Short battery life

RyanD8

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Even if I barely use my phone, it will not make it through a day on a charge. The battery usage screen says: 3 hours since unplugged, cell standby 42%, phone idle 27%, Android system 12%, display 9%. The battery is at less than 50%.

Are there other processes in the background draining my battery that don't appear in the usage screen? Is there an app that displays every process?
 

packerbacker

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Verizon phones have tons of bloatware, programs that are preinstalled in the phone that run all the time. If you tweak your settings/brightness level, your battery will last with "minimal use". Sometimes an app that you have is draining the battery and you don't know it. I also was told once that clearing the cache of your apps every once in awhile improves performance too. Just a few tips off the top of my head.
 

Rackness

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I use my phone alot. I use it as my primary music player it runs music for at least 4 hrs everyday and I text alot. My battery lasts all day no problem. I have wifi, gps, bluetooth etc. Turned off unless I am using them. I have the screen brightness on auto and I kill any Apps I am not using when I am done with them. I always have the music player and launcher pro running plus of use swift key. I am not rooted but all of my verizon Apps are killed and hidden. I think my battery life is pretty good with this setup. Try playing around with some of your settings good battery life can be had without doing anything major. Hopefully this helps good luck.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk
 

robocknjo1

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How is your reception?
Cell phones use more power when they have low or no bars than they do with full bars. The phone will use more power as it tries to find a signal
 

Cory Streater

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There are so many things that factor into battery life:

  • GPS usage.
  • Auto sync settings for email, Facebook, and other social networking apps.
  • Signal strength.
  • Backlight/screen usage.
  • Backlight brightness level.
  • Use of task killers (unless you absolutely know what you're doing - I advise AGAINST them).
  • Applications that synchronize with the network (e.g., weather apps)
  • Bluetooth usage.
  • CDMA network usage - web surfing, email, streaming media and any other app that utilizes the network.

And the list goes on. Bottom line, depending on how much you use or tweak the items above items, will affect battery life dramatically. Battery technology has not changed. It's like a gas tank. The harder you drive the more you consume. It's rare for a smartphone like the Fascinate to get through a full day when you take full advantage of its features.
 

RyanD8

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There are so many things that factor into battery life:

  • GPS usage.
  • Auto sync settings for email, Facebook, and other social networking apps.
  • Signal strength.
  • Backlight/screen usage.
  • Backlight brightness level.
  • Use of task killers (unless you absolutely know what you're doing - I advise AGAINST them).
  • Applications that synchronize with the network (e.g., weather apps)
  • Bluetooth usage.
  • CDMA network usage - web surfing, email, streaming media and any other app that utilizes the network.

And the list goes on. Bottom line, depending on how much you use or tweak the items above items, will affect battery life dramatically. Battery technology has not changed. It's like a gas tank. The harder you drive the more you consume. It's rare for a smartphone like the Fascinate to get through a full day when you take full advantage of its features.

GPS, Bluetooth, and Wifi are all turned off. The widgets are all set to update once per hour. Screen was off almost all of the time. I uninstalled the task killers.

One thing that might be draining the battery is MailDroid because I had it set to keep the connection open to the server. That was the whole point of installing that app. I changed it to once per hour to see if that helps.

There are a lot of background apps that keep restarting themselves. I may have to permanently delete them.
 

Cory Streater

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Those apps aren't necessarily "running" so to speak. Check out this article. It clears up a lot of misunderstanding about Android and apps that appear to be running in the background.

That said, I would expect your battery performance to be on the higher side, based on what you've described.
 

Rackness

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When you say hidden, you mean hidden using LauncherPro (or another launcher)?
I have them hidden using LauncherPro pro and I am not using a task killer app it am using the stock task manager to stop tasks manually when. I am not using them


Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk
 

SeatownGST

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I installed 'battery indicator 3.0.1" this weekend and it doubles up with the built in battery gauge. I'm trying to learn more about how to tweak this phone but so far it's pretty wacky.

titanium backup has been trying to uninstall it now for about 3 minutes as well.

/facepalm
 

flamingoezz

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i turned off animations and haptic response in my settings..seems to help a bit so far.

can someone explain hiding/closing verizon bloatware? do i need launcher pro, or is it just a matter of using a task killer when i boot up the phone? if i do need LP, do it require root?
 

RyanD8

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It seems like the battery life is back to normal today, so I'm suspecting that the problem was MailDroid. I'll put it back like it was tomorrow to verify.
 

packerbacker

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Sometimes apps are the culprit. Certain apps accumulate TONS of cache (Twicca, for example), and I'm not tech savvy enough to know if that effects battery or not (can someone deny or confirm)?

Something I am now doing with my SwitchPro widget I bought is turning on and off airplane mode (among other things of course). I'm a fulltime student, and don't REALLY need my phone to receive texts and calls while I'm on campus, bc I'm supposed to be in class or studying. To pass the time if I get to class early or something, I boot up a game. When I'm on my way home and in the evening, airplane mode goes off, and my battery is conserved tremendously because of this. I know that solution won't work for everyone, but for me during the week it does!

I have another random question that maybe someone can deny or confirm: if I turned ON WiFi (if I wanted to use Pandora or something, for example), does that automatically turn off 3G for the time being?
 

wowser

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Quick question on this subject. For me when I click on Battery Use, it says that the Display is always using > 70% of the battery. I've had my brightness setting on "Auto". Besides changing the brightness to the lowest level, is there anything else i should do to stop the Display from using so much battery? I've set Screen Timeout to 30sec.

Thanks!
 

maildroiddev

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GPS, Bluetooth, and Wifi are all turned off. The widgets are all set to update once per hour. Screen was off almost all of the time. I uninstalled the task killers.

One thing that might be draining the battery is MailDroid because I had it set to keep the connection open to the server. That was the whole point of installing that app. I changed it to once per hour to see if that helps.

There are a lot of background apps that keep restarting themselves. I may have to permanently delete them.

With a connection open, it should not be draining your battery. The only thing that will drain your battery in MailDroid is if you change the 'sleep mode'.
 

mpneill

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After pulling my phone off the charger (full nights charge) the battery is down to 96% in about 5 minutes. Few phone calls and checking emails and by 4PM my phone must be charged... this is worse than my Storm2. Is this normal for this phone? For android?
 

Eulogy32

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I must say that I am actually very impressed by my battery life. I routinely get 1.5 to 2 days worth of battery out of it with regular use. My GPS is always on, screen is set to auto brightness, I use the music player or Pandora regularly, and I use Google Talk quite a bit. However, I rarely make or receive phone calls, which is a battery hog. It also helps that I am coming from a Palm Pre, whose battery lasted all of 6 hours on a good day.

I also can confirm that being in a low signal area will cause you to have absolutely wretched battery.
 

Gitykins

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Quick question on this subject. For me when I click on Battery Use, it says that the Display is always using > 70% of the battery. I've had my brightness setting on "Auto". Besides changing the brightness to the lowest level, is there anything else i should do to stop the Display from using so much battery? I've set Screen Timeout to 30sec.

Thanks!

No, that's how most people's are. It's logical really. Even with the screen pretty low and a short timeout, it would still be using the most battery power unless you use other other apps/services more than normal (Music player, WiFi, etc). 3G is pretty easy to run with little battery and there really isn't too much that can come close to the display without some considerable effort/heavy use or an error with the phone.

Here's mine

2rfvep0.png
 

wowser

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Thanks Gitykins. Right now i get about 7hrs max but I'm playing with the phone constantly. I'm hoping when the wow factor of having a new phone dies down, my battery life will improve.
 

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