Bionic Battery Draining Rapidly

[jemmox21]

I bought my Bionic about 16 months ago, and have always been relatively satisfied with the battery life. About 3 months ago, I learned about Juice Defender, so I installed the free version just to see how it worked. I was delighted to see it increase my battery life significantly, to what seemed like double the normal life. Then, seemingly overnight, my Bionic battery began to drain quickly, even with moderate to little use. It's as if it drains 10% or so every hour on the hour. To test it, I went to bed one night with 100% charge, and woke up the next morning with about 40% battery life. I purchased a new battery thinking that might solve the issue, and I also installed the premium version of Juice Defender, etc., but nothing has helped. Is there some function I have inadvertently engaged to cause my battery to suffer, or is something just wrong with the phone?

Thanks!

 

[Mooncatt]

Battery would have been my first thought since I just had the same issue, but I see you already did that. Do you know for certain this is a brand new, unused, battery? Even if it is, it seems batteries are prone to defects from the factory. Mostly aftermarket ones, but I've seen a fair few OEM ones reported DOA too.

How's your in home signal? Is it pretty strong? What about 3/4G coverage? If something happened that has causes the signal to drop a lot, the phone could simply be expending more power to maintain reception.

Another big drain is the GPS, so look for any apps that may be turning it on more often than you need. Anything using location tracking could be suspect.

If using wifi, are you turning mobile data off? That saves a fair bit of power, and easy to setup a Smart Action to automate the change.

The vibrate function uses a lot more power relative to audible notifications. If you have been doing a lot of texting and such, turn the vibration off for notifications and use sounds only if you can get away with it.

And for reference if nothing else works, an extended battery is awesome. I got the OEM one (there are larger ones out there, but reviews were iffy), and I'm blown away. If I leave 4G turned on with no display timeout, I think I get about 5-6 hrs with light to moderate use. Turning 4G off and going 3G only (get the LTE On/Off app in play to easily set to "CDMA (auto PRL)" for 3G only) and using a 2 min display timeout gets me about 10-14 hrs. Then today I hardly used it except for minor texting and browsing, with the display mostly off, and I was on track to get 18 hrs off the charge. In fact, I really don't see much of a speed difference between 3 and 4G for simple browsing and stuff. Even YouTube loads fast enough to not need to buffer on standard definition most of the time. So unless I'm about to download a really big file or need to browse while on the phone, I typically leave 4G off all together to save on battery life.

 

[jemmox21]

Thanks for the response. I seem to have figured out the problem, and I'll summarize it in case anyone else is having the issue. I read about several other issues users were having that were similar to mine, and I landed on the "wakelock" problem that appears to be fairly common. I downloaded Wakelock Detector, then went to bed with my phone 100% charged and off the charger. I woke up to find it (once again) around 40%. I looked at the Wakelock Detector results and discovered Slacker Radio, which came stock with the phone and I never use, was keeping the phone awake during the night for about 3 hours, even with the display off. I uninstalled the updates for Slacker and disabled the app, as well as some other stock apps I never use in case they too prevent the phone from sleeping. So far, so good.

Thanks again for your response.

 

[Mooncatt]

Glad you figured it out, even if my help was useless.

 

[jemmox21]

Well, I may have spoken too soon, as later in the day the battery drain started again. Android OS is taking up to 40-50% of the battery usage when viewing battery stats. Other people have had this problem it appears, but so far I haven't read about a solution. Any thoughts? I really want to get this figured out, as my phone is being rendered useless over the course of 10 hours. Thanks!

 

[eterry2]

My bionic just started having battery issues. I have not installed any new apps. So, I don't think it's an app. I bought new batteries non-OEM on ebay and that has not helped. I'm wondering if it is the battery, or a problem with the phone. any progress figuring this out?