battery life.....

I live in a area where the 4G LTE signal is poor, and when it is one bar at work, my phone was as warm as a hand warmer on steriods. Hooking it to the charger, it was staying at 20% charge, eating the power as fast as the charger tried to recharge! Even after 4 hours on the charger. By FORCING 3G and locking out 4G LTE, shutting off WiFi, bluetooth, and clearing the cache I now get battery lifetimes pretty much as good as I had before ICS update. You can not force 3G and locking out Verizon's 4G LTE by default, as it is grey'ed out. You have to work around their forcing LTE only if signal is available. Verizon needs to fix this. The WiFi also ate the battery fast, even though I sit 20 feet from an industrial high power wireless node with awesome signal strength, it was also heating the phone up. Verzion 4G LTE was showing up at -105dBm and 3 bars (which is quite bogus to show three bars! maybe a Verzion hack to make their network "look better") where 3G shows up at -46 dBm (every 3 dBm is twice the signal strength, fyi). The Strong Man needs to slap down Verizon hardcore over this.

By better on the battery, means it looks like I will easily get two days out of the standard stock battery that is a year old, like I did before the update.
 
48 hours since ICS upate...my battery life has been terrible with OEM Motorola Extended Batteries . I have 2 batteries and a charging dock that I use so I always have a battery charged and just swap out every morning before work..I am usually at 30% left after a 24 hours period when I change in the mornings when I was on GB.Since ICS about 9 hours is all I can get so far.FDR 2 days before the update and FDR after installing the update....less apps running now than when I was on GB. I have noticed Android OS is using over 50% of my battery power.I will give it a few more days and see what happens.Me using 2 different batteries rules out a battery problem.
btw,3G only area.
 
48 hours since ICS upate...my battery life has been terrible with OEM Motorola Extended Batteries . I have 2 batteries and a charging dock that I use so I always have a battery charged and just swap out every morning before work..I am usually at 30% left after a 24 hours period when I change in the mornings when I was on GB.Since ICS about 9 hours is all I can get so far.FDR 2 days before the update and FDR after installing the update....less apps running now than when I was on GB. I have noticed Android OS is using over 50% of my battery power.I will give it a few more days and see what happens.Me using 2 different batteries rules out a battery problem.
btw,3G only area.

Yesterday, I did an experiment. During my one hour drive to work, there is a 3G only area for about 45 minutes of my drive, and I'd turned on LTE (4G), and the phone ran very warm, and still sucked the battery down extremely fast, it discharged the phone 40% in just one hour! However, on my drive from work on the same roads, I had forced 3G (CDMA auto PRL) mode only (shut off 4G), and my phone didn't even feel warm at all, but cool. Guess what? The battery drain was almost not noticeable (under 5% for that hour).
 
Here are the results from the 2nd (maybe 3rd?) power cycle after wiping my cache.

bionicstats.jpg

This is definitely a return to form for my Bionic! 57 hours, and the phone was still at 10% power!

To get a clearer picture, I tend to keep it on Airplane Mode from 5-7 in the morning (the time I'm sleeping between my newspaper delivery job and when I wake up for my day job) and then again from 8:30a - 12p because the classroom I work in has walls that significantly muffles cellular and wi-fi signals. 4G is kept turned off unless I actively need it or I'm out shopping and *might* need it. When at home, I keep it connected to my home wi-fi with the phone set to stay connected even when the screen is powered down. 45 minutes of voice calls is actually above the usual average for me in a power cycle, and probably half of that was via Bluetooth through my car's sound system (phone was kept in my pocket, NOT on the charger). These changes are all done manually as I have disabled Smart Actions.


My current cycle, though, burned through battery life much faster and was down to roughly 25-30% after only 16-18 hours, and the only significant difference in my usage was...yep, using the 4G more! I streamed music over 4G via TuneIN radio for about 30 minutes, and it knocked out almost 10% of my battery. On Gingerbread, it would take about 1.5 hours to use up the same battery life.

So after letting ICS soak in and keeping tabs on my phone's stats, I can confidently say that, at least for my Bionic, the ICS update's biggest weakness is that it burns up more battery power than GB when it comes to being on the 4G LTE network.

Hopefully, that is an area where future phones will fare better.
 
I have been having trouble with my ext battery on ics as well. Usually charging 2-3x daily. I found out uninstalling Dolphin browser was a huge fix. I made it thru 13 hrs and only had 20% battery loss. I also disabled data while on wifi. Huge improvement in one day. Work in NYC so I want to try and see if the same holds true on 3G/4G all day vs wifi.
 
im glad to see im not the only person experiencing horrible battery loss.

I was running ICS leak .2233 before and it was a LOT better then the OTA. i run 3G most of the day and the battery barely lasts a few hours. worst part is it takes a giant leap
 
I'm chasing a problem on Stock-Rooted .246, on a stock battery. I don't charge at night, rather I charge in my office during the day. So my phone sits off the charger during the night so I get a good idea of battery drain in standby. Since loading .246 OTA, with data/sync/4g on sitting overnight I was seeing a 12% drop in a 7 hour overnight period, with GSam Battery Monitor showing most of the drain going to Kernal activity. Not bad I guess, but seems way high to me. In comparison my previous phone (Dinc2) would only drop about 4% overnight with data/sync on.

So in an attempt to improve it and get her to sleep, I turned off Mobile Data and Background sync, leaving just the cell radio on. It's my only phone so I'd like to at least be able to receive an emergency phone call in the middle of the night, god forbid. In the same 7 hour period, with mobile data/sync off, I saw an 18% drop, GSam saying 49% of that went to Kernal activity. So, no mobile data/sync, yet the Kernel is still that active, with more drain??? What in the world is the kernel doing, it should be in a deep sleep. Any insight?
 
One thng that really helped me with battery life and more importantly to save RAM was to set backgound processes to a maximum of four and to set it to kill all activities upon exit. There are in the developer options in settings. You might try that. Phone seems to run smoother, RAM never drops below 200 MB , and battery is better.
 
Can some take a look at my screenshot here. Why is wifi taking up any battery power? It has not been on at all today. I have been noticing this a lot lately. Is it running in the background? Or is my wifi widget causing this? Whatever the cause my battery life is horrific with the standard battery. Thanks for your help/advice.
 

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Take a look at your wifi settings:

Menu>SystemSettings>Wifi>Menu Button>Advanced. Make sure "Notify Me" is unchecked. Otherwise, Ics turns on the wifi every once in a while to see if there is any wifi out there to snag and if it finds something it will let you know. If not, you never hear from it....but it uses some power in the scan.
 
One thng that really helped me with battery life and more importantly to save RAM was to set backgound processes to a maximum of four and to set it to kill all activities upon exit. There are in the developer options in settings. You might try that. Phone seems to run smoother, RAM never drops below 200 MB , and battery is better.

Thanks, Just set the background process limit, we'll see what that does. I didn't check the "Don't keep activities" though, as I do like to multitask from time to time.

Digging further into my GSam stats, I'm seeing a crazy amount of wakelocks from the mediaserver....anyone find a solution for that?
 
My battery life went to hell after the ICS update! I mean BAD...I thought it was barely acceptable before the update, but now , its unbearable..... sometimes my OS uses up as much as my display! Now I wish I would have got the Razor Maxx.....

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Android Central Forums
 
Take a look at your wifi settings:

Menu>SystemSettings>Wifi>Menu Button>Advanced. Make sure "Notify Me" is unchecked. Otherwise, Ics turns on the wifi every once in a while to see if there is any wifi out there to snag and if it finds something it will let you know. If not, you never hear from it....but it uses some power in the scan.

Thanks for the reply but it was already unchecked. The 2 grayed out boxes beneath that item were checked, however. Not sure if that makes a difference.
 
I highly recommend the "Data Enabler" widget. I put it on my home screen for quick access and turn data off at night or when listening to music - basically whenever I don need it and I can go days without a charge now. For example, I'll be at 100% turn off data, go to bed and still be at 100% in the morning. Also can go all day at work listening to music with data off and drop to 80%. I don't need data on all the time so this has been a life saver especially since 4g kills battery like there's no tomorrow.
 

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