Battery Drains in Less Than 6 Hours - Idle

[MaraJadeSharpie]

Hi everyone,

I bought a Skyrocket back in May, and I have absolutely loved it. However...! Recently my battery has been draining in 5-6 hours, while sitting dark with no applications running. And by draining, I mean literally dropping from 100% to 5% in about 5 and a half hours. This has happened twice this week. I'll describe the two incidents:

1. I unplugged my phone at about 10:30pm, it was at 100%. I checked my applications, exited everything, turned off the screen and went to sleep. At 3:45am, it woke me up buzzing to be charged, it was at 5%. Normally it will last an entire night (8-10 hours) and lose only about 30%, 50% at the most.

2. I left work at 5:15pm, phone was at 100%. I used it a couple times to visit a website here or there. The screen was off about 98% of the time, though in this case I did have the web still running with one page open. At 10:30pm, I was getting ready to go to bed, checked the phone and it was at 20%. Again, much quicker than normal.

In both cases, I had Wireless, Bluetooth and GPS off. I almost always leave all of them off, and I am positive they were off in these situations, as I checked each time when the battery went so low. So anyway, I'm just wondering if anyone has any ideas what could be causing it to drain so quickly? As a comparison case, I unplugged the phone last night at about 1:00am, 100%. At 8:00am, as I got to work, it was at 74%. So that's 7 hours running dark, and it only dropped 26%. :|

I'm not sure what information is relevant, so:

Android Version: 2.3.6
Baseband Version: I727UCLA3
Kernel Version: 2.6.35.11
Build Number: GINGERBREAD.UCLA3

Thanks so much for any input! Appreciate it.

 

[typos]

Android is known for a lot of good and cool things. However one bad thing they are notorious for is their sometimes terrible battery life. Here are a few tricks to get to most out of your battery during a long work day. Using any combination of these will help improve your batteries performance.



1. No Live Wallpaper or Animation

I know they are cool and they are fun to show off. But those interactive animated backgrounds and transitions does a number on your battery performance.



2. No scrollable or large widgets

This is personally my less favorite way to save on battery because I love my scrollable widgets. But they don’t love your battery. If you are going into a situation where you know its going to be a long time before your going to be able to recharge your device, the scrollable widget need to go.



3. Turn off Auto-Brightness

I know a lot of places say for you to keep this setting on. Despite the fact the feature is nice to have and useful there is something about it some places don’t tell you.. That sensor used up to 20 mAh (mill ampere-hour). That’s not to say that this feature will always drain your battery. But if you are going somewhere were extended battery life is needed, I would suggest turning this off and finding a screen brightness below 40% that you can live with.



4. If you have a WiMAX Phone (Sprint 4G), turn off the 4G

Your probably thinking, I bought this phone because its 4G. So why would I turn it off? Well for one that 4G is a vampire sucking the life juice out of your phone. Plus thee are a lot are area within 4G service.



5. If you have HSPA+ (T-Mobile and AT&T), turn off WCDMA

Again, I know the point of having a 4G phone is getting the 4G speed. But do you need all of the time? If you need to extra battery life you can probably live with just having GSM service for a while.



6. Manually sync your accounts.

Manually syncing your accounts maybe an unwanted extra step but by doing so you keep your phone from randomly syncing through out the day. By limited the amount of time your phone connect online you save battery life.



7. Disable Background Data

Not every app needs to “call home”. But out the box your Android device is set up to allow apps to send and receive data anytime they want. Don’t let them. Your battery will thank you.



8. Disable always on mobile

Disabling this feature means you phone will not always be connected to the internet. This will mean you will have to manually refresh certain internet connected apps and you will have to turn this feature back on when you want to use the Market. But in the long run it will be worth it for your battery.



9. Disable Location Services

Does everyone always need to know where you are? Of course not! These services do have some usefulness such as for weather apps but you can always just tell the app where you are. If it’s not totally necessary for you to have the location service on, turn it off. Or at the least make sure the GPS is disabled.



10. Turn off Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth

These are features you normally don’t need to have on every second of the day. Most people who have a problem with battery life due to these simple forget to turn it off. If you are using Android 2.1 or higher, have the Power Control widget on one for your home screens. It will let you know what’s on and off.



11. Disable Auto-rotate screen

This is another small way to save battery life. If you like typing in landscape however this one is not something you are going to want to do.



12. Galaxy S owners, use as much black as possible

The Super AMOLED display is one of the most beautiful phone displays available. One of the plus sides to it is the amount of power it takes to display black. It does not use a backlight when displaying blacks therefore it uses less power. So use a black background when you want to squeeze every last minute for power out of your phone.

Source

I hope this was of some help.

You might want to consider getting an Anker 2200 mAH battery. I got one and it has been a big help.

 

[oswipee]

Go to applications. Then all applications. One by one look for unused applications so you can disable applications then force stop it too.

 

[oswipee]

Few applications such as Calender and "news and whether" along with acuweather have settings where you want to make sure you either disable the refresh intervals or set it so that it refrshes every 6 hours as opposed to every 1 hour. That alone will save you battery.

And you want to take vibration off for anything. Vibration drains!

 

[jedah]

Sounds like you may have the dreaded charger wakelock problem referenced in this thread:

[HOW TO] Fix Your Skyrocket's Battery Life - xda-developers

 

[gargoyle_48770]

i would agree with jadah most likely its a charger wakelock, or another wakelock. i would download cpu spy and see if your phone is going into sleep mode.