Thunderbolt Battery Complaints + Tips/Tricks

[racedog]

I just bought the extended battery cause this is unacceptable to me. I've barely used it today and I'm down to 30% after 8 hours.

If that's true then you seriously need to take a look at what is eating your battery. I have the extended battery and after the first charge I ran it for 27 hours with 7.5 hours not in sleep mode (I was using the device) and I still have 44 percent battery left. AND, this was before I did any tweaking on the TB to improve battery life.

R

 

[want a droid]

I like the HTC battery widget. Just go to "Get more HTC Widgets" or whatever it is and find the battery one.

 

[IDroidThere4Iam]

So after a 2 days on the stock Thunderbolt battery I'm thinking the battery life is pretty much like the Incredible.

My setup:
I have the stock battery
I don't use the Sense widgets, I found on the Incredible they use a lot of battery.
I use Beautiful Widgets for weather, clock
I use LauncherPro instead of Sense too.
I have my screen at about 25% brightness, still easy to see
Run on wi-fi at home
I live in a 3G area, work in a 4G area. Yesterday I was at home all day and I had 3G, 2 bars most of the time.

With that said, day 1 my battery was awful. I let it charge all the way but I got about 6-7 hours out of it before it was pretty low. I didn't check the percent, but it was low enough to turn the battery indicator orange. I think the first day will be bad be cause 1) We're all gonna play with this thing, and 2) It will automatically download all your apps from the Market that you had on your old phone if you came from Android. At least it did for me. Who knows how much other data is being sync'd when you first set it up. Also, I transferred over 16GB of music to the phone and was using iSyncr wifi-sync. I'm sure that will kill the battery.

Side note, anytime I flashed a new ROM on my Incredible, battery life always seemed a crap shoot in the first 24-48 hours. After that though, things always got better. Could be the same on first time use of any phone like the Thunderbolt?

Day 2, I went over 15 hours and I was at 41% battery. I have a separate cell phone for work, so my personal phone is purely for personal use. This means I am on the phone about 5 times a day, not often, for about 20 minutes on average. I send/receive somewhere around 50 txt's a day. I check/send about 15 e-mails a day. I do spend a lot of time on Google Reader. Every couple hours I end up with about 200 new things to read. I surf the web on it a good amount too, watch Youtube videos, etc.

So, I gotta admit, after the Incredible, the Thunderbolt does not seem any worse and may be better. In fact, 41% after 15 hours would have been real tough on my Incredible until I flashed ROM's on it like CM7.

So 2 days later I want to follow up on what I posted previously. Yesterday I had decent battery life again. After being on the stock battery for 12+ hours (just over 12) I had 39% battery remaining.

During the day I did some more wi-fi syncing of music, and then my usual surfing the web, watching YouTube, sending texts, reading/sending e-mails. I also run Trillian all day for AIM, Yahoo, GTalk, and Facebook chat.

Today I switched it up. When I ordered the Thunderbolt, I assumed I would need the bigger battery so I got it, but I didn't crack it open until after a few days with the stock battery. The extended battery is a beast! You can definitely feel a little extra weight.

On the other hand, I never imagined it, but the position of the hump of the battery makes the phone pretty comfortable to hold. I mean both to your ear and when you hold it in your palm, looking at the screen.

Coming from the Incredible, this phone is a bit bigger anyways, but I am finding that I need to get used to the Thunderbolt in my pocket with the extended battery in place.

More importantly, the extended battery lasts waaaaaaay longer. I've been off the charger now for 11.5 hours and I am at 70% battery. I did turn off my wi-fi during the day while I wasn't home, so it was purely running of the mobile network all day while I was at work, 4 bars of signal.

A few other notes about how often I have things syncing: The only accounts I have active in my accounts setup are Facebook (from the Market, not for Sense), Google, and Twitter (again form Market, not for Sense). I have them setup only to update once/hour. For Google I am syncing Reader, Contacts, Gmail, and Calendar. I had Trillian running all day here too.

Display 63%
Cell Standby 9%
Phone Idle 8%
Android System 4%
Internet 3%
Voice calls 3%
Android OS 2%
GMail 2%
Google Reader 2%
Wi-Fi 2%
Beautiful Widgets 2%

 

[IDroidThere4Iam]

I did it the first two charges and now I'll just do it like once a week or month. It doesn't seem as necessary once you do it the first couple times because the whole purpose is to condition (train) your battery. If I'm wrong someone please let us know.

Pzy - In short, I don't think you'll be able to stop bump charging if you are enjoying that battery life. I don't think it really trains your battery. I read a post about HTC batteries once, I will edit this message and add the link if I can dig it up.

Edit - Found it! http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=871051

Letting your battery discharge to 0% is real bad for the chemistry in the battery, but it is also bad to let your battery sit on a charger at 100% for the same reason. The reason no one can fix this in custom software or with apps is because there is a chip in the battery itself that manages charging. This chip will let you charge up to 100%, but if you don't take it off the charger right away, it lets the battery slowly trickle down to say 92%. Once it is at 92% it sits there and varies from charging and discharging, maintaining a roughly 92% charge. When this is happening, your phone will show that it is charged and at 100% But, and I'm sure you have noticed...as soon as you unplug it your phone drops like 6, 7, or 8% in seconds to minutes. This is because the phone software is finally showing you the true battery level.

There is a reason for all of this: Its a trade off between battery life (how many days your battery will live before you need to buy a new one) and battery capacity (how much juice is at your disposal any given day). They are trying to strike a balance here. Keep your battery pegged at 100% on a charger and you will need to replace it sooner.

 

[jaguarpaw]

before i bump charged and tweaked my phone id get about 5 hours of life. I'd unplug and be at about 95% within a minute after unplugging... i bumped, got 96% bumped again and got 97%. i did it too 99%.. after that charge i got about 27 hours. NO JOKE. i also turned the 4 G off.

 

[Iceycold]

Pzy - In short, I don't think you'll be able to stop bump charging if you are enjoying that battery life. I don't think it really trains your battery. I read a post about HTC batteries once, I will edit this message and add the link if I can dig it up.

Edit - Found it! Your battery gauge is lying to you (and it's not such a bad thing) - xda-developers

Letting your battery discharge to 0% is real bad for the chemistry in the battery, but it is also bad to let your battery sit on a charger at 100% for the same reason. The reason no one can fix this in custom software or with apps is because there is a chip in the battery itself that manages charging. This chip will let you charge up to 100%, but if you don't take it off the charger right away, it lets the battery slowly trickle down to say 92%. Once it is at 92% it sits there and varies from charging and discharging, maintaining a roughly 92% charge. When this is happening, your phone will show that it is charged and at 100% But, and I'm sure you have noticed...as soon as you unplug it your phone drops like 6, 7, or 8% in seconds to minutes. This is because the phone software is finally showing you the true battery level.

There is a reason for all of this: Its a trade off between battery life (how many days your battery will live before you need to buy a new one) and battery capacity (how much juice is at your disposal any given day). They are trying to strike a balance here. Keep your battery pegged at 100% on a charger and you will need to replace it sooner.

So based on this what % do you suggest the phone is at before I even attempt to charge overnight?

 

[Mike_is_Mike]

Today is going better.

I did a bump charge this morning for the first time. My results so far:

(I'm in a 4G area)

- Full charge over night, bump charge in the morning.
- Wifi turned on.
- Screen set at 25%
- Auto sync's set to minimum or off.
- Wrote and sent two emails.
- Read five emails
- One three and a half minute phone call.
- took six photos.
- did two bluetooth photo transfers to computer.
- deleted 35 old emails.

Battery shows 90% after 2 hours and 15 minutes.

That's an improvement.

Up date.

At 3 hours I turned off WiFi and went to work.

Made more phone calls (even surfed a bit while I was on hold for five minutes)

Answered more emails

4G, Bluetooth, GPS, Google location, weather, all on. Screen still set to 25%.
I was at 9 hours and 18 minutes with 40% power left and feeling pretty good at this point. But I decided to turn on Pandora (which hadn't been registered yet after setting up NEW gmail account) -- That's when things went wrong, the screen went black, then popped up again but was frozen, went black again, popped up frozen again, did that one more time. the screen became very, very, very sluggish. Then the phone rebooted. When it came on the battery had drooped to 20% (from 40 just minutes ago). But every thing else was fine.

So I'm guessing, without another blackout, frozen, sluggish, seizure, this phone should go 10+ hours with my type of usage on the stock battery - and that's acceptable to me. An extended battery should be more than acceptable.

Bump charging (I think) made all the difference.

Now if I can get my work email set up on it, I'll be good to go and I'll keep the phone.

 

[Bwangster12]

Based on some readings I've seen about positives and negatives of bump charging, it doesn't seem like it would make a difference... but who knows, really.

Isn't it more likely that the few days that people are having the TBs and letting the phones mature have a bigger impact than the bump charging? I mean everyone is saying on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th days... that the bump charging is making the difference. Wouldn't it make sense that its those xtra days since you've had the phone?

 

[IDroidThere4Iam]

So based on this what % do you suggest the phone is at before I even attempt to charge overnight?

Good question, but I don't think I'd go so far as to suggest an optimum percent to start charging your battery. Lithium-ion batteries do not have a memory, so you really should just plug it in to charge whenever you can/need too whether it is 20% or 80% full. Sitting at your desk at work, driving in your car, sitting at home, before you go to bed, whenever.

The one caveat is that you don't want to make a habit of fully discharging the battery before charging it as that is the worst thing you can do for lithium ion. Every now and then won't kill you, but you will shorten the life of the battery if you run it empty or close to empty (e.g. 5%) too often.

Hope this helps.

 

[bthomp21]

13 hours on and used it pretty moderately. about 40% left. dang, this horrible battery life.



Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk

 

[Mike_is_Mike]

Based on some readings I've seen about positives and negatives of bump charging, it doesn't seem like it would make a difference... but who knows, really.

Isn't it more likely that the few days that people are having the TBs and letting the phones mature have a bigger impact than the bump charging? I mean everyone is saying on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th days... that the bump charging is making the difference. Wouldn't it make sense that its those xtra days since you've had the phone?

Perhaps, one way to find out would be to STOP bump charging and see what kind of results one gets. However, I need my phone for work, so I am not willing to try not bumping until this weekend.

Maybe someone else is willing to try tomorrow and report back?

 

[Pzyborg]

Pzy - In short, I don't think you'll be able to stop bump charging if you are enjoying that battery life. I don't think it really trains your battery. I read a post about HTC batteries once, I will edit this message and add the link if I can dig it up.

Edit - Found it! Your battery gauge is lying to you (and it's not such a bad thing) - xda-developers

Letting your battery discharge to 0% is real bad for the chemistry in the battery, but it is also bad to let your battery sit on a charger at 100% for the same reason. The reason no one can fix this in custom software or with apps is because there is a chip in the battery itself that manages charging. This chip will let you charge up to 100%, but if you don't take it off the charger right away, it lets the battery slowly trickle down to say 92%. Once it is at 92% it sits there and varies from charging and discharging, maintaining a roughly 92% charge. When this is happening, your phone will show that it is charged and at 100% But, and I'm sure you have noticed...as soon as you unplug it your phone drops like 6, 7, or 8% in seconds to minutes. This is because the phone software is finally showing you the true battery level.

There is a reason for all of this: Its a trade off between battery life (how many days your battery will live before you need to buy a new one) and battery capacity (how much juice is at your disposal any given day). They are trying to strike a balance here. Keep your battery pegged at 100% on a charger and you will need to replace it sooner.

Thanks, I was hoping someone would clear that up for us. Good info.

 

[IDroidThere4Iam]

Perhaps, one way to find out would be to STOP bump charging and see what kind of results one gets. However, I need my phone for work, so I am not willing to try not bumping until this weekend.

Maybe someone else is willing to try tomorrow and report back?

I can promise you that if you stop bump charging you will not see as good a charge throughout the day.

Part of the better battery life in later days may be from people settling in on their new gadget, but bump charging does, without a doubt, give you an extra bit of capacity (ballpark ~10%, maybe more?).

 

[shley00]

How do you bump charge ?

 

[palomosan]

I'm averaging about 5 to 6 hours of use, a bit more than the Incredible.

 

[Nidaja]

I tried the bump charging thing last night, and after 4 1/2 hours, I had to go to sleep. I never reached the point where the light was green when plugged into the charger. Never!!!

Is that significant? What should I do?

 

[Mike_is_Mike]

How do you bump charge ?

Read "Your smart phone is lying to you" in this link, it tells you how to bump charge.

Your battery gauge is lying to you (and it's not such a bad thing) - xda-developers

 

[Mike_is_Mike]

I tried the bump charging thing last night, and after 4 1/2 hours, I had to go to sleep. I never reached the point where the light was green when plugged into the charger. Never!!!

Is that significant? What should I do?

Did you follow this?

Your battery gauge is lying to you (and it's not such a bad thing) - xda-developers

 

[mthorn79]

I had an issue where I'd charge before bed to 100% & take it off the charger only to find my phone would be completely drained by the morning!

So I tried this, fully charged before bed, put the phone in Airplane Mode after 100% & taking off the charger. Woke up & it was at 99%! No more night drain!

Downside is that you don't get any calls, texts, notifications or updates & they all come rushing in when you enable it in the morning, but full battery is all that matters.

 

[bthomp21]

why not keep it plugged in overnight?