Understanding Battery Display

[KurtTX]

I've been struggling with what the phone is telling me. I've attached a screen shot that I've annotated a bit. I look at the battery power line and then see what was happening, especially with Awake and Screen On displays. See the battery display picture. #1 is when I made a call on Friday afternoon. OK, that makes sense...the phone is awake but the screen is not on as I have the phone to my ear the whole time. However #2 and #3 don't make any sense. Those are periods Friday and Saturday night when I turned the phone off. Why is the phone awake at all? The screen is not on for sure, but why is it "awake" and losing power?

I went by the AT&T store to ask about this...just got the shrug of the shoulders. It was suggested that I download the Android Assistant to see what's going on. I'm still playing with it and have used the "Quick Boost" feature to kill apps that I don't need running. But it seems that I do that, put the phone in sleep mode for an hour or so, come back and check the processes that are running and there are a ton of them! None that I called up and even want. The second picture below is a snap of that process screen. Besides the Assistant and HTC Sense, what are these other things, do I need them, how do I (or even can I) keep them from running??

Thanks...Kurt

 

[Elrohir]

As for the processes, most of them are background processes that start automaticly and run in the background. These shouldnt add that much to the power consumption(for processes like latitude check if gps is enabled, it really is a battery drainer).

If I look at #2 and #3 it looks like a small wakelock to me.

I hope i could help
Elrohir.

 

[KurtTX]

I don't have any of my GPS services turned on, so I don't know where that stuff is coming from.

As for wakelock, I ran across this some time back...asked about it here:

http://forums.androidcentral.com/htc-vivid/177305-how-many-hours-your-battery-good.html#post1854074

but didn't get much response. I'd sure like to know what might be causing that.

Kurt

 

[KurtTX]

It's come to my attention that the periods 2 and 3 on my picture above represent the power lost due to turning the phone on after being off all night long. There might be a reasonable draw from the CPU coming up and that when you connect the two points from the night before and the next morning, you see some power "loss" not from losing anything overnight, but from the boot up cycle in the AM. It looks worse on 3 because I'm farther down the battery power scale...batteries probably tend to show power lose more quickly near the end due to a non-linear response.

Dunno...seems plausible...

Kurt

 

[KurtTX]

Here's another display after two 48-hour periods that I ran as an experiment. The picture shows the first 24-hour (Period 1) when the phone was on but in sleep mode and the second 24-hour (Period 2) when the phone was completely off. During both of these periods, I didn't touch the phone and I received no phone calls. I did have a note in a calendar during Period 1 so I'm not sure if that contributed to the drastic change in battery decay.

According to the display, I seem to see the following things:

- while in sleep mode, the screen is off (good) but the phone wakes up from time to time...I guess to check for messages, update time, etc.
- when in the off mode, the screen is on all the time and the phone is awake...at least according to what the display says.
- I lose about 4-5% of battery life just by turning the phone on...this is the difference between the beginning and ending level for Period 2.
- the phone is logging the presence of a mobile signal whether the phone is on or in sleep mode.

Maybe there are some bugs in the display?? This is incosistent with what I would expect.

Kurt

 

[OperationA7X]

Temperature. That could play with voltages.

Sent from my HTC Vivid WCX using Android Central Forums

 

[KurtTX]

Temperature. That could play with voltages.

It's hot here in Texas, but not that hot!! I keep the phone with me in my air conditioned house, car, and work place...typically it's not on much except evenings and weekends.

I would have thought that the displays are a function of programming and such, rather than modest changes in voltage. But, what do I know??

Kurt

 

[OperationA7X]

It doesn't matter what the temperature outside what matters is the temperature of the battery. Lithium Ion batteries are odd when it comes to temperature changes.

Sent from my HTC Vivid WCX using Android Central Forums

 

[KurtTX]

True. But am I the only one seeing this sort of thing? If so, then maybe I have a defective phone...and I'm on my second Vivid since April. Maybe no one else really notices or cares. I'm approaching it from the standpoint of battery life. If the display says that my phone is "awake" when in fact it has been powered completely down, that either says I've got some kind of app running, possibly another defective phone or that the software just can't display things properly. If the former, then I need to figure out what it is to maximize battery life. If the latter, then I need to just accept it and move on...wait for the next upgrade??

Kurt

 

[OperationA7X]

In my opinion, I will not own any One X series, I need 4 soft buttons, not 3. And sometimes, my HTC Vivid doesn't shut off right, like, when I push the power button, it will show my lock screen as if the screen was just off and then, a few seconds later, it reboots. Have you had a circumstance like that before?

Sent from my HTC Vivid WCX using Android Central Forums

 

[OperationA7X]

And here's a screenshot of my battery at the moment, see the line? And that line through the battery graph, could possibly help you with your battery issue.

Sent from my HTC Vivid WCX using Android Central Forums

 

[KurtTX]

I've never had a problem with the phone rebooting as you suggest. And I've also never had such a line vertically through my battery display. Here's my latest display. Notice the increase in battery power on the right side. That is when I charged it the other day. The phone was dead off from overnight and I just plugged in the USB cable into my computer at work. So during that period of charging, the phone was awake and screen on? I think not!! This is the kind of stuff that confuses me.

Kurt

 

[OperationA7X]

I think I may have figured it out!!!! Do you have fast boot enabled?

Sent from my HTC Vivid WCX using Android Central Forums

 

[OperationA7X]

And also, whats with the almost completely dotted line in the mobile data?

Sent from my HTC Vivid WCX using Android Central Forums

 

[KurtTX]

I think I may have figured it out!!!! Do you have fast boot enabled?

Yes...it is/was a default, but I can certainly turn that off.

Kurt

 

[KurtTX]

And also, whats with the almost completely dotted line in the mobile data?

I really don't know...AFAIK, I've never been without cell tower service.

Kurt

 

[KurtTX]

You might be onto something here... The phone of course takes longer to boot and does some Android updates each time I turn the phone on. The other thing that I notice is that all of my screens seem to go to some "home" position. For example, the App button at the bottom of the phone...in the past (w/ Fast Boot enable), when I returned to all my apps, the screen would be in the position that I last left it, so for example Settings was always positioned in the same spot. But with Fast Boot disabled, I have the scroll the screen a few times to find Settings...the apps page is justified so that it is at the top.

I can see where the boot w/o the Fast option resets pointers...it's like the Fast Boot is saving to memory the last known settings/screens/choices, etc., and then when turning on again, those are reloaded. In the case of the battery display, all the software can do is assume that the phone was Awake the whole time it was off because it was on when being turned off (saved into the settings or start up area) and on when the phone is turned on again, so it just assumes that it was on the whole time.

I'll have to check this out for other situations and see if it begins to match up with the way the phone is actually being used.

Thanks...Kurt

 

[OperationA7X]

Listen, the fastboot not only 1) prevents you from being able to boot into HBoot and 2) never fully shuts off your device. Yes it takes longer to boot without fastboot but at least you could save battery.