Battery drain making me crazy

[tunie]

I've read a number of posts about battery drain, but couldn't find a definitive solution. I've had the phone for 25 days, cycled the battery numerous times, but it still drains so fast I can't believe it. I'm not using MBlur. Using GoLauncher, gmail email app (5 email addresses). I have 7 widgets that update daily and several apps I can't stop from launching and running, though CPU use shows 0%, so I'm not worried about them. Display is taking the most power at 38% with phone idle(?) at 12% and Cell Standby(?) at 10%. I've been sitting here working watching my battery go from 50% to 30% without me doing a thing. I have 4 screens (one is almost empty) no live wallpapers or anything else "live" like weather, etc.

A friend of mine has 200 apps on his DroidX with no battery drain problem. I have a fraction of that, and yet my Atrix battery drains at midday with very mild use. I must be doing something wrong.

<edit> I just went through and removed all the widgets from MotoBlur and set several apps to auto-end when the screen times out. Doing that caused my battery to go from 30% to 15%.

Thanks for any help...

 

[sk8trix]

Dude i don't mean any disrespect but with 200 apps what do you expect especially with them all running in the background.Even if you have a fraction(assuming 50-70 or so) if you let them all run all the time it is gonna kill your battery.The phone battery is really good too so its not an Atrix problem.
My suggestion get a task manager from the market even a free one and set which apps should be killed and which shouldn't,also set your screen timeout or brightness to something more reasonable.It should help.If the problem goes on you might just have a defective battery.Also remember to cycle your battery.Some people say wait untill it completely dies to re charge,personally i don't like being left with a dead phone so wait at least till 5-10% and recharge prefferebly with the phone shut off.

 

[jess.hickey]

Did you delete all the widgets from the MotoBlur pages before you switched to GoLauncher? Double check that and make sure there isn't a widget in there that is still updating frequently (if I'm not mistaken I believe those can still run in the background).

Secondly, you mentioned that you couldn't stop several apps from launching/running. Are you using a task killer? Have you set the native task killer to kill certain apps? You have to be careful with task killers as certain apps will continuously auto restart after being killed and this can crush you battery.

If none of the above is true, try downloading Where's My Droid Power and Watchdog Lite. You can use them to see if anything has gone rouge.

Lastly, it could be a bad battery. Give some of the above mentioned stuff a shot and if none of it works, head to an AT&T store and they will replace your battery at no cost.

Good luck!!!

 

[tunie]

Dude i don't mean any disrespect but with 200 apps what do you expect especially with them all running in the background.Even if you have a fraction(assuming 50-70 or so) if you let them all run all the time it is gonna kill your battery.The phone battery is really good too so its not an Atrix problem.
My suggestion get a task manager from the market even a free one and set which apps should be killed and which shouldn't,also set your screen timeout or brightness to something more reasonable.It should help.If the problem goes on you might just have a defective battery.Also remember to cycle your battery.Some people say wait untill it completely dies to re charge,personally i don't like being left with a dead phone so wait at least till 5-10% and recharge prefferebly with the phone shut off.

Oh, I don't have 200 apps. That's a friend of mine who's using the Droid X. I have 17 apps running, a few of which I don't use but can't get rid of: SocialNet, Gesture Search, MediaShare and TextMessages. They run no matter what I do. I have my display set to dim to 35% after 30 seconds and then it goes to black after one minute. I do have a display brightness app loaded that I really like, so was hoping I could keep it. It's called Display Brightness and it puts a bar on my screens that I can hit to adjust brightness. Beyond that, it's email, browser, voice search, Calendar, Maps, Places, Navigation. I have 4 widget shortcuts for quick calls to family. I also use an app called DaysLeft. I just love it because it shows me a countdown to an important event. I do have a few more apps in my app drawer, camera, video camera, clock, calculator, GoSMS, Gallery, DolphinBrowser (just trying it out) GoContacts and Advanced Task Manager. I also have a few hundred songs on my SD card, but the player isn't running unless I tap it.

I didn't think this was too much for the phone, but maybe I'm wrong. I've read and read about battery issues and have tried to eliminate anything that could be causing drain. Wifi, GPS are off. In fact, I've set just about everything that didn't ship with the phone to stop running when my screen times out. I can only think I'm missing something, somewhere.

<edit>Watchdog lite shows that nothing is really standing out. Android System is the biggest hog at 3.5%, besidesWatchdog Lite which is at 3.7%. Everything else is at 0% but for a few apps like Dialer, Data Manager Service which are all under 0.2%.

I'm a noob so I don't know how to read all this but, it doesn't appear that anything is guzzling power. Nothing is running in the background except that pesky Messages app that shipped with the phone. I've killed it twice, but it just keeps coming back. Even that is only at 0.7% I just can't see anything that would cause battery drain. I'll head over to Costco to see if I can get another battery. Maybe it is just the battery.

Thanks...

 

[tunie]

Did you delete all the widgets from the MotoBlur pages before you switched to GoLauncher? Double check that and make sure there isn't a widget in there that is still updating frequently (if I'm not mistaken I believe those can still run in the background).

Secondly, you mentioned that you couldn't stop several apps from launching/running. Are you using a task killer? Have you set the native task killer to kill certain apps? You have to be careful with task killers as certain apps will continuously auto restart after being killed and this can crush you battery.

If none of the above is true, try downloading Where's My Droid Power and Watchdog Lite. You can use them to see if anything has gone rouge.

Lastly, it could be a bad battery. Give some of the above mentioned stuff a shot and if none of it works, head to an AT&T store and they will replace your battery at no cost.

Good luck!!!

I did delete them, but not until after I loaded GoLauncher. I used Home Switch from the marketplace to switch to Motoblur and then deleted all the widgets.

I don't have a task killer, though I did use Android Assistance to kill processes for some, but they do keep coming back. I'll look on the marketplace for a task killer to see if I can get some of these apps to stop once and for all.

In Android Assistant I noticed that my battery was running at 101f when I was deleting MotoBlur widgets. The phone was awfully hot. Could that be causing the battery drain?

I'll download Where's My Droid Power and Watchdog Lite to see where the power is going. At idle, the CPU info shows 95%-100%. Is that normal? I'm not using the phone.

Thanks for your help. I'll do some more investigating before I try a new battery.

 

[jhzafrani]

When you go to the battery manager, what does it say the most battery usage is?

I had the same type of issue after I upgraded to the latest version and found out that it was actually the SpeedNet application that was using up 48% of my battery life (of course, I had to check my download and upload speeds after the update ). I uninstalled it and the battery life is great. Moderate usage today (unplugged at 7:00am and it is right now 2:10pm) and I am still at 70%.

 

[Major]

What you do in these instances is go to Settings=>Battery Manager and Settings=>Applications=>Running Services and see what app(s) is/are running down your battery. Sounds to me like you've done that already, so my guess is that your battery is faulty. I recommend replacing it.

 

[Krak-a-Lakn]

At idle your CPU is 95-100% - That's not right at all.
At idle, mine is around 20%. (that's with a live wallpaper running)

Every time my Android phone (either my N1 or the Atrix) suddenly started draining the battery - it was always an application gone rogue.
The first thing to try is to reboot the phone. I've assumed you have tried that?
The next thing is to start uninstalling apps. Once on my N1 it was a launcher app that was causing huge battery usage, another time it was a live wallpaper app.

 

[tunie]

My phone has been sitting charging through my laptop. I just checked the battery and it's running at 104f. According to Watchdog Lite, there is 0% CPU in background Android apps running. Memory is 110424 kb / 837632 kb. I'm confused because it looks like hardly anything is running and yet my phone is running at 104f. Does that mean I have a bad battery or, well, what does it mean? lol I'm such an idiot with this phone...sorry

 

[tunie]

At idle your CPU is 95-100% - That's not right at all.
At idle, mine is around 20%. (that's with a live wallpaper running)

Every time my Android phone (either my N1 or the Atrix) suddenly started draining the battery - it was always an application gone rogue.
The first thing to try is to reboot the phone. I've assumed you have tried that?
The next thing is to start uninstalling apps. Once on my N1 it was a launcher app that was causing huge battery usage, another time it was a live wallpaper app.

Now the CPU is running at 9% with Phone Idle at 11% and Display at 40% with background apps running at 6.5% I have rebooted the phone, not by pulling the battery, but just turning the phone off and on again.

I'll uninstall some apps. I'm not using them anyway; was just going to check them out before deleting them.

<edit> how can wifi show as using 5% if it's off?

Thank you so much!

 

[tunie]

What you do in these instances is go to Settings=>Battery Manager and Settings=>Applications=>Running Services and see what app(s) is/are running down your battery. Sounds to me like you've done that already, so my guess is that your battery is faulty. I recommend replacing it.

I have checked running apps and the battery and also killed some apps that shipped with the phone, though they seem to come back pretty quickly. If this doesn't improve over the next day and if the phone keeps boiling, I'll switch out the battery to see if things improve.

Thank you.

 

[sk8trix]

how long have you had your phone.Most people noticed that it takes the battery about a week to get set up right and hold a charge right so maybe that is your issue.It took my battery a whole 3 cycles for it to break in and hold a charge,just an opinion

 

[Jonneh]

Honestly, I'd recommend to stop using that task manager to kill your apps. As someone else said in the beginning of this thread, some are meant to stay on and will continuously reload which crushes your battery more (you're killing it and causing it to restart itself every time). I don't expect this to magically solve your problem, but it's just something I noticed someone mentioned earlier, and your replies seem to still hint at the fact that you're still killing the apps that come with the phone (like the stock messaging app, voice, etc). I hope it helps at least a little bit. :\

As for the cycling thing, li-on batteries don't need to be cycled, and actually it does more harm to your battery's longevity than good. However, it seems like only ~5% of the internet population is aware of this, so everyone spreads the wrong info around, unfortunately.


http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

"Capacity drop as part of cycling. A pool of new 1500mA Li-ionbatteries for smart phone istested on a Cadex C7400 battery analyzer. All 11 pouch packs show a starting capacity of 88–94 percent and decrease in capacity to 73–84 percent after 250 full discharge cycles (2010)."

 

[sk8trix]

but you can chose wich apps the task killer doesnt touch at all so this restarting doesnt happen unless im mistaken on mine i keep about 6 apps on al the time that the task killer wont bother at all

edit* cycling is the reason my battery holds about 19 hour charges maybe its just myth then but i noticed the battery life get better

 

[tunie]

Well, because I'm suuuuuch a newbie, I didn't notice that the wifi was connecting all the time, well connecting and disconnecting, all the time. I don't need wifi since I have unlimited data so, I disabled the autostart and guess what? Battery is at 40% after6 hours of use. That's pretty good in my book!

Thanks for everyone's help!

 

[sk8trix]

hey check your data plan unlimited isnt really unlimited just dont go voer your allowence

 

[dalvik]

Maybe his plan is grandfathered... if thats the case i envy him... lol

 

[sk8trix]

me too GRRRR

 

[tunie]

how long have you had your phone.Most people noticed that it takes the battery about a week to get set up right and hold a charge right so maybe that is your issue.It took my battery a whole 3 cycles for it to break in and hold a charge,just an opinion

I was thinking the same thing, but after 24 days and cycling it as least a dozen times, I decided it had to go. I picked up a new battery, cycled it but today, still draining. I don't know. It's probably something I'm doing because I'm such a noob with this phone, but I don't know what. I killed all but 17 apps. 5 of them update at least once per day. I just don't know what it could be. You know, there's so much in this phone that I wouldn't be surprised if I'm just missing something. I'd spend more time investigating but, with the onset of a sound quality issue just 2 days ago, I'll probably swap it out.

Thanks...

 

[phatboy-p]

How is the reception where you live/work? When your phone loses a connection it constantly searches for a tower until it requires a signal. This murders your battery.

Go to the battery statistics and look at cell stand by. See what percentage you are without a signal.

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