How to Improve Battery Life for the Samsung Epic 4G

[rando991]

Battery Indicator Pro. Also Fancy Widgets has an option to include Battery Status that shows percent in the widget.

 

[traumahawk]

i get about... double battery life... I can leave phone unhooked, keeping my current intensive usage up for over 16 hours and still have 25%+ left. even with my little tweaks i have noticed ZERO negative effects on speed or performance for the internet usage, txting, and gaming that i do.

~Juice Defender (with Ultimate Juice) set to aggressive.
~Roamcontrol (used to force my phone to roam when i loose sprint coverage so my device doesnt waste battery trying to find service again... we all have unlimited plans to have these phones- ie UNLIMITED ROAMING. make use of it).
~Genocide .01a (underclocked to 800mhz cap with setCPU, which is offered free to XDA-dev members).

 

[traumahawk]

What widget or app do people like best for battery status since the default is not very accurate? I have a stock phone FYI.

Thanks.

root your phone and install TER minitheme... i saw one of the moderators on here has EB13.. guessing rooted and EXT4, with the TER theme running on top of it (just cant install TER. only the theme).

or if you are not interested in rooting and modifying your phone.. i used to use a widget called simply "battery widget". check it on appbrain. works great. free too.

 

[jonbgood]

Great blog post! Thank you and I look forward to trying this, however I do have a question. You said that the only time GPS uses battery is when an app is using it. Doesn't Locale constantly use it? So wouldnt this be counter productive?

 

[Windfrenzy]

What widget or app do people like best for battery status since the default is not very accurate? I have a stock phone FYI.

Thanks.

I like circle battery widget.

 

[Windfrenzy]

With 2.2 do i still need to do the airplane toggle or did they fix it?

I have same question about EB13. Is DRM still a battery drain too?

 

[StoneRyno]

Questions concerning running processes and battery life

I'm new to both android and samsung epic 4G. I've had it for not quite to weeks now. I have gone through the basic set of power savings tips and applied most of them. The only thing I don't do out of them that I can think of is I don't set it to keep GPS off all the time. From the battery use section in settings the top 4 items are:

display (20% or higher)
cell standby (20% or higher)
voice calls (10 to 20%)
phone idle (at least 10%)

The few other items listed are 2 or 3%. Android assistant (by Aaron) typically the following are the top listed:

juiceplotter (5-10%)
dialer (5-10%)
ADWlauncher (5-10%)
batteryindicator (up to 5%)
swype (up to 5%)
the weather channel (up to 5%)

Everything else which is typically about 30 items are less than 1% down to 0% for some of them. With those details and the fact that I get 24 hours, with moderate use, between charges (I charge at about 10% left) with the stock battery. Am I optimized fairly good at this point? After about another week or so of use to get a good baseline I plan to use juicedefender and see how it works out.

Now for the running processes question. I like that I can see what it running I the background. But being new I'm not sure about anything in the processes list what's normal etc.

Market widget (not added to my launcher)
weather channel widget small (3 of it and I only have one instance of the widget in my launcher)
twitter widget (not added to my launcher)
netQfree widget (not added to my launcher)
mediahub (listed in green in android assistant, not sure what this one is)
youversion bible widget (not added to my launcher)
Latitude widget (2 of it and not added to my launcher)
analog clock widget (not added to my launcher)
power control widget (not added to my launcher)

The rest of the processes running are stuff I know what they are and that they should be running. But the ones I listed have me thinking "um I don't know" especially the couple that have more than one process running. So I wanted to get some experienced people helping me o the processes.

 

[StoneRyno]

Why was my thread merged here when it was not just about battery life optimization? I hope I get proper responses to my questions.

 

[ragnarokx]

There's nothing you can do about processes except uninstall the items or kill the processes. Nothing looks out of he ordinary. If you're looking to improve battery life, I would suggest taking a look at post #1.

 

[StoneRyno]

I'm just trying to understand how things work and what not, which is why I had started a new thread and instead I get merged and it appears like I thought nobody is seeing my post to help because of it. Sorry if I'm being to blunt but so far being a new android user is kind of frustrating when I'm not getting any help from my posts. Why are there processes running for widgets that aren't being used? Why do two of the widgets have more than one process? Are these processes using up battery? And/or impacting performance?

I'm not sure I understand the percentages thing. Because if I'm understanding it right the dialer which I assume is what the name implies is only used to dial as opposed to the voice calls which is the battery usage for the call itself. In other words the few seconds it takes to dial the calls uses 2.5 hours of battery? This based on 10% of 24 hours. As a result then if I didn't place any calls and only received calls then I'd get 26.5 hours out of the charge?

 

[jonbgood]

My battery life sucks still even after trying a few of these things. My battery usage always says 95% of it is used by Display and only 2 or 3 % used by Android system, wifi or things like that. I feel like this is inaccurate if my battery life is so bad. And my brightness is only at about 60%. Any thoughts?

 

[ragnarokx]

Display is by far the biggest battery hog. I usually keep my brightness at ~15%.

Some people say the app "Juice Defender" helps with their battery life.

If you have root access, that's where the real battery savings are - using an undervolted kernel is probably the best way to extend battery life. Custom ROMs with unneeded apps/processes removed also helps.

 

[StoneRyno]

Brightness was the very first thing I did when I got my epic. I still don't fully understand the battery use info because the percentages don't always make sense. Like i used google reader for 10 minutes and it said it used 13% and the point at which I used the app was 20 hours after unplugging the phone from the charger. I somehow suspect that isn't accurate. A few other things like ADWlauncher, dialer, and one or two other apps percentages vary wildly despite a fairly constant or constant usage pattern day to day.

But outside of that I have found ways to improve my time between charges. Despite no replies to help me understand how things work pertaining to battery use. I kill all of the widgets that I don't use in my launcher that from the battery use info are indicated to not be using battery. However because I went from 24 hours between charges to nearly double that due to killing all those widgets at start up it is clear they are using battery despite not being used in my launcher. There were I think 8 of them including some google talk thing that kept loading despite the fact I set it to not log me into google talk. Now i only have about 7 widgets that load at startup and those are for apps I use regularly so even if I kill them they get loaded back every time I use those apps. But that is fine as I have nearly obtained my goal of 48 hours between charges with light to moderate use. That means on days of heavy use I won't have to charge until I am going to bed for the night. I do have one or two apps I will be removing that appear from the info in battery use to drain more than I feel is worth the benefit of the apps. But will see after I go a week and establish a new baseline. Oh and then after that I'll be trying juicedefender.

 

[rando991]

After much searching, I finally found some folks who may have had an answer to what SNSService is. SNSService doesn't appear to be anything more than a Samsung Facebook/Twitter sync service (therefore not necessary if you aren't using one of those feeds and if you are using them, then you probably aren't experiencing the SNSService restart bug). If since Froyo, you have noticed SNSService in a "restarting" loop under running services and it's drawing your battery down, you can Force stop it and it should stay down until you reboot your phone. If you don't want to root your phone so that you can remove it, here's a possible fix that worked for me. Since I had removed the "Feeds and Updates" widget from one of my homescreens, I didn't notice the problem until I got the OTA Froyo update. I think that after the update it is looking for that widget to update. So I put the widget back on a homescreen, touched the recycle button at the top right corner of the widget and then I noticed that my SNSService stopped restarting. I subsequently removed the widget and now have yet to see the problem recurr.

 

[SamsungSucks]

I am using the Froyo update from Samsung/Sprint. Following the steps in post #1 caused my battery to drain in about 40min.

I am not sure if this is a Froyo issue, but I have noticed that when I turn WiFi on, the Epic is constantly scanning for a Wireless network about every 3 seconds. Even when I am on a Wifi network.

Is there anyway to make it stop scanning for new networks while I am on one?

 

[StoneRyno]

Update to my previous post. I may have been hasty in my stating the 2x improvement. That day may have been a fluke. Today I only got about the same life as the previous couple weeks. Around 24 hours on the charge. But then that too may be a bit unlucky and perhaps there is significant improvement after killing off those widget processes. I should know better than state results from only a single day's use data.

As for the wifi issue post. I'm still on the previous version 2.1-update1 according to phone info. I don't have that problem with wifi neither when connected to wifi or out of range. I leave wifi on all the time. It doesn't appear to consume battery during the times I'm not in range of wifi. Which is any time I'm not at home. I am too new to android to say what went wrong but in my experience from other platforms a battery drain that is that rapid there is something more going on that just an inefficient setting. If that is happening all the time ever after rebooting and charging up then there is something bad going on. I'm not sure what I would do. I also don't know all the details at to why they pulled the update so it could be that weird things like this and perhaps this is one of the reasons it got pulled?

 

[traumahawk]

17 hours

My phone has been unplugged and in heavy use (txt/web/email) for 17 hours. I am at 42% battery life.

Juice defender (+ultimate juice)
EB13 + ACE rom v1.7
Genocide .03 kernel- set to 800mhz max / 100mhz min
Advanced Task Killer with autokiller setup to kill everything except juicedefender
roamcontrol- set to "roam only". i enable home/automatic when i KNOW i will have good sprint coverage, otherwise i just leave it on roaming. its a lot slower when trying to browse internet or download and such... but really saves battery and doesnt affect calling/messaging features at all

 

[StoneRyno]

I'm using juiceplotter which estimates time remaining before needing to charge and time remaining until fully charged. While I like how good it is a predicting the remaining time I'm not sure I'm happy with the reported battery usage for the app. It has been consistently at 5% or greater. Which again because I don't know if I understand the percentages thing (nobody has confirmed to me I'm understanding it correctly) this means that with 24 hours from a full charge if I uninstalled juiceplotter I would get at least an additional 1.2 hours. Is the 5% or higher battery use of juiceplotter high for the predicted time remaining choices out there or are all of them use this much? I noticed battery indicator by darshan has a paid version that includes estimated time remaining and logging info plus it's notification icon and some other features. I have the free version and it tends to be much lower like around 0.5%. Which is why I'm wondering if it is all apps that predict time remaining or just juiceplotter.

My experience seems to be remaining consistent with the first almost two weeks I've had it. I get 24 hours give or take about 2 hours. That one full charge where I got almost twice that seems to be a fluke and I have no idea why. The top 5 or so battery usage things are mostly the same and are expected based on my usage. Other than a custom rom and juicedefender I'm doubtful there is anything more I can do related to those 5 or so things. I do know that there is a lot of little things consuming tiny amounts each that add up to a small amount that may be parts of stuff that would not be installed by using a custom rom. I think I'm going to continue with things how they are now for this week and then try joicedefender and see how it goes. Then go from there.

 

[tnuts]

is there a free app you know of that does the same thing as the locale app?

 

[tnuts]

never mind. i installed the juice defender pro and there is a wifi location feature that auto enables/disables wifi when in range of a saved connection. the default setting for the app is to turn off all connections when the phone is sleeping and sync periodically. they have a setting to keep wifi turned on all the time when in range of a network (still auto disables when out of range), but they do not recommend it (says it drains battery). is it better for the battery to always keep wifi connected when in range to prevent constant connection/disconnection, or let the app turn off all connections when not in use?