Epic 4G Touch Battery Life is Terrible

[Robcy]

To OP;
Get Watchdog Lite, and OS Monitor. You will notice that suspend, and event/0 will take over when the phone tries to go to sleep with the screen off. I have tried everything, and the only things that have worked it turning off Background Data, and this morning doing a hard reset. I got the Touch on day 1, and it had excellent battery life until 10/1/11. After that I was lucky to get 9 hours of life from a full charge. 10% to 15% per hours with the screen off was the norm. I had great 3g signal, and WiFi at all times, and my usage habits did not change. Android OS was 60%, and watchdog would alert on suspend, and event/0 all the time. Since unchecking background data is not an option I finally gave in, and hard reset the phone. Today my battery life is back to normal, and I am seriously hoping that it stays that way.

 

[oskar1995]

When I was seeing the battery bleed I was using Accuweather for the weather provider. Do tell what your theory is...

Epsom, looks like my theory is incorreect I was wondering if it had something to do with Google as a weather provider. I noticed that it wouldn't even pull weather and left my device awake for awhile. Accuweather seems to be okay. Not sure what might be causing it but I've been doing well the past few days.

 

[jazzmanx33]

First, I want to thank everyone in this thread for all the help! You guys rock!

After reading a lot of posts in this and other threads, I want to ask this question: How many people out there have to go through a bunch of steps to get great battery life, and how many have great battery life out of the box with no extra work? It seems there are people on both sides, and I just want a rough count. I realize that there are many bad apps/widgets out there that eat our batteries, but aside from that how much work do you all actually have to do to get your battery working optimally?

Thanks again.

 

[ajonesma]

Did you guys really expect the battery life to be great? its a 4G phone with a huge AMOLED display, of course the battery is going to be horrible.

 

[oskar1995]

First, I want to thank everyone in this thread for all the help! You guys rock!

After reading a lot of posts in this and other threads, I want to ask this question: How many people out there have to go through a bunch of steps to get great battery life, and how many have great battery life out of the box with no extra work? It seems there are people on both sides, and I just want a rough count. I realize that there are many bad apps/widgets out there that eat our batteries, but aside from that how much work do you all actually have to do to get your battery working optimally?

Thanks again.

Jazzman,

More than happy to answer this question. My great battery life is an "out of the box" experience. The only thing I changed (and this was more annoyance than anything else) was the update frequency of the Sprint Zone. Nothing of value came from that.

I dont use any Advanced Task Killers or Power Management Systems (i.e. Juice Defender). I let GMail (3 accounts) sync instantly (I'm impatient I want my junk email NOW). I have Beautiful Widget (home small with the date and weather) update every time I wake up the phone (which happens to be quite a bit). I do not have an active 4G antenna since I'm not in a good area for it. I do not leave WiFi active all day (just seems counter intuitive to me but I will use it when home). Bluetooth is on all day (again I'm impatient I want it connected to my car AS SOON as I get in). I spend about 2-3 hours per day with it connected to Bluetooth in my car.

I guess I should consider myself part of the fortunate group. My Photon required an occasional fill up mid day to give me peace of mind I would get through my day. My Gingerbread Evo REQUIRED that fill up and so far in just shy of a month with this phone I've had to fill up ONCE, and that was a result of playing with it for a LONG time in the morning, and leaving something open that did some damage. I probably could have made it through the day (I was averaging about 7% per hour at that point), but I didn't want to run out.

 

[Epsom_D2]

I guess I would fall in the group of good out of the box with no tuning, until I installed a bad program/widget.

The same was true of my EVO though, and it got significantly better battery life after I put Myns and then Synergy on it.

Chalk it up to good luck.

 

[GCMS]

I guess I would fall in the group of good out of the box with no tuning, until I installed a bad program/widget.

The same was true of my EVO though, and it got significantly better battery life after I put Myns and then Synergy on it.

Chalk it up to good luck.

What's Myns and snyergy? I have task killer is that effective enough to conserve battery?

 

[jazzmanx33]

Jazzman,

More than happy to answer this question. My great battery life is an "out of the box" experience. The only thing I changed (and this was more annoyance than anything else) was the update frequency of the Sprint Zone. Nothing of value came from that.

I dont use any Advanced Task Killers or Power Management Systems (i.e. Juice Defender). I let GMail (3 accounts) sync instantly (I'm impatient I want my junk email NOW). I have Beautiful Widget (home small with the date and weather) update every time I wake up the phone (which happens to be quite a bit). I do not have an active 4G antenna since I'm not in a good area for it. I do not leave WiFi active all day (just seems counter intuitive to me but I will use it when home). Bluetooth is on all day (again I'm impatient I want it connected to my car AS SOON as I get in). I spend about 2-3 hours per day with it connected to Bluetooth in my car.

I guess I should consider myself part of the fortunate group. My Photon required an occasional fill up mid day to give me peace of mind I would get through my day. My Gingerbread Evo REQUIRED that fill up and so far in just shy of a month with this phone I've had to fill up ONCE, and that was a result of playing with it for a LONG time in the morning, and leaving something open that did some damage. I probably could have made it through the day (I was averaging about 7% per hour at that point), but I didn't want to run out.

Ideally, this would be how I would want this phone to work, and by most accounts, this is how the phone should work. I'm doing some more testing this morning after the factory reset, as I stated, and I should have data shortly, but I still have a funny feeling the phone/battery is faulty. We shall see...

Thanks for the reply.

 

[oskar1995]

Ideally, this would be how I would want this phone to work, and by most accounts, this is how the phone should work. I'm doing some more testing this morning after the factory reset, as I stated, and I should have data shortly, but I still have a funny feeling the phone/battery is faulty. We shall see...

Thanks for the reply.

I think it is certainly possible that there is a problem with the battery/device. Dguidry seems to have had some success with having the device replaced and it doesn't sound like you are doing anything that would impact the battery the way you have described.

 

[skyo12]

If your battery is draining that much, I wouldn't hesitate to return it. As I mentioned, I'm not getting the ridiculously long battery life as some of the people on this forum but I get acceptable battery life.

I fully charged last night at 11:30, unplugged and went to bed. Woke up at 6:30 and the battery was at 94%. I have background data enabled and all the syncing as normal.

 

[jazzmanx33]

I think it is certainly possible that there is a problem with the battery/device. Dguidry seems to have had some success with having the device replaced and it doesn't sound like you are doing anything that would impact the battery the way you have described.

Thanks. I'm doing some more testing this morning, after the reset, and as of now, things look much more promising... color me shocked. I'll report again with screenshots once a few more hors go by. I may not have to replace it after all... (/crosses fingers)

 

[JayWill]

To answer your earlier question, I got great battery life out of the box, so I never really dug too deeply into Milo's post. I did do some app testing though, and even did one factory reset early on as I was testing and tweaking things. If I identify something that may be causing unnecessary battery drain I tend to unintsall first and ask questions later. An example is the Go Contacts/Dialer app. Shortly after a call came in I hit the ignore button and put the phone down. About an hour later I happened to look at my battery status and noticed that my phone had been wakelocked. The only thing that had changed was Go Contacts so I promptly killed it and uninstalled. I don't know what events led to the wakelock, but I know it hasn't happened again since the app uninstall.

Anyhoo, most battery issues fall into three categories ... poor signal, application issues, and defective battery/phone. Your signal is strong, so it's probably one of the last two. Your factory reset and running clean while you test will help you determine which of the final two it is.

Good luck!

 

[milominderbinde]

...Since unchecking background data is not an option I finally gave in, and hard reset the phone...

To turn off Background data: Tap Home > Menu > Accounts and sync > Background data OFF

This turns off Background data and Auto sync.

 

[jazzmanx33]

UPDATE:

All was well this morning until about 1h40m ago, and it seems the battery took a nosedive again.

I unplugged the phone from the charger at around 11am, and for the first hour or so of getting emails, texts and checking the battery, I had used about 2% (98-97% at that time), and I was cautiously optimistic. Then I received an unknown call which was ignored, and then shortly after another unknown call that was also ignored. After that, the battery exhibited it's "normal" behavior of draining while doing nothing. I uninstalled every program I could after the reset, and installed absolutely nothing new afterwards. The only things I did were:

- Set up email accounts (Gmail push, Exchange 5min peak, 15 min off-peak)
- Set up SocialHub connections to Facebook and Twitter (3 hours for messages, 1 day for contacts and calendar)
- Connect to Gtalk
- Set up auto refresh for AccuWeather widget for 3 hours

Attached are the screenshots after 2h31m. Discouraged to say the least. Anyone willing to call it? :'(

 

[Robcy]

After the hard reset, which was assist by a sprint tech I installed everything back, and today under normal usage after 6 hours, and 45 minutes my battery is at 78%. yesterday at this time I was at 21%. The hard reset appears to have corrected the issue. hopefully it will not return.

 

[creighton]

Are all of these usage reports without the 4G radio on? I'm more than 10hrs off charge, albeit with fairly minimal usage, but with Exchange ActiveSync and 4G radio on. Battery is at 70%. That's about a 3%/hr drain which seems pretty good with 4G on. On previous phones if I left 4G on the battery would be dead in 6 hours.

 

[milominderbinde]

UPDATE:

All was well this morning until about 1h40m ago, and it seems the battery took a nosedive again.

I unplugged the phone from the charger at around 11am, and for the first hour or so of getting emails, texts and checking the battery, I had used about 2% (98-97% at that time), and I was cautiously optimistic. Then I received an unknown call which was ignored, and then shortly after another unknown call that was also ignored. After that, the battery exhibited it's "normal" behavior of draining while doing nothing. I uninstalled every program I could after the reset, and installed absolutely nothing new afterwards. The only things I did were:

- Set up email accounts (Gmail push, Exchange 5min peak, 15 min off-peak)
- Set up SocialHub connections to Facebook and Twitter (3 hours for messages, 1 day for contacts and calendar)
- Connect to Gtalk
- Set up auto refresh for AccuWeather widget for 3 hours

Attached are the screenshots after 2h31m. Discouraged to say the least. Anyone willing to call it? :'(

That 60% Android OS is telling us something is badly wrong.

Gtalk has killed many. Uninstall it for now.

And coincidentally the Weather Widget has gotten many others. Remove it for now.

Remove the FB and Twitter Social Hub stuff.

Please install Watchdog as shown in the 30+ Hours Battery Life and follow those other steps. Each step is important for power management and to find your battery suckers.

Until you go back to ground zero it is still almost impossible to tell what is going on. Break it all the way down to where the battery is great and then start adding things in one at a time.

Let us know what you see with Watchdog.

 

[dguidry12]

Having problems just take the phone back for a replacement. Why hold on to something that has these issues.. smh

 

[skyo12]

Quick question for those of you who are getting great battery life.

How many widgets do you have running? As much time I spent on organizing my home screen the way I want it, if the widgets are draining all the battery life I'm considering removing all of them and just going with 2 or 3 home screens.

 

[jazzmanx33]

Wall-O-Text Warning again:

So I just got back from 2 Sprint stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and boooooy am I not pleased. First, Manhattan:

I got to the store around 5:30, and the guy at the front ask me what's up. I said I was there to ask some questions about a possible faulty battery on my E4GT, and right off the bat he says "It's an Android phone; they are terrible with battery life. The screen alone will take most of it. Turn 4G off, don't sync your email, etc..." I explain that I am familiar with all that, and I've been an Android user for a long time, but this battery drain is excessive. He seemed to be understanding, and said that if it's within 14 days of purchase, he'd give me a replacement, only they were out of stock at that store. He suggested other stores in Manhattan, but I told him that would just go to the store I bought it from in Brooklyn, and I left that store.

In Brooklyn, I arrived at the store around 6:30pm, and they close at 7pm. There were about 3 others in the store but no one was being helped at the counter, so I walked up and inquired about my possible faulty battery. He immediately says "It's an Android phone. They are horrible with battery life. How long has it been since you charged?" I said it was around 11am since I took it off the charger, and I showed him the phone as it was (around 49%; it had actually been charged 10% at around 3pm when I was playing with USB stuff at my desk). He sees it and exclaims "WOW! You get some great battery life there! That will last you about 24 hours! I wish I got that on my phone! My EVO would have crapped out around 3pm. Your phone is fine!" I Explained to him that I had absolutely nothing installed, and that the phone was basically sitting idle in my pocket eating power for nothing, and still he says that it's fine. "All android phones, even all smartphones, eat power like that," he says. he told me to take the phone home and set it on the desk overnight, and when I wake up, it'll still be around 30%, which again is excellent. I again stress to him that NOTHING is installed or running on the system, 2 accounts are syncing every 3 hours and the screen had been off for most of the day. No gaming... no 4G... nothing that the phone should be able to run no problem, according to multiple professional and amateur sources, and he still says that's OK. He would be so lucky to have that kind of battery on his phone (funny enough his was another E4GT; I should have asked him to show me how long he's been on battery today, but I didn't think to ask)

Even other customers in the store, after hearing what I had been doing with the phone, said that the battery was probably faulty, but the agents refused to give me a new phone, and refused to acknowledge that a problem even had the possibility of existing in my case. So I thanked them for their help, and left the store; no new phone, no new battery and a feeling of uncertainty surrounding me.

So... what now? It's clear that my local Sprint employees have no intention of giving me even the chance of getting a new phone to see if the problem is valid. Is there a problem? Should I just be content with the fact that the phone will suck battery even while idling and virtually nothing running? Is it OK for the phone to get 8-9 hours under normal use? (texting, Facebook/Twitter, email, occasional videos and games, phone calls... the stuff that smartphones are made for?) Right now I'm at a loss... I have no answers. I can only go by the advice of the community, and that's you all.

Milo: I will try the things you suggested in your posted here, though I can't uninstall Gtalk and can only remove the AccuWeather widget from the home screen and can't remove it entirely. I will also re-implement the strategies you posted in your 30+ hour thread. My only hope is that I can squeeze as much out of the battery I can everyday and keep my use of this awesome device to a bare minimum, or get a spare battery. And here I thought the day of that ended with the EVO...

Thanks again all