Desire battery

[Guest roscoe141]

I'm finding the battery to zap very quickly on my new Desire. On my old phone I charged once every 3 or 4 days but I find I have to recharge my new phone daily even with only very little useage. I realise it has a lot going on in this little device that is likely to drain the battery more but it feels excessive charging it daily.

I have wifi switched off, I have the brightness level down, it's set to timeout in 15 seconds and no applications are running that I am aware of.

Has anyone else found this?

[Guest Davman]

Welcome to the world of the the Desire!

[Guest battletank]

Welcome to the world of the the Desire!

Exactly.

I bought myself a 1600mAh extended life battery from MobileFun - it's been a long time since I last had to carry a spare battery around with me.

[Guest Davman]

Exactly.

I bought myself a 1600mAh extended life battery from MobileFun - it's been a long time since I last had to carry a spare battery around with me.

Does that improve things with the extra 200mAh? How much was that?

[Guest scotch whisky]

You just have to get used to charging it up every night. The only way you are going to get more than one days use is by not turning it on!

I doubt the bigger battery will help much. Doubt you will acheive two days use.

Edited April 16, 2010 by scotch whisky

[Guest toxic-hero]

you can prolong your battery life by turning off GPS, wifi, bluetooth, mobile data, etc... you can also reduce browsing the net, checking emails, editing documents, playing games, listening to music, watching videos, etc, etc, as the phone display consumes much power. but then: why do you have a phone like this if you are using it only for telephony?! a catch-22 if you ask me... ;-)

[Guest battletank]

Does that improve things with the extra 200mAh? How much was that?

It was about £25, but no, I don't notice any real difference. Having two batteries, though, is necessary.

[Guest roscoe141]

It was about £25, but no, I don't notice any real difference. Having two batteries, though, is necessary.

woke up to find I had 4% power left. Phone is charging... Again. Tsk

[Guest jackdaniels_lee]

I found that switching 3G off and using it on demand makes a heuge difference, 2 days without charge on GSM.

Download 2G-3G OnOff from the market free, just works as a shortcut to the setting but makes a massive difference, wasnt to great on my good old hero but connection and hardware on the desire is "Super rocket fast"!

Change to GSM only, and when its time for a browse switch to WCDMA/GSM Auto.

;)

[Guest mlang]

So is there any feedback yet from Android/Google about the appalling battery performance?

I've been having a go with a T-Mobile Pulse for a month and was planning to get a Desire this coming week, but I'm starting to think that's a bad idea if I have to carry my charger around all the time to use the thing.

To put it into context, I just had a 26 hour coach journey back from eastern europe thanks to the iceland volcano and it allowed me to compare my main S60 v3 phone to Android 1.5.

Before getting on the coach, I fully charged my N95 8GB and my Pulse. I then switched off the Pulse and left my Nokia on.

Throughout the journey I was switching my satnav on now and then to check our progress, sending a few texts, updating twitter & facebook, and browsing a few webpages on the BBC News site.

My Nokia lasted 20 hours.

I then switched on the Pulse - 2G only, brightness to 0%, wifi, GPS, autosync off. I didn't use the satnav as much (obviously i turned GPS on when I did), and I didn't use Twitter (I just can't find a client that's even close to Gravity). I also killed off old process with ATK regularly.

I had a less than 10% battery after 5 hours and it died before I could confirm I was back with my lift.

So is 2.1 any better?

I kind of feel that Android can currently only retain charge if you don't actually use it. As soon as you do, it drops its charge like it's in freefall. Why is it so bad, and is there any sign of the obvious problems being fixed?

Certainly switching off the features in order to be able to use it for a whole day seems like a very poor workaround.

I've been waiting for the Desire for a while and Vodafone have given me a very good offer that I just need to confirm on Monday. So is it worth it, or should I wait for Android to come up with decent power management and apps that don't waste battery charge. I'd certainly expect to see dynamic switching of 2G/3G, GPS etc.

I'm very frustrated. Has anybody actually managed to use their Desire (i.e. regular texting, browsing, satnav, twitter, facebook, music, video, using wifi, etc) for a whole day yet? I just want to be able to charge every night and be confident that the battery won't suddenly die on me? If my 2 year old N95 8GB can do it, why can't Android?

Edited April 18, 2010 by mlang

[Guest Tarqon]

Your N95 has a 240 x 320 screen and a 332 MHz processor. Lower battery life is simply the price we pay for much higher phone specs. It's the same with my Omnia, a charge will last me two days tops.

[Guest mlang]

Your N95 has a 240 x 320 screen and a 332 MHz processor. Lower battery life is simply the price we pay for much higher phone specs. It's the same with my Omnia, a charge will last me two days tops.

Not intending to be rude, but if that is similar to the official line, then it's a lazy answer.

Firstly, the device is being sold as a mobile device, so it should be. If, even with everything on the phone switched off or down to a minimum, it can still only run for less than a day if used, then it becomes a pointless device.

If the clock speed is an issue, then surely it should be able to switch to a lower clock speed automatically to save battery.

If the screen is the issue, well it's off a lot more than my nokia's, which has a screensaver. Also the brightness was set to zero, so it's overall output was lower.

Surely, now we're already passed v.2, dynamic power profiling should be able to at least do something?

I wonder if a Desire is a worthwhile phone now. Really not sure.

Bugger.

[Guest jackdaniels_lee]

The issue is 3G, it should be used on demand and not as a standard network connection, all 3G/HSDPA/WCDMA networks require a lot of power thus zapping your battery. ever since 3G was 1st introduced it has had the same impact on all handsets, the issue is only magnified with the Desire as we are transferring a lot more background data.

Fingers crossed that in the future we will see a more "economical" newtowrk managment system in the Android O/S, untill then the best way is to switch to GSM only untill WCDMA/3G is needed.

someone may even be able to whip an app together.. ;)

[Guest gregDT]

These battery threads are beginning to bug me. The phone has a 1400 mHa battery. The laws of physics dictate exactly how much electrical charge the battery can supply. The more stuff you use the more power you use. The phone gives about six and a half hours of GSM talk time and then it's dead. It's not unreasonable to expect that if you do anything on it for six and a half hours that uses a comparable amount of power i.e. GPS, WiFi, web surfing, playing games then guess what..... you'll kill the battery just the same. Who'd have though eh? This has been true for mobile phones since the dawn of time. The difference is that before all you could do on a phone was talk. Now you can talk, surf, e-mail, game, take photo's, shoot video, run GPS and turn by turn navigation. All in a device that's about 12mm deep.

I use my phone a reasonable amount each day. I run a power manager (Juice defender) and charge it every night. I have no problems at all. I'll look into buying a Seideo 3200mHa battery when they release one for the Desire, but of course I'll be adding 5-6mm to the thickness of the phone. A battery with twice the power is going to need twice the space.

I have a 17" Samsung gaming laptop that has a 4900 mHa battery and will run flat out for three hours and then die. I have a smaller and less powerful Samsung Netbook with a 5900 mHa battery that will run for nine hours before it stops. And I have an HTC Desire with a 1400 mHa battery that will run for six hours at full load before it dies. None of this surprises me at all.

If you have a mobile phone that last longer than the HTC then it either has a bigger battery and is by default a bigger phone or it simply does less stuff and therefore lasts longer.

[Guest mlang]

If you have a mobile phone that last longer than the HTC then it either has a bigger battery and is by default a bigger phone or it simply does less stuff and therefore lasts longer.

What you say is, of course, quite correct.

But I think the big issue is the bit where you say the other phones are doing less stuff. If their battery performance is better, that is almost undoubtedly true. But the issue arises where these other phones that are doing less are actually providing the same functionality at the same speed as the Android device. To me, that means that Android is doing a lot of unneccessary stuff.

For example, if I switch airplane mode on I still see apps starting up and sitting there for a while presumably trying to connect. Why? The phone should be flagged up as being offline and so any apps hunting for a connection should be able to check the flag and stop trawling immediately. Maybe it should be swapped round and there should be an OS scheduler that tells apps to look for a signal or not - more push than pull.

On the same lines, I don't want things like Servo Search constantly switching themselves on to index things, but they do (at least, in the provided build with my current device).

If an app doesn't need 3G, it shouldn't try to use it. Indeed, I'd like to be able to modify the access permissions given to each app so I can ensure that certain apps only use wi-fi, or just 2G, or whatever.

Auto-sync should let you pick the intervals per data-type - I only need my contacts synced when I change them, not all the time (and it would help if syncing contacts actually worked properly, rather than constantly failing and repeating).

The full clockspeed shouldn't be needed all the time, so the speed should drop when low strain apps are running.

If users can get so much more battery time out of a device by manually tweaking the available settings, then we should expect the phone to do such tweaking itself as each situation arises. There are also certainly setting that users can't tweak, so the potential for saving should be even greater.

It's just really frustrating that features seem to be taking priority over core function.

I really do want the Desire to be a good day-to-day phone - if it's not I'll be in poo.

[Guest gregDT]

You maker a very good point. Android may or may not be an energy efficient OS. I have no idea. My previous phones were Nokia Symbian ones and even by the wildest stretches of the imagination they didn't do half the things my Hero and Desire do. The Apple OS has been heavily worked to make sure the battery lasts, hence the lack of multitasking, animated wallpapers etc etc.

One thing I did notice on my Hero was that when rooted and running SetCPU the phone in default mode without SetCPU doing anything actually ran slower than it's full clock speed most of the time. SetCPU pushed up the clock speed and seriously speeded up the Hero but also really drained the battery. Maybe the Desire uses it's 1gig CPU more of the time. I suppose my point was that I don't expect a phone the size of the Desire to run flat out all day and I never did. However if the OS is overly power hungry then that's a fault to take up with the Android devs and not something the phone itself should be criticised for. I think when we can get root on the Desire we'll be able to load some apps that resolve some of the issues you mention. So it's bad that the Android OS causes the problem but ironically great that the Android OS allows us to modify the phone ourselves to solve them.

Plus I imagine most of us just can't put the gorgeous thing down and that's spanking the battery. When it spends more time in our pockets and less time in our hands I think the battery issues will not be such a problem ;)

Edited April 19, 2010 by gregDT

[Guest roscoe141]

Since starting this thread and having had a few days to test it, if you're using it for calls and texts alone, with everything switched off, you will get a couple of days out it. So it's definitely not as bad as I first thought. I'm a happy camper. ;)

[Guest ZiCoN]

I just turned 3G off, so it runs on edge.. ;) But it gave me at least 1/3 more battery time.

[Guest munkimatt]

With the screen set to the dimmest level, bluetooth and WiFi off, sync turned off, GPS off and absolutely no browsing or music or anything like that I can admit I didn't go through a whole battery.

I went through two full batteries.

No word of a lie, on Sunday I had two fully charged batteries. The phone came off charge at 11:40am and by midnight the second battery was empty. My usage for the entire day accounts to a 2 minute phone call, two photos, two refreshes of my Gmail accoount and around 93 text messages.

Entirely unacceptable performance.

Edited April 20, 2010 by munkimatt

[Guest jackdaniels_lee]

With the screen set to the dimmest level, bluetooth and WiFi off, sync turned off, GPS off and absolutely no browsing or music or anything like that I can admit I didn't go through a whole battery.

I went through two full batteries.

No work of a lie, on Sunday I had two fully charged batteries. The phone came off charge at 11:40am and by midnight the second battery was empty. My usage for the entire day accounts to a 2 minute phone call, two photos, two refreshes of my Gmail accoount and around 93 text messages.

Entirely unacceptable performance.

If this is true then there is a fault with your handset.. and proven above 3G is the battery killer its like a 10 year old 3.5 litre V8 engine... "fuel guzzler"!

[Guest munkimatt]

If this is true then there is a fault with your handset.. and proven above 3G is the battery killer its like a 10 year old 3.5 litre V8 engine... "fuel guzzler"!

Sadly this is my second handset already, the first was the same. Both genuine batteries too, in case anyone was wondering.

[Guest qwertyux]

Sadly this is my second handset already, the first was the same. Both genuine batteries too, in case anyone was wondering.

you guys should reckon using a taskiller. Out of the three famous ones,

1. Automatic Task Killer

2. Taskiller

3. Advanced Task Killer

I much prefer Automatic Task Killer. It auto kills everything that you choose when the screen dim and I can easily go through a day of heavy use of Twitter, Facebook, occasional browsing with WIFI never turned off (at home) . I can see that non-stop connection to 3G uses more battery than Wifi.

my screen brightness is auto.

If you go to setting > about phone > battery > battery use

You can see what have been using the battery so much. for me, the top one is usually cell standby followed by android system.

Try using Auto Task Killer, you gonna see a vast difference in battery performance

[Guest Profete162]

you guys should reckon using a taskiller. Out of the three famous ones,

1. Automatic Task Killer

2. Taskiller

3. Advanced Task Killer

Wrong!

If you kill processes without knowing what you do, the impact on the battery will be hard.

Let me explain:

All these task killers will kill sleeping processes ( HTC stuff, your widgets, your updates, etc..) As they sleep, they don't eat battery, and you kill them.

But unfortunately, theses processes will relaunch a few time after that you kill them, eating now a lot of battery. Then you will kill again, they will come back, etc... So you will use more battery!

These slepping processes does not arm your battery ( maybe some bad-coded)

So please stop making apology of these softwares:

Sources:

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-usin...r-with-android/

http://androidforums.com/motorola-droid/18...apps-truth.html

[Guest munkimatt]

Wrong!

If you kill processes without knowing what you do, the impact on the battery will be hard.

Let me explain:

All these task killers will kill sleeping processes ( HTC stuff, your widgets, your updates, etc..) As they sleep, they don't eat battery, and you kill them.

But unfortunately, theses processes will relaunch a few time after that you kill them, eating now a lot of battery. Then you will kill again, they will come back, etc... So you will use more battery!

These slepping processes does not arm your battery ( maybe some bad-coded)

So please stop making apology of these softwares:

Sources:

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-usin...r-with-android/

http://androidforums.com/motorola-droid/18...apps-truth.html

You may say he is "wrong" but the fact is he is getting a hugely better battery life than me.

[Guest nikosrs4]

something is going on with yours, I have mine 11 hours now from charge, with 10' calls and 4-5' of use and nothing more and I have 89%..but it's 11 hours! so it could last 5 days ;)