Battery life?

[Guest booster22]

What bad coded apps in particular?

I havent a list, but the android apps market is full of programs badly made and fail to work as expected.

My point is dont assume all apps are flawless where battery power is concerned.

Some apps just need to be killed.

[Guest tdodd]

It's been 41 hours since the last charge and I'm down to 73% battery. At this rate it would not be unreasonable to expect a standy time of around 6 days. That's a little short of the spec, but hardly criminal. Now I admit that in that time I have made and received no calls, texts, emails or anything else on the phone. I've had 3G enabled but there has been little use made of it. I have had syncing turned off, yet still there has been a little data traffic each day.

My obervations are that using data communications does suck hard on the battery. My suspicions point to Weatherbug (now uninstalled (again!))as being a particularly greedy little app where battery life is concerned, but I have not performed any controlled testing to prove that. I do know that when out shopping last week and trying to get some price check data the battery was evaporating before my eyes. For some reason I was struggling to get any data comms working and the phone was getting quite hot at the rear. In the space of an hour or so I saw my battery plummet from maybe 60% to 9%. WTF!?!. So data usage does seem to be a consideration.

As the vast majority of my waking hours are spent at a laptop and with a landline to hand I really don't feel the need to have the phone running data feeds 24x7. If I'm out and about I don't really think it will matter if I don't pick up an email for a few hours, and certainly I couldn't give a stuff if I miss tweets and Facebook updates while away from my desk. If I do want something I'll enable sync or do whatever I need to do and then turn off the features I don't need until the next time. I imagine the people suffering "poor" battery life are using the phone pretty hard, whether they realise it or not, because background data access is likely to greatly reduce battery life, or so it seems to me. Obviously foreground use is going to be worse, with the screen lit up and extra processor power to do stuff.

Edited November 1, 2010 by tdodd

[Guest No Expert]

I'm monitoring mine at the moment, on standby it's fine but soon as I start using the touchscreen for about 5-10 minutes its drops by 20%.

Also under about phone, battery use it's showing:

Android System 98%

Cell Standby 2%

Is that a good sign or is not even accurate?

Revs,

exactly the same for me!

The minute I switch on I can see the battery losing about 1% every 2 minutes!

What's going on?

[Guest Seagull81]

I havent a list, but the android apps market is full of programs badly made and fail to work as expected.

My point is dont assume all apps are flawless where battery power is concerned.

Some apps just need to be killed.

Fair point, I suppose the only way to tell a bad app is once it's been installed and things start to go awry. :)

If the San Francisco is anything like my HTC with regards to battery life, it should improve over time.

[Guest tdodd]

Revs,

exactly the same for me!

The minute I switch on I can see the battery losing about 1% every 2 minutes!

What's going on?

Dropping 1% every 2 minutes would imply running from full to empty in 3 hours 20 minutes, which is fairly close to the 4 hours talktime quoted for the phone. If your battery is emptying that fast it sounds like you have some rogue app going nuts on the phone. Maybe it is gobbling up CPU, maybe it is shifting data like it's going out of fashion. Maybe it's getting busy with the GPS. Obviously having everything enabled - Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G, Sync, Max Brightness - is going to increase the drain. Do you have live wallpaper or lots of busy little widgets? They're all going to chip away at the battery.

From a full charge my phone will last a few hours before it even begins to drop from 100%. I'm now at 68% after 44 hours since it came off charge. EDIT : Now down to 55% after 60 hours.

As a newbie to Android, this being my first Android phone, I have been tempted to install a bunch of stuff on the phone, much of which I may need once in a blue moon, or probably never. I've pruned it back again to the genuinely useful stuff that I may actually use regularly. Non essential apps which have raised my suspicions, like Weatherbug, are history. I've lived 48 years without a weather app on my phone and I think I can manage the rest of my life without one. If I need to know the weather I can always access a website to check. As for background updates, I simply don't need background process to keep themselves updated with regular data feeds. If I want data I'll go get it when I need it. Having email notifications on the phone every five minutes is worthless to me when they pop up on my laptop.

If you want to embrace all the features offered by the phone then battery life will suffer. If you want to significantly prolong battery life then disable the features you don't need and only enable them at the times you need them. If you have a mystery app that has gone rogue then you'll need to track it down and deal with it.

I think you're going to have to do some troubleshooting to find out what is running on your phone, why, and whether you actually need it to be there at all. If you start the built in Task Manager app and go to the Resource tab what figure does the CPU settle at after 20 seconds or so? With my phone it hovers around the 12% mark. If yours is significantly higher then it sounds like you have background apps soaking up CPU cycles. Can you check your data usage rate. Is something doing a lot of data I/O in the background? What is it? Why is it? Do you need it? To monitor my apps and CPU usage in more detail I use Watchdog Lite. To monitor my 3G data activity I use 3G Watchdog. Neither one is fancy, but it's enough to allow me to keep tabs on things. What I can say is that with Weatherbug and Tweetdeck installed, and background syncing enabled, my battery life was dropping far faster than with those apps removed and background sync turned off. Nothing like the drop you are seeing, but enough to give me a clear indication of the effect these things have on battery life.

Edited November 2, 2010 by tdodd

[Guest booster22]

Fair point, I suppose the only way to tell a bad app is once it's been installed and things start to go awry. :)

If the San Francisco is anything like my HTC with regards to battery life, it should improve over time.

With everything turned off and phone left on standby mine lasted 5 days, while i used the credit on my old phone. this was in its second week.

i easy get a days use on moderate use, a day in my eyes is while im awake, so 16 hours.

I also started using task killer, got rid of orange apps. and charge the phone while driving, and also turn off 3g wifi etc and only use them when needed

Was going to buy a spare battery, but now im quite happy with the battery life.

[Guest No Expert]

I hope this might help someone else out there.

I finally discovered the rogue app on my device which was killing the battery.

It was the myLock app which allows you to unlock the phone by pressing any of the keys. The problem is that the device never goes to sleep therefore killing the battery in a few hours.

I've confirmed this by looking at the usage statistics in SpareParts.

I would avoid myLock for now.