Post ICS Update - Tweaked my battery into behaving better!

[Tsukiyomi]

I did a manual ICS install last week and like 95% of people it hit my battery pretty hard. I've spent a lot of my phone time since then doing a mix of tricks that I found both here and online so just thought I'd give this quick heads up. I've no idea whether one particular trick worked or any were just useless, but the full combination (and probably a bit of Voodoo) seem to have got my battery back from draining about 10% an hour on the newly installed ICS to what you see below almost a week later:

Now bear in mind I'm by no means an expert and barely know what I'm doing. In fact the manual ICS upgrade was the most complicated thing I've done with my E4GT to date. It won't be too hard to find each step that I did so I won't go into the nitty gritty, but here's a list of everything I've done since installing the update zip last Friday:

1. Backed up everything (yes, including Data) to MyBackup
2. Ran a Factory Reset, erasing everything
3. Reinstalled MyBackup and installed everything I had (again, including Data).
4. Cycled the battery for 2 days
5. Restarted the phone with Power and Volume Up held down then cleared the Cache and restarted the phone again.
6. Removed several apps that I never use
7. Set my screen brightness to 50%
8. Turned vibration intensity off for everything except screen presses, where I lowered vibration to about 50%
9. Turned off notifications for FB, Twitter, etc.
10. Signed out of Latitude
11. Auto adjust Screen Power (in Display) is set to On
12. Ran my battery down to 0, kept turning the phone on until it wouldn't turn on at all. Removed battery for 3 minutes, replaced and charged at wall outlet with power off. Removed power and turned phone on once it was fully charged (Blue LED and 100%)
13. Cycled the battery again twice, running it down to 5% each time before putting it on the charger and charging back up to 100% then disconnecting charger immediately.
14. I've actually got Wi-Fi on permanently (since I work from home). Bluetooth, GPS are off and my phone is set to switch over to 4G if there's no Wi-Fi connection.

Like I say, some of these steps might be redundant but as of my last charge over 18 hours ago I've had 1hr 12mins of Screen Time and 19mins of Voice Calls. Android OS is still showing a high percentage and a change in overall phone use might give me different results but I thought I'd share what I've done on the off-chance it helps somebody else.

Thanks to those who have given pointers on the different steps I've tried before mashing them all together.

 

[carole6m]

I turned off haptic feedback and FB notifications. I'm still using auto brightness. My stock battery can last up to 40 hours after the OTA update.
From what I read, draining the battery completely will damage it and it's actually good to charge whenever you get a chance.

 

[Tsukiyomi]

True but I didn't do it for battery life reasons. Draining to 0 was a one-time thing to recalibrate the battery gauge.

 

[oskar1995]

If I'm not mistaken, its pretty common after a pretty big software upgrade that Android battery life suffers for a day or two. I've generally seen this when I went from Eclair to Froyo and Froyo to GB. Those two updates seemed to include a period where Android use is fairly high than begins to "settle in". I've seen a lot of terms thrown around for this, but I'm not going to claim any as my own.

A couple of days in and my battery seems simliar to what I experienced before. Depending on the day and what I'm doing I generally see about 4-6% battery drain per hour (spread across the day). If I'm off the phone its generally 2-3% per hour.

 

[Tsukiyomi]

If I'm not mistaken, its pretty common after a pretty big software upgrade that Android battery life suffers for a day or two. I've generally seen this when I went from Eclair to Froyo and Froyo to GB. Those two updates seemed to include a period where Android use is fairly high than begins to "settle in". I've seen a lot of terms thrown around for this, but I'm not going to claim any as my own.

A couple of days in and my battery seems simliar to what I experienced before. Depending on the day and what I'm doing I generally see about 4-6% battery drain per hour (spread across the day). If I'm off the phone its generally 2-3% per hour.

That's very interesting and it could well have been the case for me. This is my first Smartphone (only got it at the end of Feb) and my first software update so I had no real frame of reference but it's good info to know, thanks.

 

[taylormah]

What does clearing cache from the recovery does? Would it delete my files on the sd partition of the internal storage? How is it different from wipe/factory reset option?

 

[Tsukiyomi]

What does clearing cache from the recovery does? Would it delete my files on the sd partition of the internal storage? How is it different from wipe/factory reset option?

As far as I'm aware it's just a quick trick of sorts to get junk out of the system and let the phone start over again. Kind of like running CCleaner on a PC. It doesn't delete any of your files and it's entirely possible that it just works along the lines of apps like Easy Cache Cleaner. I was just looking for anything that works so tried tips from several people

 

[carole6m]

What does clearing cache from the recovery does? Would it delete my files on the sd partition of the internal storage? How is it different from wipe/factory reset option?

It doesn't delete your files and it's not factory resetting anything.