Terrible Battery Life on my E650 (HTC S710/VOX)

[Guest dgcorp]

Hi there,

Below I have written lots of details about my issues with poor battery life on my E650. If you have a moment, I would really appreciate it if you would answer the above poll and write your comments about the sort of battery life you get from your E650/S710/VOX and any thoughts/suggestions you may have?

Thanks in advance for your help...

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I got my Orange SPV E650 (HTC S710/Vox) from an Orange shop on Oxford Street at the end of June 2007. I was moving up from my increasingly decrepit SPV C500 and apart from the slight increase in weight I thought it would be a great move.

I have been using (I should say persevering with) my E650 for several weeks now and I generally like the phone, apart from one HUGE issue. The battery life on my device sucks massively :)

- If I leave the phone on my desk all day and do basically nothing with it (maybe a couple of texts/reminders) I get approximately 20 hours use before the battery dies.

- If I use the phone like I want to (5-10 texts, 5-10 mins of calls, 5-10 mins of Bluetooth ActiveSync, around 90mins of Music via headphones) I get approximately 10-12 hours :P(

I have read through the whole of the VOX board and have seen several topics refering to bad battery life but also several that say people are getting 2-3 days of usage. I have experimented with ACB Power Meter but not there is nothing which seems to be using more than expected (it peaks for Bluetooth/Calls/Texts) and I'm not sure of the validity of this tool anyway!

I have reduced all the power management to the minimum settings and my backlight does go off correctly. I do not use Bluetooth for anything apart from the few minutes of ActiveSync and do not normally use WiFi at all (it dies in about 1-2 hours if I do!).

I have quite a few custom programs installed but usually have all apps not running except for the few I use the most: SBSH Papyrus v11317, TCPMP v071 or WMP10 (wondered if one may be more bettery effificient but didn't seem so). I use the STEAM homescreen.

I bought a second battery off of Ebay (from HK) and this seems to give me around 90% battery life as the Orange original one (which is about what I'd expect from a 3rd Party Chinese battery!).

Important Detail: When I bought the phone the first 3-4 charging cycles were performed at my home in the UK. I normally live in Denmark though, so ever since then I have been charging it using the UK charger but with an adapter to 2-pin Euro Plug.

I even briefly tried the charger from my old C500 (they seem to be rated almost identically) and it gave basically the same results

I have tried charging it for 10-12 hours overnight, with the power on and off while charging. I have charged it from flat many times and from half full many times.

My E650 Version Numbers

------------------------------

CE OS 5.2.1235 (build 17740.0.2.0)

Radio Version: 4.1.13.37_02.83.90

RIL Version: 2.002

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So - what do people think?

- 2 duff batteries?

- UK Charger not working?

- UK Charger not working as it is being used in Denmark?

- Problems with charging components inside phone?

Thanks again to everyone that answers the poll and comments below!

Cheers, Derek

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[Guest Urs]

I've discussed this issue on some Polish pda board and got several answers. I'm affraid that 1-2 days is max what You can get from SPV E650 battery. I charge it every night, if I don't call much, don't us BT or Wifi battery lasts for two days, but that's all.

Several people responded that it's exactly the same with their devices.

Somebody told me to do hard reset with battery fully charged, but it didn't helped at all.

The only proposed alternative was

Battery from boxwave

which has double capacity of standard battery, but it looks terrible.

That's all. Deal with it, buy bigger ugly battery or sell Your SPV E650.

I've choosen option 1 :)

Cheers !

[Guest illum]

Charging li-ion batteries from flat, or letting them go flat many times will decrease the life of any li-ion battery. Most battery manufacturers recommend a full discharge and charge maybe once every month and to top up the battery whenever you can, as there is no memory effect on li-ion.

I do not have any issues with battery life and keep my overclocked to ~250mhz. I get roughly 2 days use out of my phone before it reaches about 35% - which I think is pretty acceptable really. Make sure the camera program isnt running the background, that thing sucks battery life like theres no tomorrow. I do infact close all programs when im not using it, just habit.

[Guest th1rt3en]

horrible battery life. mine lasts at the most 8 hours with light usage(3 or 4 txt's, no phone calls) I find myself charging it 3 times a day on some occasions, atleast 2 times per day every day.

I've been trying to start the warranty exchange process, but its hard because i'm in the US, and i dont think HTC America will honor the warranty.

[Guest Urs]

Charging li-ion batteries from flat, or letting them go flat many times will decrease the life of any li-ion battery. Most battery manufacturers recommend a full discharge and charge maybe once every month and to top up the battery whenever you can, as there is no memory effect on li-ion.

Could You link us to some articles regarding this recommendation ?

I've never heard about it.

[Guest illum]

Will try my best:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-Ion - refer to the "Guidelines for prolonging Li-ion battery life" section.

http://batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

http://centralhobbies.com/instructional/lithium.html

You'll notice the notes about li-ion batteries having a limited charge lifespan, and that they can only take a limited number of "full charges", which is why charging them partially is better.

[Guest dgcorp]

Thanks to everyone for there comments/votes so far.

And thanks to Illum for his notes on Li-Ion batteries. I've heard about this before, just find it hard sometimes to break out of the old habbits of full-discharge then charge I developed with my early Ni-Cad batteries :)

Could I ask that when people Comment (and if Voting only leave a brief comment!) that they state which Version and Country of the device they have (e.g. Dutch E650 or German S710) so that we can build up an accurate idea of the different devices as possible!

Thanks again and I'll be checking this thread daily for updates!

Cheers, Derek

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[Guest Urs]

@illum Thank's a lot for these links. In Poland most telecom salesmans advice to fully discharge lithium batteries. :)

@dgcorp I have SPV E650 bought at Orange Poland.

[Guest Dilirium]

Mine looses about 45% percent a day with no Wifi/Bluetooth on. Generally I send like 25 messages a day and I am on the phone for like half an hour. E-mail is sunchronized each half hour.

My device is overclocked to 240Mhz. I have an unbranded HTC.

Not bad in comparrison to other peoples devices. Maybe it has to do with the brand of the Voxes? I don;t know but maybe the SPV ones use modified software which makes it drain the battery more?

[Guest Urs]

Mine looses about 45% percent a day with no Wifi/Bluetooth on. Generally I send like 25 messages a day and I am on the phone for like half an hour. E-mail is sunchronized each half hour.

My device is overclocked to 240Mhz. I have an unbranded HTC.

Not bad in comparrison to other peoples devices. Maybe it has to do with the brand of the Voxes? I don;t know but maybe the SPV ones use modified software which makes it drain the battery more?

Naaah... mine SPV is exactly the same if I use it like You, but usually I use it a lot more than 25 messages, and half of hour of calling.

[Guest Magnus Olsson]

I have a S710 and had about 8-9 hours batterytime, i had alot of software installed since its fun to try out things when you first got it. i reseted mine and now i still have full battery after about 20 hours. So its worth a try unless you already tried it. My phone is about 3 month old.

Now i will install the applications i use instead of all that sounds fun :)

[Guest tobbbie]

Try out acbtaskman from http://www.acbpocketsoft.com

- It gives you the options to track CPU hogs individually

- and track the power drain the the OS reports

Mind that the latter is not the real power drain, at least for my O2 XDA phone (old ROM) which is comparable to the QTEK 8300. The charts were giving alarming reports of power drain, but the real device behaves as expected. After some experimentation I could get an amp-meter in the battery loop. What I noticed is that each (even very small) use of CPU immediatly drains the battery. So assuming that all other power drains are out of question (Bluetooth, WIFI), the CPU drain is what you can detect in detail.

Another draining issue could be the memory card. So for a try, you could see how long you survive if you have no memory card in your device. I remember reading something about this (not sure which device) somewhere.

good luck in testing,

bye

tobbbie

:-)

P.S.: Tools that switch off your blinking LED drain more power by their CPU use than saved by not blinking the LED!

[Guest paholman]

Try out acbtaskman from http://www.acbpocketsoft.com

- It gives you the options to track CPU hogs individually

- and track the power drain the the OS reports

Mind that the latter is not the real power drain, at least for my O2 XDA phone (old ROM) which is comparable to the QTEK 8300. The charts were giving alarming reports of power drain, but the real device behaves as expected. After some experimentation I could get an amp-meter in the battery loop. What I noticed is that each (even very small) use of CPU immediatly drains the battery. So assuming that all other power drains are out of question (Bluetooth, WIFI), the CPU drain is what you can detect in detail.

Another draining issue could be the memory card. So for a try, you could see how long you survive if you have no memory card in your device. I remember reading something about this (not sure which device) somewhere.

good luck in testing,

bye

tobbbie

:-)

P.S.: Tools that switch off your blinking LED drain more power by their CPU use than saved by not blinking the LED!

Underclocking when idle is another battery saving tip. i.e lower the CPU speed to something like 140 when idle.

[Guest tobbbie]

Underclocking when idle is another battery saving tip. i.e lower the CPU speed to something like 140 when idle.

I am not sure about this, since the device enters some sleep mode when the CPU has nothing to do. I did some measurements on my O2 XDA phone and the main power drains are (as expected), Lights on and CPU usage. Since accuracy of this measurement is not high and this especially in the range of low current drain I can't tell about the differences in idle mode, here my examples, using "Tornado Power Control":

MHz, idle(no light, no homescreen), low-light, high-light

116 2,5 41 56

180 2,5 51 68

228 2,5 68 80

I am not sure how much of the "lights-on" drain is due to the LED and how much due to the homescreen active (forcing CPU active). I measured on my device as well the drain in the status lights off + screen on which needs some specials trick to reach it (maniac autokeylock). This gave surprisingly 44mA. I did not track it further as my concern was to find if the OS reported values for power drain are real or not (-> they are NOT).

Playing Music, no lights (no matter what player, Pocketplayer, TCPMP, Coreplayer): ~60mA (CPU about 40%)

bye

tobbbie

:-)

[Guest skazz]

I suspect that while there might be a few bad batteries, the real problems are likely to be related to software. Specifically software which is behaving badly on WM6.

Take for instance the known problem with various apps (including TomTom 5.2) which prevent the LCD from ever switching off: You get the backlight going off but the LCD itself stays on, and that is obviously a big battery drain.

My Dutch SPV E650 can definitely get a good 2 days battery use but I tend to be a very light user in terms of calls or data. I think that at the moment I only have TomTom installed and I've applied the backlight fix. Thinking about it, I tend to only charge it 2-3 times a week by hooking it up to my work laptop. It survives the weekend from Friday afternoon until Monday morning easily enough just sitting around in standby with the odd phone call.