset it, to see if GPservice still at the top. Sadly it still there. After I reset the stats, go to sleep directly and check it about 1 hour later, GPservice uses 40% - 60% of the battery usage, draining about 6% battery / hour.
With screen on a few minutes, it easily drops to 5th or 6th place with ~7% usage, with screen and main apps I use on the 1st and 2nd place. When I googled about this using Firefox, that's when I start worrying about something else, the battery itself. With wi-fi and low brightness (less than >20% if I convert it from the slide bar), browsing with Firefox decrease the battery 1% in 2-3 minutes, no or low usage drains 1% in about 5-6 minutes. In contrast, charging increase the battery 1% in 1 minute. Is that normal? IDK, usually bad battery increasing faster when charging and decrease significantly when in use.
Please help, especially about the excessive GPservice battery usage. And if it's possible, I prefer non-root solution for it. Thanks and sorry for my bad English.
OPO - stock rom (unrooted XNPH44S)
Google Play Services 6.7.76 (reverted back to 5.0.89 factory version but things pretty much the same)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Definitely sounds like somethings not right, what apps do you have that access or could potentially access your location? If you're still not having any luck, as a last resort you could try a fresh install of CM11S and install your apps one by one to see if you can determine if any are responsible for sucking battery.
Give the below app a try:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playfulgeeks.gservicefix&hl=en_GB
Install Gsam to see if you can gain any more insight into whats causing battery drain.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.bbm

cliffflip said:
Hi,
Until one night I decided to plug the charger earlier than usual, unplug it around 11pm (w/ 100% battery), then I fell asleep. I was shocked the next morning (8am) when I saw the battery has decreased to 65% with no activities whatsoever. I check the battery usage in Settings and then saw Google Play Services (GPservice) at the top of the list with 45% usage, with "keep awake" time almost identical to total time on battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
did you try to use this App: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
there you can see which app prevents your phone from going to sleep (partial Wakelocks)

gsmyth said:
Definitely sounds like somethings not right, what apps do you have that access or could potentially access your location? If you're still not having any luck, as a last resort you could try a fresh install of CM11S and install your apps one by one to see if you can determine if any are responsible for sucking battery.
Give the below app a try:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playfulgeeks.gservicefix&hl=en_GB
Install Gsam to see if you can gain any more insight into whats causing battery drain.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.bbm
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maps, Google Fit, Google Now, among other things.
CMIIW but I read somewhere that GServicefix does the same like privacy guard, denying some service to keep awake, wake up, etc.
So I installed Gsam and run it about 1 hour. Interestingly in there, Kernel (Android OS) is on the top the % list with 60% usage (mostly phone in idle/sleep). When I switch sorting to Kernel Wakelocks, it shows event0-798 & event2-798 as the top 2 wakelocks with around 7000 wakelocks. I'll update in few hours, thanks.
drcyber said:
did you try to use this App: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
there you can see which app prevents your phone from going to sleep (partial Wakelocks)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From what I read on the Play Store description, Kitkat and above requires root?

cliffflip said:
Maps, Google Fit, Google Now, among other things.
So I installed Gsam and run it about 1 hour. Interestingly in there, Kernel (Android OS) is on the top the % list with 60% usage (mostly phone in idle/sleep). When I switch sorting to Kernel Wakelocks, it shows event0-798 & event2-798 as the top 2 wakelocks with around 7000 wakelocks. I'll update in few hours, thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Please post screenshot of gsam
Try clear cache+dalvic cache in recovery

Hi, sorry for the late reply.
It seems reboot the phone a few times solves the problem. Battery usage now seems normal when idle, even with location & sync turned on.

Battery: Is possible to view the apps that consume less than 1% battery usage?

Hello,
In Battery menu I can only see apps that consumed 1% or more battery. Anyone knows if there's an app or a way to show all the apps that consumed less than 1% battery?
Note: I'm not looking for an app that parallely tracks the apps battery usage (there are plenty of apps for this). I'm looking for an app that you can basically install when you are at 20% and read the stock battery information and displays it with more detail or less filters. So basically show stock android battery stats that is missing from the battery menu.
Thanks!

Stopping kernel WakeLocks, during mobile hotspot

This shooting up of android os process battery usage is only after the root.
Google play services and other GAPPS have already been removed from the whitelist of power saving. I have been using my mobile hostpot for about 6 hours and 6 hours standby after it and this is the usage through Better Battery Stats app, from full charge to 39%.
Samsung smart manager shows android OS as the major culprit.
Also total computed power usage doesn't amount to the decrease in battery power. Total power usage is amounting ~ 1000 mAh but battery is of 2600 mAh, this is happening after root and I have fully drained and charged while switched off to full to calibrate the battery, but same.
Earlier real usage time was equal to what is now but estimated usage time was just double when all GAPPS and gms were running in background.
I am posting the screenshots. Can somebody let me know the reason for this and how can I disable the wakelock visible in the Better Battery Stats screenshot?

Does anybody have an idea of reducing Mobile Radio power reported by android OS process?