Super sucky battery life!

[SdotJ]

The Pre's battery was like 4 hours-8 hours.
My Evo's battery is from 8 hours-16+ hours.
That's on 3g in Cola, SC.

Yeah the 3g in cola sc is down right terrible. I get better speeds in Lexington for some odd reason. Either way as long as I had decent signal I was doing 10-12 easy with moderate use. Still don't see why this is still a discussion considering we can buy a bigger battery but I guess that point has been missed.

 

[Primetimeplaya]

I have a real problem in looking at what programs are running on my phone. I have things running that I haven't even signed into......ever. Often I find the Amazon mp3 item running and i've never so much as clicked on that thing since i've had the phone. Same thing with others.

 

[capnhowdy18]

Certain programs are always gonna run. They are ran at startup, or Android for whatever reason feels the need to load up that service/program.

Having the program running wont kill your battery life. It takes the same amount of power to have empty memory as it does to have Amazon MP3 sitting in the memory. You actually use more battery life killing some of those programs. The reason being that after you waste the cycles to kill it, android eventually decided to load that program back into memory which takes some cpu cycles.

Where you run into problems is if that app in the background is doing something. Either using the cpu, polling the internet or who knows what else. Those are the programs you wanna check out. For instance if your facebook is open thats fine, unless you have checked to refresh every 30mins and you only check it once a day.

 

[derek5l]

I am having horrid battery life..1.5 hours from a full charge and 50 of my battery is gone..sprint have me a new phone and battery because I just new this was unreal but low and behold the same battery issue holds true..I laugh at fan boys that claim to get over 6 hours off battery life with medium usage..its just nit true!!!!!

What kind of phones have you had before the EVO?

 

[dguidry12]

What kind of phones have you had before the EVO?

Im back guys and thanks for the comments. I am at a computer now so I can respond alot better. I have had all of the Treo's and the Palm Pre. All of those had super sucky batteries as well especially the Pre.

My experience today was this morning after 100 percent of battery it dropped down to 60% of battery life the first 2 hours. This is with very minimal usage. Keep in mind that I have gotten a replacement phone and don't have apps that are a drain. I just can't understand why the battery decreases in such short time in relations to it being 100 percent.

 

[Kedar]

Im back guys and thanks for the comments. I am at a computer now so I can respond alot better. I have had all of the Treo's and the Palm Pre. All of those had super sucky batteries as well especially the Pre.

My experience today was this morning after 100 percent of battery it dropped down to 60% of battery life the first 2 hours. This is with very minimal usage. Keep in mind that I have gotten a replacement phone and don't have apps that are a drain. I just can't understand why the battery decreases in such short time in relations to it being 100 percent.

How's the 3g in your area?
Is AIM/Google Talk on?

Seems like the two most likely culprits.

 

[dguidry12]

How's the 3g in your area?
Is AIM/Google Talk on?

Seems like the two most likely culprits.

The arrows on the 3g logo never stay on solid if that means anything and for aim or google I don't use those two.

Thanks for the help though.

 

[Gekko]

are you following the steps i posted?

 

[Doug B]

I've had my Evo now for six days. Wifi and 4G are turned off. The first couple days of battery life sucked as I expected since it is a new phone. But the last few day have seen great battery life. I work 12 hours shifts and use my phone constantly for phone calls and moderate data usage, as well as some game playing during down time (Angry Birds is sooo addicting). My phone still has life left when I get home. Usually left with about 10 to 15 percent battery life by the time I plug it in. The uptime between charges is approximately 17 hours. This is the same type of battery life I would see with my Nexus One. I am really loving this phone.

 

[anon(41073)]

I don't know if this has been discussed already. What worked for me was changing the Sense weather/clock widget from using location to manually entering the zip code. What I think was happening is due to the building that I work in it was using alot of battery by searching for a GPS signal every hour even though I am getting a strong 3G signal. This seems to have worked for me. I went from having to charge my phone at work(12 hour shift) to being able to make through it the whole day without a charge.

 

[kyoon19]

you should check the battery life thread. Also, turn off gtalk. I took off the charger 8hrs ago and I still have 78% on my EVO. I made short calls several times and listened to music for about 20min in my car. If I don't use my phone at all, it lasts about 40hrs. My phone is rooted and running setcpu though.

 

[roothog]

I don't agree entirely with tania's suggestions:

I get great battery life on my phone. This is what I do with it:

1. GPS off. I dont need it on unless an app needs it or I am lost.

Sounds good.

2. WiFi on when needed.

Disagree. WiFi on when available, not when needed. There'll be some background communication happening on your phone periodically, and doing those over WiFi rather than over 3g will help your battery. Getting off of the cell data and on to WiFi data will lengthen your time on battery.

3. Screen set to 1 minute before it sleeps.

4. Display light down a bit.

Both seem fine.

5. Email checks once a day. (if I need to check repeatedly for something, I just refresh the mail. no biggie. I am used to this already. I see how this may be a problem for people who need email reception to be instantaneous though if it is job-related.)

If you're on WiFi rather than 3g data, then you can crank this much higher. I sync every 5 minutes from 8:00am-Midnight, and every 15 minutes from midnight to 8. With that sync rate, I've still gone over 3 days on battery.

6. I sign out of apps that may keep me signed in while running, like Photobucket. I don't know if this has a direct affect on the battery life, but better safe than sorry.

FriendStream is another one. I've removed that widget from whatever home screen it was on.

7. I update alot of my stuff manually because I don't need to know what is going on every second (like facebook... I just hit Update when I get curious about who is doing what lol). I understand that some people may need to have constant updates though, so manual updates may not be the best solution for everyone.

8. I am a light to medium user. I have my fun with it playing games and staying connected to friends. I also like to take alot of pictures for creative purposes (art student). I expect my usage to be a little higher in a few days when college starts. I'll be emailing and looking up info on the go more frequently. My cell signal sucks at college though, so my Evo will be off when I don't need to use it. Verizon cell signal wins at school. FLAWLESS coverage. *sigh*

So far... this is what I can remember. If I come up with anything else, I will post again. I hope some of this information helps. I was worried about battery life when I got my Evo, but I was happily surprised. I am not getting horrid results. It is about the same (dare I say BETTER?) as my Pre. I wish you luck dguidry12!! I hope you can resolve things because the Evo is a wonderful phone. I am an Android Newbie as well.

Good luck! <3

Other savers:

- Turn off GTalk auto sign-in (on the settings page of the Talk app).

- Turn off always on mobile data.

- Turn off data feed syncs for any feeds you're not using (stocks, news, etc).

- Turn off plugins in your browser.

- Never turn 4g on.

The key point, though, is that the phone will not be configured for battery saving when you purchase it. You have to spend some time working with it to improve your time on battery.