Battery Usage & correlation with Widgets?

[onthecouchagain]

Does anyone know if there's a correlation between how large widgets are (say between the Beautiful Widget Home Weather and the BW Home Weather Small) and battery life? In other words, if the larger the widget (font sizes, more elaborate fonts, etc), the more drain on the battery?

Ditto for say custom icons and custom docks. What does changes them do to the battery usage? I notice battery drop when customizing to a larger and more stylized font for my BW Home Weather widget, and for changing the background to something more beautiful (though it's still fairly dark - it's of space). I also changed my batt. stat from a small numbers display ("78 percent") to a medium size letter display ("Seventy eight percent"). How do these changes affect the battery, if at all? Anyone know?

Also, in checking the "About phone" to see what's using what, I notice often that Cell Standby and Phone Idle are among the top culprits of draining my battery. What exactly is Cell Standby and Phone Idle? Why would the phone drain so much battery being 'idle'? And how can I customize this - there's no button to any setting like say under "Display" you can go to the 'Sound and Display' settings.

Thanks.

 

[voghan]

My opinion is that its not really widgets causing battery drain but the data they pull in the background. I've stopped using calendar widgets, contact widgets that pull facebook or twitter updates and news widgets. I still use a weather widget and a couple others for battery life, gmail and time.

I have two phones I use right now. My hero gets close to 40 hours because it has almost nothing running. Just weather & time widgets. Controlling screen brightness makes a difference too. Auto brightness is just too bright on the vibrant.

 

[blooper]

i love the battery usage monitor, i actually have a shortcut to it on my home screen.

the misconception of the numbers and percentages there is that people think that the numbers represent a percentage of the whole battery, but its really only part of the battery.

example:
your phone is at 90% (you can check under "my device" battery status tab) and your battery usage says display 80%. this does not mean 80percent of your battery is being drained by your display, it means of that 10% that you have used, only 80% of that was because of your display, so 8% of the total battery was used for the display SO FAR.

of course, if you decide to stop playing with your phone and just leave it in your pocket for a few hours, youll notice that that 80% will eventually go down and the "stand by" and "idle" values will come up.

as far as the difference between stand by and idle, i think stand by is the total amount of time since the phone has been on without being plugged into another power source and idle is the time that its not being used.

so from your figures, youre not using your phone much be its still draining, probably due to background applications such as the weather widget that updates pretty frequently over your network.

 

[onthecouchagain]

I'm aware of how to read the battery, but am still disappointed that "Cell standby" and "Phone Idle" eats up so much juice at all.

As far as I know, nothing else "pulls" data in the background except for Gmail. Sometimes after an evening of full charge, I unplug it and leave the phone on overnight, and in the morning, I'll find it went from 100% to 77%. The culprit, once again, phone idle and cell standby. This is very disappointing for not even 'using' the phone. Before I let it be, I make sure to Task Kill anything that isn't necessary (it leaves gmail, battstatt, no lock, kik messenger, android agenda widget - which I've set to only refresh once every 12 hours - and SMS messaging). Everything else is killed off.
And Beauty Weather widget only updates at intervals of 16 hours (the longest setting they have), and refreshes only after I unlock my device. What could be using so much "phone idle" and "Cell standby"? If I turn off 3G over night, will this make the Cell Standby eat up less juice?

 

[blooper]

you could find some good tips from this article:
http://www.androidcentral.com/keeping-your-charge-how-improve-battery-life-your-android-phone

i usually suspect task killers and messaging apps for unusual battery consumption. but you should try turning one of those apps off for the day and see how that affects your battery. that will narrow down your culprit.