Battery Life gripes/help

[dj_elite]

hey all,

wondering what your experience is with the battery life on this phone so far.

Maybe it's still 'breaking in' but so far it's been dismal on mine. I plugged it in out of the box and I got the battery to about 70-80% since I had to run off somewhere. I admit, I used it fairly heavily during that time (activation, syncing contacts and accounts, downloading apps) for a little under 2 hours and shortly after that it died. I came home, charged it up, and used it for a few more hours in the evening (a few phone calls, texts, more apps, etc.) and within 4-5 hours, it was shot again.

It charged fully last night and I unplugged it before going to sleep... by morning it was down to ~80%, and this morning I took two 30 second phone calls and read nytimes online for... about 5 minutes and it went down to 70%. Exchanged a few texts with friends, down to 50%, shortly thereafter, down to "you have to charge it."

I again charged it up fully (till it said CHARGED on screen), which was at about 1:30 PM. Went to lunch with some friends, ran some errands (was barely on the phone... answered a few texts, snapped a picture, checked facebook once) and again, down to 60% in about 2 1/2 hours.

I came from a Blackberry Bold 9700 on AT&T and I wanted something else... I know that I shouldn't expect the same battery life, but hell I figured I could at least get through most of a day of moderate use with it. Particularly with all I read about the phone being rated better than the original droid despite using the same battery.

I took it to Verizon and they tech insisted that was pretty normal but said he would do a 'test call' for 20-30 minutes and see how much it drains. "But the droids all use a lot of battery power"

I know this was a long post... cliff notes: In about 28 hours (8 of which I was sleeping) I've had to charge it fully 3 times (not including the initial charge which was to about 80%). Verizon says normal. Pending a 'test call' which I will be picking it up from in 10-15 minutes.

Am I expecting too much? Or is this just absurd?

 

[dbdynsty25]

All Android phones are terrible for the first couple days as far as the battery goes. I'm not sure why that is, but it settles down and hits the sweet spot after 3 or 4 days. Although the Incredible didn't...that thing just needed the higher capacity seido to even be usable.

It also helps to start paying attention to what apps/widgets/etc. that you have updating in the background. Things like weather, twitter, facebook etc. sometimes can be set to intervals that are way too frequent. I always kill those and do them manually.

 

[dj_elite]

the woman at the store when i picked it up said many of the same things. she told me to drain it all the way down then charge it overnight (at least 6 hours) which i'll be doing.

the store ran a test call for 1 hour and it only drained ~20% of the battery.

i had disabled a lot of the widgets already, all i have is weather and calendar. i've also been using advanced task killer.

i found a button under data manager that said "disable background data" or soemthing but then my email doesn't work, although that would be the ideal solution.

 

[dbdynsty25]

Just wait a few days, it'll get better. Significantly. Plus, you're playing with it a lot now...more than you will once you get used to the phone.

 

[dj_elite]

it got a little better yesterday although i didn't use it much... but anyway, i'd been trying to disable my facebook account on the phone to eliminate the excess contacts, and i was getting tons of errors. i finally decided to do a hard reset (i've only had the phone three days obviously, so no biggie) and did NOT do facebook this time around and it's like a new phone.

i did this all on battery power today and i downloaded a ton of apps, played some of the new games i got (for a while!), had background syncing ON all day, used wifi, made phone calls etc... pretty heavy use... and i made it just under 12 hours on the charge. overall, with the facebook integration gone, my phone is MUCH snappier now especially anything related to contacts since i had all those extra contacts clogging up my phone.

very excited about this phone now that i can use it for more than 3 hours at a time. i write this up mainly to facebook, but i imagine just as i'm breaking it in the battery life is improving as well.

 

[mikells43]

im at 15 hours now, and still at 70%. its been great so far.

 

[FORDOC]

For me the battery has gotten better over time. I did the usual battery saving methods and found this phone has excellent battery life. The only time I have a problem is streaming music over 3g but that is to be expected. I suggest give it some time and once you are done exploring the new device you will be happy.

 

[mzazthang]

im still sooooo irritated! i even got a replacement! i didnt use all day til 530pm....made 3 phone calls and prob 10 txt..within an hour it was dead! very disappointing! isnt the whole idea of an android phone so you can do sooo many things with it??? ughhh if bb had more apps and such i prob would switch back...

 

[karnovaran]

Regarding Facebook, you can go to Data Manager and select Motorola Applications to make it sync only when on WiFi.

 

[dj_elite]

Regarding Facebook, you can go to Data Manager and select Motorola Applications to make it sync only when on WiFi.

I had that checked, I think.

Like I said, I don't write this up entirely to removing the facebook account from the social networking... I think it's also the process of 'breaking it in' so to speak, but I'm glad to have the facebook account gone because it would sync hundreds of contacts to my phone that I didn't want to be there.

 

[pauldroidr2d2]

I have yet to purchase a smart phone that has a battery life that I'm satisfied with. In my opinion they all stink.

In my opinion the phones that use a lithium ion polymer battery tend to last longer, but that is just my opinion and what seems to be the case with all the various smart phones I have owned and used.

I think that the HTC phones tend to have the worse battery performance of the smart phones that I have used. I have used Blackberry's, HTC, and Motorola. As far as the smartphones go, Motorola's assortment of Droid's have an okay battery life when compared to the various droid phones available.

Ultimately, the development of the batteries and power supplies for our smartphones and cell phones in general have not kept pace with the technology.

 

[karnovaran]

I had that checked, I think.

Like I said, I don't write this up entirely to removing the facebook account from the social networking... I think it's also the process of 'breaking it in' so to speak, but I'm glad to have the facebook account gone because it would sync hundreds of contacts to my phone that I didn't want to be there.

Good point. I have only about 70 Facebook friends (yep, I'm a loser) so it's not a big issue for me. There should certainly be a way to have the dialer show you only the people you would ever call. I've switched over to Dialer One for it's T9 searching and highly recommend checking it out if you haven't yet.

 

[pauldroidr2d2]

Good point. I have only about 70 Facebook friends (yep, I'm a loser) so it's not a big issue for me. There should certainly be a way to have the dialer show you only the people you would ever call. I've switched over to Dialer One for it's T9 searching and highly recommend checking it out if you haven't yet.

LOL, I'm right there with you on the friends thing.

What is Dialer One and T9. I've seen the app, but have never installed it since I didn't know what either of those things are.

 

[karnovaran]

LOL, I'm right there with you on the friends thing.

What is Dialer One and T9. I've seen the app, but have never installed it since I didn't know what either of those things are.

It's a replacement for the stock dialer. It looks much like the HTC Sense dialer if you've played with an Incredible or Eris. T9 search means if you want to dial your friend Frank, you would hit 3 (for F) then 7 (for R) and he should pop right up. It's a free app, just grab it and see.

 

[cguella]

I bought the extended life battery $50, fully charged it overnight and still did not make it through the day. To be fair I will give it a few more days to "break in" but that is horrendous.

 

[pauldroidr2d2]

There is an extended battery for the SD?

Sent from my DROID2 using Tapatalk

 

[Kmcferrin]

Not sure what the SD is, but Verizon does sell an extended battery for the Droid 2. It's got an MAH rating 35% higher than the stock battery.

It is a bit useless to talk about battery life on the Droid 2 without talking about how you use it. I had battery issues on my previous phone so the first thing that I did was tweak mine. I gutted all of the Motorola widgets. I set daytime sync to once every 30 minutes. I disabled auto-bright and set it to about 20% brightness manually (which is bright enough everywhere except bright sunlight). My email accounts are configured for push (2 GMail and 1 Corporate Sync) so that I'm not POPing all day long. I only turn on GPS when I need it for maps, otherwise I let it use cell tower triangulation for location services. I don't use wifi, but I do leave bluetooth on all day because I use it with my handsfree link in my Acura. I use it a fair amount during the day. I usually unplug it at around 8am in the morning, and I don't typically get the low battery warning (15%) until after 10pm, sometimes as late as midnight. So that's a good 12-14 hours before I get down to 15%, but I've only had it for 5 days.

 

[dj_elite]

like i mentioned earlier, no problems now.

no motorola widgets, 2 gmail accounts, auto brightness, background sync ON, WiFi on when i'm home. i got ~15 hours yesterday with a few hours of voice calling and still had 20% when I plugged it in.

 

[floydomatic]

I've had my droid 2 for about a week. I posted in an another thread about the battery life but I'll put a litter here again. I get about 14 hours typically out of it under medium to heavy use including messaging, email, browsing, some calling, and music. I keep wifi, gps, and bluetooth off unless i need them.

Smartphones are inherent to bad battery life but there should be no reason why you can't make your droid last at least a full day and then charge it at night.