Low battery life, revisited

[joebob2000]

I have started more than a few threads here about the harrowing battery life my Fascinate is experiencing. I have one final question as I work through the last 2 days in my 30-day "mulligan" window with Verizon. Let me catch everyone up:

When I first got it, I was getting maybe 8-10 hours out of the phone on standby with very light use. At first I just figured I was probably using it too much; playing games and messing with apps and all that. After my usage settled down I still only got 8-10 hours of usable runtime out of the thing, and I began trying every trick in the book of battery life here on the forums: debloating the verizon apps, keeping the screen set low, trying the airplane mode trick to get the no signal time to go down, you name it. Finally I went to verizon and tried talking my way into a new phone but they only wanted to give me a new battery. The funny thing is that after I went in and complained and had them mail me a new battery, the standby life increased a good bit (before the new battery was even in). I don't know if it was because I un-rooted and started using the phone as little as possible, but standby time went up to 12 or 15 hours. The new battery came, and in the first day of "use" the standby time was an astounding 18 hours. That's with me doing rather little on the phone itself (screen-on time was about 2h30m). So things are improving.

The question that is still giving me pause is that the screen seems to suck the life out of the battery at an astounding rate. I leave it set to 0% brightness unless i am in direct sunlight. I unplugged the phone 2 hours ago and the battery is down to 80% with a screen-on time of 21m and a use of 54%. Some simple math suggests that it took about 11% of the battery to run the screen for 21 minutes, at the lowest brightness. Is this the kind of drain the rest of you are seeing? I need some hard data suggesting this is abnormal behavior for the phone, so I can act either by getting a replacement fascinate or bailing out and getting a droid 2 or something that has a significantly less taxing screen technology. Anyone willing to comment?

 

[Kevin Gossett]

I can easily get a full day of moderate to significant use and still have at least 30% left before I dock it at night. I think only once have I needed to plug in during the day.

With that being said, the screen will draw the most power, but not at the rate you are describing. IMHO, I think you waited a little too long to exchange, because now you won't have enough time to determine if a replacement will work for you.

Good luck with whatever you decide!

 

[Chrisvklein]

same... 8+ hour day of work playing games and watching videos gets me to about 40%..

 

[joebob2000]

I can easily get a full day of moderate to significant use and still have at least 30% left before I dock it at night. I think only once have I needed to plug in during the day.

With that being said, the screen will draw the most power, but not at the rate you are describing. IMHO, I think you waited a little too long to exchange, because now you won't have enough time to determine if a replacement will work for you.

Good luck with whatever you decide!

I would be glad to keep the fascinate if the screen-on time were better. Can you say conclusively that you have noticed less than 30%/hr screen draw on yours?

 

[joebob2000]

same... 8+ hour day of work playing games and watching videos gets me to about 40%..

I need your screen-on delta, so for example after consuming 60% of the battery during your work day, what percentage is the screen and how much time is on the screen clock in the battery use app?

 

[abowlofsoda]

I would assume you got an app or some sync going on that went bad. When i figure got the phone i was app happy and install all kinds of stuff. I started getting some serious battery drain.

I have since went back to stock and started over and have been slowly adding things... just things I need and watching to see whats going to affect performance.

Maybe you should look into that returning to stock thread. Just might fix the problem.

 

[joebob2000]

I would assume you got an app or some sync going on that went bad. When i figure got the phone i was app happy and install all kinds of stuff. I started getting some serious battery drain.

I have since went back to stock and started over and have been slowly adding things... just things I need and watching to see whats going to affect performance.

Maybe you should look into that returning to stock thread. Just might fix the problem.

The standby time seems practical, the only apps that are running in the background are the normal sync ones, twitter, weatherbug, and AIM. The phone drops less than 5%/hr when i'm not using it, so i am ok with that for now. What i need to find out is if the screen life i am seeing is typical of the galaxy s or if, somehow, this phone is just "bad". After reading the laptopmag review of the galaxy s phones, a 4.5 hour screen-on time seems typical; but I am using the very lowest brightness and still see closer to 3.5 hours.

 

[Chris3D]

The standby time seems practical, the only apps that are running in the background are the normal sync ones, twitter, weatherbug, and AIM. The phone drops less than 5%/hr when i'm not using it, so i am ok with that for now. What i need to find out is if the screen life i am seeing is typical of the galaxy s or if, somehow, this phone is just "bad". After reading the laptopmag review of the galaxy s phones, a 4.5 hour screen-on time seems typical; but I am using the very lowest brightness and still see closer to 3.5 hours.

A few thoughts... the screen is probably the single biggest drain on the battery, so the numbers you're seeing are probably not atypical. If you're getting 1 hours less than what was found in the review you mention, it could be that the screen is consuming the same but other processes are making up the difference between your 3.5 hours and their 4.5 hours.

I'd say that there's still something going on in the background if you're dropping ~5% per hour in standby. I unplugged my phone with a full charge around midnight last night, and when I woke up at 7am, it was only down to 95%.

Keep in mind, the 30 day return window is to get a refund for the phone and get out of any contract extension. If you're otherwise pleased with the phone, there's nothing saying you can't get a replacement down the road if you can't conclusively solve the battery issue. My first phone was exactly like yours, my current one has been getting a solid 36 hours on a charge - with moderate use. So the phone IS capable of decent battery life. If yours continues to be an issue, now with a "paper trail" with Verizon, at some point you should be able to get them to replace the phone.

 

[joebob2000]

A few thoughts... the screen is probably the single biggest drain on the battery, so the numbers you're seeing are probably not atypical. If you're getting 1 hours less than what was found in the review you mention, it could be that the screen is consuming the same but other processes are making up the difference between your 3.5 hours and their 4.5 hours.

I'd say that there's still something going on in the background if you're dropping ~5% per hour in standby. I unplugged my phone with a full charge around midnight last night, and when I woke up at 7am, it was only down to 95%.

Keep in mind, the 30 day return window is to get a refund for the phone and get out of any contract extension. If you're otherwise pleased with the phone, there's nothing saying you can't get a replacement down the road if you can't conclusively solve the battery issue. My first phone was exactly like yours, my current one has been getting a solid 36 hours on a charge - with moderate use. So the phone IS capable of decent battery life. If yours continues to be an issue, now with a "paper trail" with Verizon, at some point you should be able to get them to replace the phone.

It's just harder to get them to issue me a brand new one as far as I can tell, short of nuking it (which is morally dubious but i wouldn't say its out of the question for me)...

 

[abowlofsoda]

Speaking of battery drain- I went down 14% in battery life from watching 5 videos in the YouTube app this morning. I didn't click HD on any one of them. Running time on the videos were around 5min.

I have a charger at my desk and a charger in the car... I expect around 10 hours of battery life a day with my useage. I had a bit better battery life on my iPhone 3gs but since I'm never far from a charger I never run out.

 

[joebob2000]

I'd say that there's still something going on in the background if you're dropping ~5% per hour in standby. I unplugged my phone with a full charge around midnight last night, and when I woke up at 7am, it was only down to 95%.

I have seen 5%/hr before but that's certainly the high end of it. I benchmarked the standby drain for a few hours today and it is well below 5%/hr around the half-way mark on the battery (i wouldnt trust full/low numbers as much since that plays more into the calibration than the actual unit performance.) Airplane mode was unchanged after an hour, and full sync running was 1% after an hour.

 

[SOTK]

After installing the latest JT Clean Install Rom, I am getting almost two days of heavy use out of my battery!! I couldn't believe the improvement at first. When I first got my phone, I was barely getting 12 hours out of my phone with heavy use. This has fluctuated as I experimented with different programs on my phone, enabling/disabling wifi-gps-bluetooth, etc. I was able to get up to 16 hours by turning off certain functions and by not running certain programs; however, when I started trying different Roms, I noticed improvement in battery performance over stock OS. As I said, for some reason with this latest Rom I've tried, I've reached the best battery performance I've seen thus far out of this phone!

 

[Chris3D]

After installing the latest JT Clean Install Rom, I am getting almost two days of heavy use out of my battery!! I couldn't believe the improvement at first. When I first got my phone, I was barely getting 12 hours out of my phone with heavy use. This has fluctuated as I experimented with different programs on my phone, enabling/disabling wifi-gps-bluetooth, etc. I was able to get up to 16 hours by turning off certain functions and by not running certain programs; however, when I started trying different Roms, I noticed improvement in battery performance over stock OS. As I said, for some reason with this latest Rom I've tried, I've reached the best battery performance I've seen thus far out of this phone!

I can confirm JT's superclean rom extends the phone's battery life. I installed it last night, just the standard version, no voodoo, took my phone off the charger at midnight, and with moderate use - few calls, decent amount of web browsing and email, watched about 20 minutes of a movie and took 2 to 3 minutes of video, and the battery is still at 70% right now (9:30 pm). Really amazing the difference it's made.

 

[joebob2000]

I can confirm JT's superclean rom extends the phone's battery life. I installed it last night, just the standard version, no voodoo, took my phone off the charger at midnight, and with moderate use - few calls, decent amount of web browsing and email, watched about 20 minutes of a movie and took 2 to 3 minutes of video, and the battery is still at 70% right now (9:30 pm). Really amazing the difference it's made.

I am starting to become convinced it really is all about the software. Maybe my first battery was bad, the new one seems to last longer but without a conclusive test tool there is no way to know. One thing I finally deduced is that the official AIM app is a complete piece of trash. Not only does it force close like every two seconds, but just having it run connected causes probably 5%/hr drain on my battery, and it shows up in "cell standby". I unplugged the phone last night at 1am with 100% charge and all the usual stuff running, and when I woke at 6:30a it was down to 75% (that's 25% in 5.5 hours!) with "cell standby" at like 70% of battery usage. I killed off the AIM app, charged the battery back up and so far this morning the battery has been dropping less than 1%/hr.

 

[Chris3D]

I am starting to become convinced it really is all about the software.

Yea, there's definitely a lot of poorly written Android apps out there. I'm no Apple fan, bit I'll admit that the average iPhone app seems to be of considerably higher quality than apps on Android. Obviously there are exceptions to that, but on the whole, it seems to be the case.

And just an update... it's been 36 hours after taking my phone off the charger (after installing JT's Super Clean rom), and my battery just hit 40% now. At this rate, it'll easily make 48 hours, and that's WITH use...

If you're comfortable trying out a new rom, give that one a try.

 

[F34R]

after I debloated, my battery life has increased significantly.

I've went 18 hours or so without plugging it in; phone calls, a bunch of texts, angry birds playing, email sync, some facebooking, taking pictures...

Surely there are a lot of things going on in this phone as stock that don't need to be. Much, much happier with the battery life now. I'll keep an eye on my usage today, and report back after my 12hr shift is up. Phone was unplugged a little over two and a half hours ago, I'm at 85% right now. I have been texting a little this morning, and have been on a speaker phone call for 20 mins.