Huge battery waste

drummer7

Well-known member
May 16, 2010
86
1
0
So I always knew that live wallpaper uses up more battery than a normal background...but I had no idea to the extent it would do so.

For the past 2 months Ive been going to work every morning, occasionally texting, receiving emails, and playing games while pooping. In my building I'm usually in and out of service, and by the end of the work day my battery is ALWAYS between 45-60%.

These past 2 days was the first time I turned off GO Weather Live Wallpaper and put on a normal background, and my battery has been at 71% and 74% when I'm done work. Under battery usage the Android OS is way lower than what it used to be.

I just thought it was interesting that the Live wallpaper was literally using ALMOST HALF of my battery, especially when my screen is barely on at all to begin with during the work day. For those of you using live wallpapers and concerned about battery life...turn it off
 
try a black background.

I'm not sure how the nexus screen works, but if it doesn't light up any pixels in the black areas (just exposing the black screen) then yeah, I could imagine that saving even more battery. I'm gonna have to give that a try
 
yup, thats how it works. i love a good background as much as the next guy, but i have to say i think the all black looks very cool, and its also functional.
 
I have a live wallpaper and get a reasonable 10-15 hours a day (depending on use). But I use a "special" live wallpaper called Nexus S Revamped. I set the back round to true black and the moving pixels to white and my battery is the same as a non live wallpaper. You should think about trying this out if you still want a live wallpaper.
 
Great idea! I made a 1x1 pixel wide black png and will use that.

Scratch that. Apparently there's a bug in Android. You cannot use a 1x1 image as the background. Both Astro and Gallery crash. I had to make it 10x10.
 
I have a live wallpaper and get a reasonable 10-15 hours a day (depending on use). But I use a "special" live wallpaper called Nexus S Revamped. I set the back round to true black and the moving pixels to white and my battery is the same as a non live wallpaper. You should think about trying this out if you still want a live wallpaper.

I use that exact wallpaper, and I did the same thing with the black background, but I still use red/blue/green/yellow pixels. It saves battery, and looks cooler than the stock Nexus wallpaper IMO.
 
Just had a weird battery drain occur. It went from mid 20s to 15% in the space of about 20 to 30 minutes. I plugged it in and the drain continued, going down to 13%. I turned the phone off and let it charge for about 15 minutes powered off and when I just turned it back on it was back up to 29%. I've never had it go down and up so fast.

Only thing that changed was I had run some updates, the most recent being Words With Friends. Could this be the culprit? Has this happened to anyone else?