The Official Battery Life Thread

[KillerG]

Yes I do Some people may try to justify having a cell phone in school for emergency purposes. That is complete bull. If anyone needs to get ahold of their kids they can call the main office. Kids will also try to justify having the cell phone because it can be there calculator, amongst other things. The problem is that they can and will use it for things that are not related to school during the day. How do I know? Because I'm the 1 that would do so

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We technically aren't aloud to have cell phones at my school, but most of my teachers are very cool and nonchalant about it. They know they're there, and there's no way you can force teenagers (especially seniors) to not have one. In most cases it's hard to force teenagers to do anything, but when it comes to cell phones they really are wasting their time.
And about the parents calling the main office? That's INSANELY inconvenient because then they have to forward that message all the way across campus and find a kid from the 2000 kids that go to my school. Yeah, they don't want you using your cell phone, but would rather you call your parents on it than come to the office, that's what I've been told from all the administration. Just don't get caught, and only use for emergencies and you'll be fine. It's like what you say is where people get in trouble...kids start playing Angry Birds during class and don't pay attention.
But I know personally that I've used my cell phone in class...I don't often do much with it, but sometimes I'll text someone or go look up something on the internet. Most of the time though, I have a teacher's assistant class as my fourth class and I just do all my texting and surfing in there, it seems to work out fine, I don't need to text people until then normally anyways, usually to see if they want to go to lunch or something.
But I've been getting okay battery life, I'm thinking about if it doesn't get to what everyone else is getting I'll take it back and ask for a replacement (I've been having more than just battery issues. And I kind of want to return my Otterbox case and get an extended battery instead).
Today I've gotten to 25% after about 5 hours, and I'm running Juice Defender, it turns off my radios when the screen is locked, and I was on 4G most of the day, except I was on wifi for about 30 mins before I left. I also have advanced task killer, and killed pretty much all the apps I didn't need running while idling. Auto brightness too, but I've been inside all day. I also turned off wifi when I was gone, and the GPS, and I never have bluetooth on, just auto brightness and autosyncing every 15 or 30 minutes. I got home and ran wifi for about 30 minutes now, here's my stats:
Cell Standby-35%
Phone Idle-20%
Display-19%
Wi-iFi-11%
Android OS-7%
Browser-3%
Browser is funny because I only looked up like 2 things today on the browser since it's been off the charger. Is this supposed to be average? I would think since all the radios are off most of the time that I'd be getting better battery life...

 

[Scout_313]

After deciding to run my phone on 3G only and switching to 4G only when I need it, my battery life has improved immensely. I've used it a fair amount and I'm only down to 40%.

 

[fogflyer]

OK, I have had this phone for 10 days now and I think the battery use meter is inaccurate. I am 3G only and on wifi the majority of the time. My wifi toggle is always on. I am in/out of wifi area at work all the time, so it does some toggling.

I think the DISPLAY is the biggest drain on the battery even though the chart certainly does not list it as that.

Today has really convinced me of that. Most work days I get home with 40% and it is down to 20% by the time I go to bed and dock it. I usually have about 3 hours of display on time at the end of the day. When I first got the phone it did not quite make it through the whole day, but I would have 4-5 hours plus on the display.

Today, my uptime is over 13 hours and I am at 80 percent still! The big difference is that I only have a display on time of 1 hour 12 minutes. All the days my talk time is less than 30 minutes.

Now my meter shows about like everyone elses with cell standby and phone idle as the top two in the 30% range. Then comes wifi (16%) motorola contact data (12%) and today my display is only 5%. Normally my display is about equal with the wifi amount in third or fourth place.

Anyway, 80% after almost 14 hours is way more than I have gotten before and the main thing that I did different was just not play on the phone much today. If the majority of the battery was getting eaten up by cell standby and phone idle I don't think I would have seen this kind of drastic improvement.

 

[JStrider]

I went camping this weekend and didnt have my charger.

I took the phone off the charger at noon on friday, put it in the maximum battery saver mode. With very minimal use, a couple texts and a brief phone call, Sunday night at 9pm my battery was still at 10%.

I had thought about turning off the 4G, but decided I wanted to see how long it would last with it on.

 

[Are Bee]

I had been noticing pretty non-stellar battery life and trying things here and there to remedy it. Today's fix was removing the facebook widget and the Verizon data usage widget from my homescreen. One of these seems to be doing the trick as I'm at 70% battery after 7 hours right now. I haven't done a whole lot today (a few minutes of gaming, a few txt messages, 4 phone calls, couple of minutes of browsing) but some crappy battery days didn't involve much either. Currently, 4g on, wifi on (locked in on a signal at work) gps and bluetooth off. I think it might be the data usage widget that was causing the problem. Just wanted to see if anyone else had come to that conclusion.

 

[Cigar-Junkie]

I had been noticing pretty non-stellar battery life and trying things here and there to remedy it. Today's fix was removing the facebook widget and the Verizon data usage widget from my homescreen. One of these seems to be doing the trick as I'm at 70% battery after 7 hours right now. I haven't done a whole lot today (a few minutes of gaming, a few txt messages, 4 phone calls, couple of minutes of browsing) but some crappy battery days didn't involve much either. Currently, 4g on, wifi on (locked in on a signal at work) gps and bluetooth off. I think it might be the data usage widget that was causing the problem. Just wanted to see if anyone else had come to that conclusion.

It would be too funny if the battery issues are caused by Verizon widget. Deliberately didn't top off my charge today via car dock or desk top charger and turned off 4g all day. 12 and 1/2 hours and at 40%. Just deleted data used and recent email widget. Also last night moved my three email addresses from stock "my accounts" to Kaytien email (that's one more then K-9) thinking that polling the accounts might hurt battery life. Trying to tweak this bionic before having to send it back due to battery not able hold for a full day. I really like the phone but I need to get close to a full day with moderate usage, if I can do that I am OK topping off during heavy use. Now I am at 30% because I type so slow, I am a grandpa, go figure.

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[KillerG]

Today my battery life was pretty good, I think I'm finally figuring out how to balance it a bit more...and I think a big cause for my poor battery life was just that I am running too many apps at a time. I noticed that under my advanced task killer app that I'm running 20 apps at a time...for no good reason! I'm going to either uninstall apps that I don't think I'll need, or start blacklisting some.
The big battery saver is Juice Defender. I set it to turn off all mobile data when the screen is off, and I was running 3G all day except for about twice when I switched 4G on to do something.
So I got a screenshot app and I took some pictures. I got home at about 35%:

Here's my battery stats. Any of the wifi usage was when I got home.

People always ask how long the screen was on. When I took the screenshot: 1 hour and 45 minutes. Almost 2 hours out of the 8 hour day...mostly because I was at school most of the day and keep it off obviously when I'm in class.

Here's a screenshot of the battery settings I'm using.
And another thing that could be using up battery, like others are saying, is the widgets I have going.

Here are all my screens...I also didn't take a screenshot of one homescreen because it's just icons of games to launch. I pretty much filled up all 5 screens now, I only have space for a little more on my docs page there with my mobile hotspot icon (which is unlocked to work if I have my charger on me ) I am rooted, but I've barely done anything with it, just removed a few apps, unlocked the mobile hotspot, and got the bootstrapper loaded on.
So it was about 35-40% when I got it home...good or not? I've seen people that keep the radios on all day and are getting more battery usage than me...

 

[Cigar-Junkie]

Sometimes task killers cause more battery drain than they save. Android os will restart tasks that just got killed over and over again. Many android functions are there but idle and not using any battery.

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[Cigar-Junkie]

20% at 14 hours now.

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[KillerG]

Sometimes task killers cause more battery drain than they save. Android os will restart tasks that just got killed over and over again. Many android functions are there but idle and not using any battery.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

I've seen that happening more and more often now...I'm thinking I might just uninstall it because I don't think it's helping much. Or just make it stop running in the background so that I can just use it for pesky apps that don't want to go away.

 

[YourMobileGuru]

I've seen that happening more and more often now...I'm thinking I might just uninstall it because I don't think it's helping much. Or just make it stop running in the background so that I can just use it for pesky apps that don't want to go away.

The phone already comes with an app called Task Manager (in your app drawer) which will allow you to kill any runaway tasks. There is absolutely NO need for a third party task manager/killer and as stated above said apps tend to do as much harm as good and often more so (NOTE: This is added by Motorola not Google. Google's stance is still that they are not needed on Android 2.1 and later).

 

[shadowsjc]

charged it to 100% last night, around midnight. went to sleep (phone remained on full performance battery mode, 4G on). woke up with phone at about 80%. went to class in the morning (didnt use phone), walked home and chatted on google chat for 15-20 mins. chatted some more, went grocery shopping. phone was warm all morning (not sure why). eventually died at 130pm (13 hrs, but 7 of those were with the phone sitting on my desk with the screen off while sleeping).

gonna try uninstalling some apps to see if that helps. i really wish the Prime were being released in Oct because i dont think i can wait till Nov without a decent phone.

 

[mjforte]

charged it to 100% last night, around midnight. went to sleep (phone remained on full performance battery mode, 4G on). woke up with phone at about 80%. went to class in the morning (didnt use phone), walked home and chatted on google chat for 15-20 mins. chatted some more, went grocery shopping. phone was warm all morning (not sure why). eventually died at 130pm (13 hrs, but 7 of those were with the phone sitting on my desk with the screen off while sleeping).

gonna try uninstalling some apps to see if that helps. i really wish the Prime were being released in Oct because i dont think i can wait till Nov without a decent phone.

What makes anyone think the Prime will have better battery life than the Bionic? Not only is it clocked higher at 1.5GHz but it will also have an HD screen on top of an LTE radio. It will still be using a first gen LTE radio so I wouldn't expect battery life to be better, but possibly worse than the Bionic.

 

[ManBearPig618]

What makes anyone think the Prime will have better battery life than the Bionic? Not only is it clocked higher at 1.5GHz but it will also have an HD screen on top of an LTE radio. It will still be using a first gen LTE radio so I wouldn't expect battery life to be better, but possibly worse than the Bionic.

I think it's more of a "Bionic isn't quite cutting it, I'd love to be able to try out the Prime" type statement...not necessarily a prediction of the Prime's battery life. It may end up having a larger battery, it may not. I doubt they would give it anything less than what's in the Bionic.

Personally, I think the Bionic has battery issues. Wifi/standby are ripping through their batteries like nobody's business. Hopefully when the Prime drops in early November it will be a little more efficient.

 

[YourMobileGuru]

charged it to 100% last night, around midnight. went to sleep (phone remained on full performance battery mode, 4G on). woke up with phone at about 80%. .

I've never understood people's aversion to leaving a phone on the charger overnight it doesn't hurt anything and you can't overcharge a Lithium Ion battery.

 

[shadowsjc]

I've never understood people's aversion to leaving a phone on the charger overnight it doesn't hurt anything and you can't overcharge a Lithium Ion battery.

To test battery life while the phone is sleeping? After all, it's one thing to say "dude, I barely used my phone during the day but my battery life sucks" when in actuality you're turning the screen on every 5 mins to check Facebook. It's another thing completely to leave the phone unattended on a desk for 6 hours while you're asleep.

 

[shadowsjc]

Phone off the charger at ~4pm this afternoon. Used very sparingly. No phone calls.

Now, 50%, 7 hrs.

Cell standby, 44%, (time without signal 0%)
Phone idle 41%
Android OS 9%
Display time: 4% (time on, 23 minutes)

No games, no poor reception area, just sitting around most of the afternoon.

 

[YourMobileGuru]

To test battery life while the phone is sleeping? After all, it's one thing to say "dude, I barely used my phone during the day but my battery life sucks" when in actuality you're turning the screen on every 5 mins to check Facebook. It's another thing completely to leave the phone unattended on a desk for 6 hours while you're asleep.

All phones use battery when not in use. This isn't new and will not change. Why wouldnt someone want to start their day with a fresh battery?

 

[YourMobileGuru]

Phone off the charger at ~4pm this afternoon. Used very sparingly. No phone calls.

Now, 50%, 7 hrs.

Cell standby, 44%, (time without signal 0%)
Phone idle 41%
Android OS 9%
Display time: 4% (time on, 23 minutes)

No games, no poor reception area, just sitting around most of the afternoon.

So basically from that you can predict about 13-14hrs of battery life on a charge with light/moderate use..... tell us again why that is a bad thing? That's quite good for Android.

 

[bplewis24]

All phones use battery when not in use. This isn't new and will not change. Why wouldnt someone want to start their day with a fresh battery?

I think what he's saying is that it would be a one-time experiment to see how much battery will be used when it's completely idle overnight. Not that it would be standard practice every night.

I knew something was bad about my battery when I left it on overnight with an 80% charge and woke up to a completely dead phone at 6AM.

Brandon