How's your Battery Life?

[JonDeutsch]

I have found that certain apps that have no business sipping at the battery had a direct impact on my battery life.

For instance: Pulse news reader... once I uninstalled it, my battery life improved remarkably. So, you might need to uninstall certain apps that are like little battery ticks....sucking out the juice while you're unaware.

 

[seek#CB]

After having Task Manager for at least a month now, I don't regret it!

Battery life has greatly improved for me. I also read that one article on how to use the Task Manager the correct way. I've gone a day and a good chunk of hours with 40% left and that's with good usage.

 

[jen51975]

I have had my phone for about a month (5 days until 30 day mark...) Decided to monitor my phone battery usage and log it... It's been on for 2h 48m and the battery life is at 73%. I made 2 calls, 1 for 4min & 1 for 20sec, sent couple texts and played 2 rounds of words with friends...

shows my display @60%, Voice calls 18%, Words Free 8%, Cell Standby 7%, Idle 2%, Android sys 3%. I only use a pic for my display. I think I'm taking it back to AT&T today.

 

[bigbot45]

Yes, 2.2 has a setting to disable mobile data. The only way to disable it on 2.1 is to use an app like APNDroid which changes the APN's so the phone can't connect over the network. I still use APNDroid on 2.2 since there's no direct way to get to the disable data.

Just hold down the power button and there is a "Data Network Mode" option.

 

[scsurface1]

Mine is terrible, but I bought 2 batteries and wall charger on EBAY for 1 penny (+8.80 s&h). Always have one with me. Not a problem now.

 

[bwmitchem]

First phone my wife had wouldn't last half a day. Returned to ATT and was told it's a know issue with the phone that just seems to happen with some phones. They exchanged it for another phone and now seems to last pretty much the whole day.

 

[bhayden25]

The battery life when i first got my phone was terrible. But after time went on it got better. The most ive been able to get out of one charge is like about 27hrs usually i get just under 24hrs

 

[kdfarr]

Battery meters for lithium ion batteries are best used to indicate when they need a charge and NOT what the percentage of the charge is left. The voltage drop of a lithium ion battery doesn't happen until the very end of it's charge, unlike a Nickle based battery (Nickle-Cadmium / Ni-Metal-Hydride) that drop their voltage in a rather linear fashion. A nickle based battery is much easier to meter for voltage drop along the life of it's charge, while a Lithium battery doesn't drop it's voltage until it's just about had it. Therefore it's much more difficult to meter a Lithium based battery.

The up side is that a lithium battery will supply voltage for a much longer time than a Nickle based battery. It's not Samsung's or htc's or Apple's metering system that's bad, it's that problem of trying to meter them.

The battery that comes with the Captivate is a 1500mAh battery. If battery life is your problem get a larger battery, something like a 3000mAh or 3300mAh battery. Your still going to have problems with the meter telling you if it's 1/2 or 1/4 or whatever but at least you'll have twice the time to read a meter that isn't going to help you much.

 

[yagerc]

Battery life is really poor... which is very sad.
Have to stay plugged in every night or I have no charge in the morning.

Maybe if AT&T Samsung would release some of the Android updates... well, it couldn't hurt.

 

[hellrod87]

Battery life is really poor... which is very sad.
Have to stay plugged in every night or I have no charge in the morning.

Maybe if AT&T Samsung would release some of the Android updates... well, it couldn't hurt.

If you make it through a whole day and only haven to charge overnight, there is nothing to complain about. My cappy running CM7 makes it till about 5pm with ~ 40% left, and I'm ecstatic about it.

If you are really trying to squeeze more battery life out, try juice defender from the market.

 

[Marco11]

I get ridiculously good battery life, I strongly suggest using a stable ROM like Andromeda3.

I get about 36 hours of battery life with it. Also turn brightness all the way down and just use the notification bar brightness slider thats built in when youre outside.

 

[vvmike]

Yeah I'm coming from a Magic (myTouch) and have found that battery is quite a bit worse than I'm used to. Granted, and as mentioned, what I've been doing is not exactly the same as normal usage, but, all the same. It's quite low.

Any advice about undervolting (can you do that through setcpu or do I have to figure out how kernels work?)

Also, out of apex, miui and serendipity which one will yield the best battery life?

 

[JoeR32]

I came from an HTC Inspire 4G and im very pleased with the captivates battery life.

 

[Reggie]

My battery life has gotten much worse. I have to say I have everything stock with Froyo and leave everything on - bluetooth, gps, etc. But I barely get a 7 hours use out of the phone

 

[JayPhill89]

My battery life has gotten much worse. I have to say I have everything stock with Froyo and leave everything on - bluetooth, gps, etc. But I barely get a 7 hours use out of the phone

I bought a new spare battery for $5 when I started having horrible battery like yourself. That fixed it, turns out my 7 month old battery was just worn out.

Just be aware that its not a samsung made battery but works great anyway.

 

[Porojukaha]

I bet the next battle between droid and iphone will be over battery. SOmeone is going to figure out how to get us batteries that last up to a week i bet. Just wait a year or too.

 

[valcoren]

Hello All,
I have had my Captivate now for close to a year. We have had always had poor signal strength inside our house, so we introduced an AT&T micro cell into the mix about 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure if it is the cell or the vanilla Froyo we are running, but the battery life on the phones have decreased majorly within the last 2 or 3 days.

 

[mdoyal1]

My Captivate gets about 20 hours of use before I have to plug it back in. I'm running CM7 with the CPU underclocked to 800Mhz, scaling is set to ondemand. I also use the true Gingerbread launcher (which is actually really nice, some developer has it for free in the market). Brightness is manually controlled and I change it quite often depending on if I am inside or out

 

[sep2006]

When I had the official FroYo build my battery life was pretty fail, got about 8 hours then it completely died and I had to charge again. Then I flashed the leaked 2.3.3 and that was about the same, only slightly better battery life. Then I flashed 2.3.5 yesterday. I started charging it at 9AM with 5% battery and unplugged it at 12PM and it was 100% full. I went the rest of the day on heavy use and at 11:30PM the battery was still at 70% (and when I went to bed a few minutes later it was still at 70%).

I wanted to see if it lasted through the night (Usually it would drain the battery pretty fast even if it wasn't being used) so I left it on all night and this morning at 9AM I looked at it, still had 66% and been using it all day heavily and it's at 50% as I type this.

Also, no random resets yet, something I had a lot of on 2.3.3

I turned it off and back on to test boot speed and it took 15 seconds to fully boot. 15 SECONDS.

 

[Jsmokey]

Well on my WIP rom and my red nebula kernel, rom's kh3 base kernel is kj3, I get quite astounding battery life. Usually I listen to music for at least a good 4hrs or more while at work and when I have a little downtime I check forums to see if anything new has came up or check my email. After that once I'm home I do quite a bit of reading on it and surfing the interwebs when not working on my rom or themes.

As far as settings I keep brightness right around mid way and have system sounds turned off, I run my cappy at a constant 1.4ghz oc btw, I turn all sync settings off other than mail and my forum apps. Other than that the only battery saver I use is Juice Defender Ultimate which really hasn't made a huge impact since I always turned data and wifi off when I wasn't using it anyways.

With that said on an average day with the stated use I get around 9hrs of heavy usage with about 15-20% left when I plug it in and have been able to get around 2-3 days in stand by which I think with the oc settings and no UV that's pretty good in my book especially when stock kh3 and all the newer leaks I would get around 6hrs if I was lucky with how I use it before going completely dead.