Battery drain when idle

HaveADay

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Mar 14, 2011
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So something must be up with my settings. My tablet steadily drains the battery regardless of what settings I change. I've set WiFi to be off at all times when the screen is off but yet I have the drain pictured in the attachment. I've stripped down pretty much all the widgets off my homescreens. I can't figure out what else would be consuming battery. Others have the same problem?
 

strudel#AC

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Oct 26, 2010
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So something must be up with my settings. My tablet steadily drains the battery regardless of what settings I change. I've set WiFi to be off at all times when the screen is off but yet I have the drain pictured in the attachment. I've stripped down pretty much all the widgets off my homescreens. I can't figure out what else would be consuming battery. Others have the same problem?

I also got excessive drain when the tablet was idle even in airplane mode, especially when docked with the keyboard. I figured out a way to all but eliminate the drain for me.

I have a 32 GB microSD card in the tablet and an 32 GB SD card in the dock. Both cards are loaded with tons of pictures and videos. When the micro SD card is in the Prime and the SD card is in the dock, drain while idle is 2-3% per hour for the tablet and 5% (or more) per hour for the dock. The dock drain is especially concerning since it quickly eliminates any battery-life boosting benefits of the dock if a large amount of idle time is involved. For an experiment I tried removing both the micro SD and SD cards to see if the drain while idle changed. After removing the SD and micro SD cards, I saw drain of 1% on the tablet and 2 % on the dock after 11 hours of sitting idle. For comparison, if the SD and micro SD cards were in the tablet and dock, the tablet's battery would be at 67-78% and the dock would be at 45% or less.

Maybe it is the large collection of media that the Prime is trying to process while it is idle, but removing the SD and micro SD cards made a huge difference for me. Right now I can have a very large amount of storage with poor standby battery life or much less available storage with exception standby battery life. Hopefully this is something that ASUS can address in the future because I want both, expandable storage and exceptional standby battery life.
 

nyijedi

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Jul 14, 2010
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Thank you for posting this. I don't have the dock, but I do keep an SD card in my Prime. I noticed similar battery savings when ejecting the SD card (I still leave it physically plugged in - I just eject it). Hopefully Asus fixes this, but either way, thanks for sharing this.
 

jedi105

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Apr 6, 2011
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Hopefully Asus fixes this, but either way, thanks for sharing this.

This isnt an ASUS problem per se. This is actually something that goes back a long time. Years ago when I had a LG Env 1 (yes, it was a long time ago and I loved that phone) I had my first taste of this. Then I had the original Nook and again, I saw crazy battery drain. After some research I found that the device continuously queries the card that is inserted even when the screen is off or the phone or device is in standby (kind of like having a laptop computer with a wireless mouse). The same cannot be said for say cameras or even MP3 players so this is something that maybe can be fixed with a firmware update but I dont think anyone at ASUS (or any other manufacturer for that matter) knows or cares about. Quick fix is remove all cards from your device but then that kind of defeats the purpose. I also found that there is an issue with the developer options where if you untick "Stay Awake" feature for some reason it doesnt actually change the setting unless you cycle it back on and then off again. Dont know why that happens and its quite annoying in a device as expensive as this, but I live with it. Both experiments resulted in significant battery life increases.
 

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