Help, my battery life sucks!

[lolreconlol]

Hi,

I unplugged my phone this morning around 9 A.M, and sent about 50-100 texts today, and right now at 5:35 my phone is at 33%. The only thing that is running, is ADW.Launcher, and I've done LIGHT Twitter/Facebook checking throughout the day, maybe about 2-3 times each. I have Beautiful Widgets, but it's set to update every hour. I haven't talked on the phone at all, and my brightness is set to auto. My wifi is off, and I made sure I don't have GPS or anything on. What's killing my battery? My BB's battery life was 1000x better, I shouldn't have to baby this phone to have it make it through the day.

I'm running JT's Clean D101 rom, and that's it.

Edit - 32% now.

 

[NOsquid]

BB have better battery life, theyre also painful to use for anything besides text/email. Compromises...

I'm convinced part of my perception that my BB had great battery life is due to the fact that i never browsed the web on it except unless it was urgent, whereas i do it all day on my fascinate.

At your current rate youd probably make it 12hrs+ which isnt tooooo bad. Did you check the battery info in "about phone?" Anything interesting?

Often the big difference between people on the forums is location. A lot of what kills a phone battery is searching for reception especially 3g. Some people just have great service where they live/work.

You can try an app like juice defender to toggle your data if you want, some people have good results.

 

[lolreconlol]

BB have better battery life, theyre also painful to use for anything besides text/email. Compromises...

I'm convinced part of my perception that my BB had great battery life is due to the fact that i never browsed the web on it except unless it was urgent, whereas i do it all day on my fascinate.

At your current rate youd probably make it 12hrs+ which isnt tooooo bad. Did you check the battery info in "about phone?" Anything interesting?

Often the big difference between people on the forums is location. A lot of what kills a phone battery is searching for reception especially 3g. Some people just have great service where they live/work.

Without even using the phone, I went from 33-31% in 18 minutes. My signal is always around -90 dBm, it's -96 now.

It's at 8h 48m 33s since unplugged:
54% Display
13% Standby
10% Voice Calls
8% Phone idle
7% Android System
3% ADW.Launcher
2% Android OS

Hehe, battery is at 30% now.

 

[F34R]

Yeah, that's a big part of the bb battery life perception; usage.

While my battery seemed to last for days with my Tour, I didn't use it for more than facebook notifications, texting/mms, and phone calls. I'd occasionally have to check something on the internet, but it wasn't the norm.

I'm using my Fascinate a lot more actively than the BB. I've gone 18+ hours, bringing it down to about 10%, with Tapatalk, browsing, phone calls, 200+ text/mms messages, camera, pic uploading, and my obligatory beautiful widgets updating.

 

[packerbacker]

Your battery life actually doesn't seem too bad! You don't seem to have any apps that are draining it, and it seems pretty standard that display and voice calls are two of the main battery hoggers.

 

[joebob2000]

The blackberry excuse of "yeah it lasts forever because you hardly use it" is serious bull****. I put in a lot of time on my bb storm, the only thing that would pull the battery down at any decent rate is heavy data usage. I would regularly have aim and bbm on line, do emails and tweets and web pages and messages and maps all day and the battery would never give up in less than 18 hours. The fascinate, with as much or less usage, maybe gets me 12 hours and that's if I lock the brightness as low as it will go.

The bb platform, with a central data system to coordinate messaging, is just more efficient no mater how you cut it. I would elaborate but the battery on my fascinate is about to die. Sigh.

 

[jeffnucci]

Is the super clean ROM deodexed? I deodexed my phone and I'm getting better battery life.

 

[F34R]

The blackberry excuse of "yeah it lasts forever because you hardly use it" is serious bull****. I put in a lot of time on my bb storm, the only thing that would pull the battery down at any decent rate is heavy data usage. I would regularly have aim and bbm on line, do emails and tweets and web pages and messages and maps all day and the battery would never give up in less than 18 hours. The fascinate, with as much or less usage, maybe gets me 12 hours and that's if I lock the brightness as low as it will go.

The bb platform, with a central data system to coordinate messaging, is just more efficient no mater how you cut it. I would elaborate but the battery on my fascinate is about to die. Sigh.

Sorry, but your experience isn't universal. Don't be so arrogant to think that your usage and battery life is something automatically synonymous with Blackberry. I had the Tour since release date, up until a month ago, so I can surely testify to the experiences with battery life that I had. You mention nothing of voice calls, which would equally drain the battery down when included with all your other activities throughout the day.

The Fascinate doesn't have quite the juice, but it's comparable, and with a larger screen and more usage that I had out of my BB with data and GPS.

 

[Adiliyo]

Is the super clean ROM deodexed? I deodexed my phone and I'm getting better battery life.

yes, it is deodexed

 

[joebob2000]

Sorry, but your experience isn't universal. Don't be so arrogant to think that your usage and battery life is something automatically synonymous with Blackberry. I had the Tour since release date, up until a month ago, so I can surely testify to the experiences with battery life that I had. You mention nothing of voice calls, which would equally drain the battery down when included with all your other activities throughout the day.

The Fascinate doesn't have quite the juice, but it's comparable, and with a larger screen and more usage that I had out of my BB with data and GPS.

Only android arrogance is allowed here, my bad. I have gotten three days at a stretch (yes 72 hours) in voice/txt only use of my bb (roaming outside the us) and I am pretty sure an android phone couldn't dream of that. Data traffic kills smartphone batteries, and the bb platform has several novel ways to minimize traffic. If you can't recognize that, you are going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why your phone only runs 12 hours on a charge. Yes, a bb can be drained fast if used heavily but this fascinate is dead faster on light use than my bb EVER was, even on heavy use. Screen inefficiency, chronic multitasking and inefficient data use are all possible culprits. But no, lets keep telling ourselves the browser is faster so it's obviously better than a bb.

 

[Sta11i0n]

I too came from BB, a Storm to be specific, and didn't have battery problems with it until about a month before I switched to the Fascinate. (I think my BB knew I was shopping elsewhere and making me pay for it) I used mine very heavily all its life. Playing music for hours each day, texting, bbm, web, etc... On its last leg, phone calls where its cryptonite. I could literally go from 85% battery to 15% after a 10 min phone call. So as you could imagine, my switch to the Fascinate has been nothing short of impressive. The only things I would recommend changing on your settings is the screen timeout to 30 seconds, and your backlight to a fixed setting, as low as you can tolerate (mines all the way down). I noticed a pretty considerable difference when I made those changes on mine after using it the first few days on auto. It is still tough for me to get an accurate judgment on this phones true battery life during regular usage since I'm still playing with downloading new apps and showing it off to friends to get a "real world" baseline. Your display is always going to be your biggest consumer of power, so I'd recommend doing as much as you can happily work with to keep that as dim and off as possible. Right now, I've been unplugged for over 13 hours, and am at 50% battery which includes some app shopping, text (approximately 200), web (shopping and videos) email, calls (30mins total), and some gaming.

 

[voghan]

It's almost midnight and I have 34% battery left. You need to not use auto brightness. Find a setting like 10% . You should also root your phone and remove all the Verizon apps. There are posts on that in the hacking forum. If you want the best possible battery life this is your solution.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk

 

[Adiliyo]

blackberry's also have anemic cpu's and tiny screens.

sure my tour got pretty good battery life, but i couldn't do as much with it either. (or didn't want to because it was a bad experience)

i get about 12-18hours on a charge with my fascinate though depending on use. it also seems to charge pretty quick, so 20-30 mins on a charger here and there is going to help a lot.

this is all with autobrightness as well.

 

[packerbacker]

It's almost midnight and I have 34% battery left. You need to not use auto brightness. Find a setting like 10% . You should also root your phone and remove all the Verizon apps. There are posts on that in the hacking forum. If you want the best possible battery life this is your solution.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk

I fully concur.

 

[F34R]

Only android arrogance is allowed here, my bad. I have gotten three days at a stretch (yes 72 hours) in voice/txt only use of my bb (roaming outside the us) and I am pretty sure an android phone couldn't dream of that. Data traffic kills smartphone batteries, and the bb platform has several novel ways to minimize traffic. If you can't recognize that, you are going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why your phone only runs 12 hours on a charge. Yes, a bb can be drained fast if used heavily but this fascinate is dead faster on light use than my bb EVER was, even on heavy use. Screen inefficiency, chronic multitasking and inefficient data use are all possible culprits. But no, lets keep telling ourselves the browser is faster so it's obviously better than a bb.

I was actually speaking directly about my own experience. You stated in a general sense that the usage myth was bs. I explained fairly clearly that I was talking about my usage, and your usage doesn't necessarily speak for the bb using world. You can't possibly call the comparisons, between my bb usage and battery life vs my android usage and battery life, bs. You simply dismiss our accounts because yours was different. That's arrogance.

Once I've ironed out what I want my phone to be doing, the battery life has been comparable to my BB, especially taking into consideration the usage, screen, cpu, etc.

 

[emptycube]

I just noticed that there is a setting for:
WiFi Sleep Policy
When screen times out
Never when plugged in
Never

Mine was set to 'When screen times out'. Would it use less battery if it were set to 'Never'? When I'm at home I leave WiFi ON.

It is located in Settings>Wireless & Networks>WiFi settings; then press the Menu button and select Advanced>WiFi Sleep Policy.

 

[sjenkins1009]

Wifi sleep policy is actually a battery saver. It shuts down the wifi on your phone after so long to prevent it from draining the battery. If you set it to never you will actually see less battery performance. I would reccomend at the very lowest, never when plugged in so this way when on battery it will still take Wifi into sleep mode.

As for the comparisons people are having between BB and Android, two different OS's two completely different uses and enviorments. BB was designed as a company phone with a home option. BB browser is a low key mobile browser that usually displayed pages just like my dumb phone used to. BBM has never been something that can be turned on or off (least not that I have ever seen will have to check my old tour when i get home). Also, the other major difference goes back to where everyone is talking screen size.... the small screens on the tour, bold, curve, are screen displays only, so of course they are going to use less power, and then the storm, seriously people? All you have to do is look at the picture difference between the storm and the facinate and you are surprised that the Fascinate uses some more power?

 

[jwebste9]

Well I unplug phone at six thirty each morning. Gps always on. Beautiful widget updating every hour. School send twenty emails a day. I text non stop and check android central hourly. And play angry birds and I do t put phone on charger until ten or eleven and it will be at 15 percent. I would call it great battery life. O and wifi is on from 830-520. Rooted and removed some bloatware

 

[joebob2000]

I was actually speaking directly about my own experience. You stated in a general sense that the usage myth was bs. I explained fairly clearly that I was talking about my usage, and your usage doesn't necessarily speak for the bb using world. You can't possibly call the comparisons, between my bb usage and battery life vs my android usage and battery life, bs. You simply dismiss our accounts because yours was different. That's arrogance.

Once I've ironed out what I want my phone to be doing, the battery life has been comparable to my BB, especially taking into consideration the usage, screen, cpu, etc.

I havent found a single use case where the fascinate can outlast the BBs i have used. Maybe our luck is just different. If the android platform is supposed to work better than this, then maybe I need to ditch the fascinate. However, if we (the android community) are going to ignore the stuff the BB does right and simply say "hey look how terrible the browser is" then we are setting the bar WAY too low for a smartphone. I want to see Google competing with RIM on every level, not just multimedia, that's my point here. To date, I haven't seen it and I really get the impression that the kool-aid around here stops any of you from expecting that either.

 

[emptycube]

Wifi sleep policy is actually a battery saver. It shuts down the wifi on your phone after so long to prevent it from draining the battery. If you set it to never you will actually see less battery performance. I would reccomend at the very lowest, never when plugged in so this way when on battery it will still take Wifi into sleep mode.

OK thanks, I guess I thought it switching back and forth between WiFi/Data everytime time I pick up the phone would use more battery. In any case, it can't be much more battery drain because I set my phone to 'Never' on Saturday @ ~2:00 PM and it was @ 50% late last night (so almost a day and a half) but I didn't use phone much.