Battery running down fast....

[Guest stottyb]

I haven't read all the posts in this thread but just wanted to add that I had a work's iPhone 3g before I got my personal SanFran and I noticed in both that 3G is often the biggest battery drainer. This can be because the phone is constantly trying to lock on to 3G signal in some areas and the phone is frequently switching between 3G/2G/GPRS. I remember my colleagues saying that the iPhone battery was poor and getting about a days usage while I would get more.

On days where I use a lot of wifi, GPS, and 3G I will be lucky to get a full day out of the battery, and in comparison to some people here I don't think I can really be labelled a "heavy" user. Having widgets to turn off these features when not in use, I have been able to get over 3 days use out of the phone including light wifi and 3G usage. I suspect that if used sparingly I could get 4 days out of it.

I think that people don't realise how draining wifi, GPS, and 3G can be, and the quoted standby/talk times are probably based on average voice and text usage on most phones and so their expectations are often too high when leaving these features enabled, SanFran included.

Edited October 18, 2010 by stottyb

[Guest AndyHibberd]

My point was that this reading is not (on its own) diagnostic of a different (let alone faulty) battery.

I am agreeing that there is massively more likelihood of the differences in reported "Full Battery Life" being indicative of the different loads that different users (even using different firmware) are putting on their batteries.

Specifically, running the battery flat in 3 hours, and taking 12 hours to charge and the phone running hot is much more likely to indicate a user wanting (or at least having) "everything on, always", than it is to indicate a defective battery.

With everyone's batteries being the same age (give or take a couple of weeks), the "Full Battery Life" predicted should be taken more as an indicator of the way you are driving the thing than any hardware comparison.

However, my expectation would be that running "everything on, always" would actually be the fast track to making the battery "defective". Probably take more than a week or two of such abuse though.

Yea agreed that reading calculates life based on average use (I assume).

[Guest DaveMac]

I use 'Setting profiles' which recognise when at home and goes into airplane mode while I am asleep thus saving more power.

In normal sleep mode overnight, I lose around 1% per hour. Last night I decided to put the phone in airplane mode while I slept to see what the difference would be.

Got up this morning after 8 hours to find that my battery had drained by 20%... :P WTF??? lol

[Guest dadashi]

My battery dies after 10 hours of non-stop wifi, internet, some music, a little GPS, app instalations...

Is that normal? Should I be expecting more?

[Guest john306]

Normally just turn my phone off before bedtime.

Last night I left it on, closed wi/fi, data, run task killer, etc etc.

Said 99% at midnight, at 7am it was on 71% :P

Will have to do more testing on this..... or just turn it off like I normally do overnight.

Edited October 20, 2010 by john306

[Guest yug0]

Mine only loses about 1% over night with all data connections off.

I find angry birds very draining though.

Has been on now 2 days 2 hours since last charge with 16% left. Light usage though!

Edited October 20, 2010 by yug0

[Guest DaveyP]

I find angry birds very draining though.

Yes.. so do I

Some of the levels are quite tough.

[Guest Nick Rhodes]

My phone was using what I considered to be too much battery whilst not be used a huge amount.

I did a factory reset I cleared the caches using clockworkmod.

I've tried Sebastians ROM for 24 hours and found battery life went from using 20-30% overnight with no additional usage to using 9% (after making a phone call and reading a few emails). WiFi connection far more stable and only managed to loose connection once (rather than almost everytime the phone slept).

I then did a full reset wipe again and went back to Pauls mod yesterday morning and both WiFi and battery still better.

Far from scientific proof, the reset and wipe may be a coincidence, but its a significant improvement.

[Guest Odes1]

My phone was using what I considered to be too much battery whilst not be used a huge amount.

I did a factory reset I cleared the caches using clockworkmod.

I've tried Sebastians ROM for 24 hours and found battery life went from using 20-30% overnight with no additional usage to using 9% (after making a phone call and reading a few emails). WiFi connection far more stable and only managed to loose connection once (rather than almost everytime the phone slept).

I then did a full reset wipe again and went back to Pauls mod yesterday morning and both WiFi and battery still better.

Far from scientific proof, the reset and wipe may be a coincidence, but its a significant improvement.

How do you go about doing a full wipe and re-install? I see the options on clockworkmod but am unsure of the order to do things in!

[Guest yug0]

Yes.. so do I

Some of the levels are quite tough.

:P You know what I meant

[Guest DaveyP]

:P You know what I meant

Yes ... :D

I'm glad that the 'humour' didn't go unnoticed.

But seriously though (just for a moment) the weakest point of the SF is indeed the battery life, I now plan my use around charging.. no charging = keep the usage down. (but its still great value for the cost)

[Guest rufustfirefly]

I have not rooted at all. I am new to Android. My System is showing the CPU running almost constanly at 100% and its killing my battery.

Is it worth doing a factory reset to see if its anyhting I've installed ?

I cant find a factory reset option anywhere ?

[Guest Sere83]

My battery dies after 10 hours of non-stop wifi, internet, some music, a little GPS, app instalations...

Is that normal? Should I be expecting more?

It's this type of post that worries me. I am getting no where near this. My phone would be dead after 2 hrs if I did this. Again no offence to Paul but I'm sure it must be an issue with the R3 Rom as it just doesn't make any sense that my battery life is so much lower.

Must sync and background data always be on to receive email notifications? Another issue I'm having is my hotmail account doesn't send me notifications or update despite me turning on notifications, why is this?

[Guest Nick Rhodes]

How do you go about doing a full wipe and re-install? I see the options on clockworkmod but am unsure of the order to do things in!

I did all my wiping from clockwork - in here the order does not matter, but I did, "wipe data/factory reset", "wipe cache partition" then I went into advanced and did the "wipe Dalvik Cache" option.

Then install new ROM if required and reboot.

Cheers, Nick

[Guest dadashi]

It's this type of post that worries me. I am getting no where near this. My phone would be dead after 2 hrs if I did this. Again no offence to Paul but I'm sure it must be an issue with the R3 Rom as it just doesn't make any sense that my battery life is so much lower.

Must sync and background data always be on to receive email notifications? Another issue I'm having is my hotmail account doesn't send me notifications or update despite me turning on notifications, why is this?

I'm running on stock orange, removed what doesn't suit me and rooted it to install some app that need rooting.

I don't mind which rom I'm running at as lomg as it works. I don't care about the orange colours either, it looks rather nice. Like the netherlands :P

I will consider changing the rom if froyo 2.2 becomes available for the SF, which it is soon by the looks of things :D

I wonder if orange will follow with an official froyo2.2 update

There are a few tips to new mobiles and rechargeable batteries.

1- Before first use, leave the mobile on charge for about 12 hours no matter what... don't use it in this space

2- Only charge it when its empty, don't keep plugging it into a socket or pc at every chance (there is an option to disable charging when plugged into the PC)

3- Leave it 24/7 ON and plug it into the mains every night before going to bed untill the morning regardless of it being empty or not.

[Guest AndyHibberd]

Point 2 contradicts point 3, no?

Only charge if empty.....always charge at night?

The idea that you have to empty out the battery before you recharge does not apply to Li-ion batteries. They don't have a memory like nickel ones.

Sere, there is no way that guy is getting 10 hours with that sort of use.

No smart phone could do that.

eg Desire 6.5 hours talk time, Desire HD 5.5h, iphone 4- 7h

You can expect up to 5 hours of pretty heavy use.

Probably be able to watch 2 hours of video (headphones). However I have not tested this, just an estimate.

I've been getting a whole day from my phone, using it as a normal phone with less than an hour of smartphone use per day.

Andy

[Guest dadashi]

I took it off the mains about 8 this morning. I've been installing apps, looking at the internet, a couple of calls, 30 minutes GPS navigation. I turn the wifi off when I'm not surfing or downloading. Now 12 hours later I've still got about 40% and I'm surfing again right now!

I haven't installed any fancy stuff, no launcher pro or any of that sort of stuff. I'm sure they just eat up the battery. I'm running on stock orange.

I tried a couple of battery apps but I wasn't happy with them. Only Battery Droid was appealing but it doesn't work anymore. In task manager it's shown but I can't find it in my apps! When I check the market it says its installed so why can't I find it on my mobile?

I have been carefull with the battery usage turning the wifi and any unneeded apps off when not in use. Brightness at around 20%. But it would be nice not have to worry about that. We definitely need some spare batteries or better still some more powerfull ones.

Where and when can we find some spare batteries for the SF / Blade?

just as a comparisson, my friend has a 3Gs iphone and he doesn't make it through the day. Poor iphone users can't replace their batteries...

How do the desire or X10 hold out on a charge?

Edited October 20, 2010 by dadashi

[Guest AndyHibberd]

Apparently spare batteries are gonna be hard to get hold of. Spoke to a phone accessories shop at the back of Aldgate and he said cos it's a Chinese company and it's a limited Orange run etc. I'm still holding out hope tho, they make 3rd party batteries for a lot of devices.

I can imagine getting more battery life out of this (Wouldn't want to disable launcherPro tho, it's too useful).

Also I don't think keeping 3G on does have a massive impact, my battery went down 1% an hour with 3G in background locked screen.

dadashi, I can sort of believe your comments now.

[Guest Eclogue]

I have not rooted at all. I am new to Android. My System is showing the CPU running almost constanly at 100% and its killing my battery.

Is it worth doing a factory reset to see if its anyhting I've installed ?

I cant find a factory reset option anywhere ?

I think this is different to general battery issues. Have a look at the high CPU usage thread - try covering the light sensor for a minute and/or going into camera options and back out tricks.

[Guest Sere83]

I am now running R4 after a complete cache wipe and factory reset. Battery is exactly the same as on R3! not very good!.

When my phone is taken off charge after a whole night it drops 1 bar after literally 30-45 minutes of doing almost nothing (I used stopwatch app for about 30minutes). Does anyone less find that it drops one bar very quickly?

I do have launcher pro and background data enabled.

Any one else find this?

[Guest seekr]

I've been struggling with battery issues for a while now... Here's a screenshot of JuicePlotter I just took:

You can see a drop of 25% in 30 minutes. That was while browsing Pulse in 3G, [wifi, gps, bt, sync] off and playing mp3 through Winamp. I got brightness set to Auto (I would say 50% of those 30min brightness was in almost full). I don't have anything major running and although I do occasionally kill hogging apps with task manager I do avoid that. I am lucky that most days I can charge it during the day and I do carry a emergency 4xAAA charger which I have yet used.

I reported this to Orange and they said:

From the information you have provided regarding music and 3G usage, it is unlikely your battery will last more than 24 hours. I would advise that you try a day without listening to music or using 3G and see if the battery still runs down. If you do not lose power when using the phone to make calls and send texts message only, then there is not a fault.

So, apparently we shouldn't expect the battery to last 24h if we do anything but make calls and text... appalling.

I was using a LG GT540 before I got the SanFran and although LG's battery was far from lasting me 2 days I could easily get through 1 day with 3G and music use while commuting (about an hour each way, with sync on and everything else off) and I would likely still have about 10-15% before I would get it to charge. Now I can't get 30-40 min of morning browsing without having to charge it midday...

Ok, I know LG's screen has lower res and is physicaly smaller... but still... is this expected? SOrry for the rant... but the unreliability of the SanFran (compared to the LG) is maddening.

[Guest d123]

Apparently spare batteries are gonna be hard to get hold of. Spoke to a phone accessories shop at the back of Aldgate and he said cos it's a Chinese company and it's a limited Orange run etc. I'm still holding out hope tho, they make 3rd party batteries for a lot of devices.

I think you will find he is talking nonsense, ZTE is a pretty big company and has been making phones, mifi's and dongles for quite some time, the San Fran is also available as the Blade and there is no way ZTE wont be pushing what is going to be a huge seller for them.

Expect the shops and eBay to have them within weeks.

With regard to battery life, I'm finding mine better than my HTC Desire, I'm using Sebastian404's r4 ROM, and am getting a comfortable days use, with everything but GPS on. I'm showing 41% battery with 18hours 8 minutes of use today.

Not quite as good as my iPhone 4, but better than the Desire.

I find the San Fran is actually so close to the Desire in use that I no longer saw the need to keep the Desire, so by buying a San Fran I ended up with £170 in my pocket after the Desire sold on eBay :P

[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.