Wait and see Battery life method

[Edwill86]

So its day 14 of having my bolt... and I have been getting increasingly better life every day I have owned it.
let me set the stage here

Stock battery
4g data on 100% of the time
gps in idle
1-2 hour sync for fb and twitter
not rooted
Auto display brightness
Medium-light to Medium use most days

so
day 1- 5 was a bit rough with an average 3-5 hours max without charging.
after those 5 days I started to see some jumps in life. I started getting 7-8 hours days 6-10.
keep in mind I am not tweaking my phone at all after day 5. I have just been using it like I want to use it. EI Playing games when I want, streaming pandora or using the music player, sending emails, texts, IM's, and adding apps..ect ect.

days 11 and 12 I was hitting 10 to 10.5 hours of run time... Now yesterday.. I hit 15 hours..but here is the thing... i still had 45% life left at 1am when I went to bed.

so in conclusion ( at least what I have seen with my phone) if you just use ur phone and dont worry about the life it will work itself out you just have to be patient. (not to mention the 2.3 updates for android should make it even better.)

 

[scorpiodsu]

That's pretty encouraging. It'll be good to see how others battery life is over the next week or so especially those that bought on launch. I know my EVO battery life improved over time. Not drastic, but improvement nonetheless.

 

[Slapnpop826]

This has been my experience as well. I did the few tips that were suggested when I first got the phone and I have just been using it normally since. I have noticed with each day (I'm on day 7) my battery life has increased and I also noticed that it seems to charge faster.

 

[dajogejr]

I am committed to getting the most out of the stock battery.
The first week I went between the two, fat daddy and stock.
Since last Friday I'm exclusively on the stocker.
I'm using the phone...just as I would.
If I use it as GPS, I plug it in. With LTE, GPS and Bluetooth all on...it'll drain the battery like gas through a wide open Hemi.

One thing I've been doing since day one is pressing power when I'm done, not waiting 30 seconds to timeout the display.

If I remember, I turn off bluetooth when not in the car and turn on WiFi at home (WiFi at work is terrible...)

 

[djousma]

Like you said, "using the phone normally". Probably the biggest drain is all the tweaking and playing with the new toy.

 

[nativi]

I have had pretty good battery life from day one. The other night I had to start playing games at 1am to get the battery to drain more before charging it over night. Now yesterday the battery went crazy or something, the phone seem to heat up alot while in my pocket and the battery got drain. I had to recharged it, which i have never had to do that. So I am checking to see if I downloaded something that was running in the background.

 

[Wildside]

I found my battery life improved greatly after a week of use. I was out of town and was using it quite a bit the first 3 days getting it tweaked (did most of the battery saving tips) and then I used it pretty heavily to keep my wife informed about our son's baseball games throughout the day.

When I returned to the office, with bad VZW reception, my battery life went south fast. I did the factory reset Monday night and battery life was horrible yesterday but seems to be better today. I assume the phone is reconditioning the battery after the reset and that I will again see improvement over the next 5-7 days.

I'm thinking about rooting but will have to get help from someone (Miami maybe?) because I paid retail for the phone and really don't want to brick it doing the root myself.

I agree though - battery life gets better as the phone is used.

 

[scorpiodsu]

Like you said, "using the phone normally". Probably the biggest drain is all the tweaking and playing with the new toy.

I would bet that's true in most case. When people first get the device, they can't put it down. So that constant use obviously would drain the battery. After a few days or a week or so, they don't play with it as much and finally have the phone the way they want and all the apps they feel they need so they are now using the phone with normal use that results in better battery life. Having said that there's no question that some devices have batteries that still handle the initial love fest a little better than others.

 

[ji001]

This is good to hear.

although I hope mines will improve like yours, I think itll probably be because of the new-ess effect wearing off and I mess with it less.

 

[Charmed Juan]

I am a rather heavy user, I listen to podcasts and audio books at work, My Droid X couldn't last the day. So i have a spare battery in a cradle charger and pop that in at the end of the work day.
With the Thunderbolt, I have to charge it at breaks and lunch and just barely make it to the end of day.
Today, I found my podtrapper app stuck on updating the engadget podcast. My battery was in the yellow in 3 hours.
Sent the logs to the Dev, he is very good at fixing problems.

 

[tropper]

So its day 14 of having my bolt... and I have been getting increasingly better life every day I have owned it.
let me set the stage here

Stock battery
4g data on 100% of the time
gps in idle
1-2 hour sync for fb and twitter
not rooted
Auto display brightness
Medium-light to Medium use most days

so
day 1- 5 was a bit rough with an average 3-5 hours max without charging.
after those 5 days I started to see some jumps in life. I started getting 7-8 hours days 6-10.
keep in mind I am not tweaking my phone at all after day 5. I have just been using it like I want to use it. EI Playing games when I want, streaming pandora or using the music player, sending emails, texts, IM's, and adding apps..ect ect.

days 11 and 12 I was hitting 10 to 10.5 hours of run time... Now yesterday.. I hit 15 hours..but here is the thing... i still had 45% life left at 1am when I went to bed.

so in conclusion ( at least what I have seen with my phone) if you just use ur phone and dont worry about the life it will work itself out you just have to be patient. (not to mention the 2.3 updates for android should make it even better.)

I pretty much have had the same results, but around day 7 I put my seido 1600 in that I bought before the offical thunder bolt announcement. I have been getting increasingly better batt. life with it as well. Sedio says you will see the best performance with 5-6 full charges.
So far with med-med heavy useage 30% left at about 12/14 hours.

 

[tropper]

I am a rather heavy user, I listen to podcasts and audio books at work, My Droid X couldn't last the day. So i have a spare battery in a cradle charger and pop that in at the end of the work day.
With the Thunderbolt, I have to charge it at breaks and lunch and just barely make it to the end of day.
Today, I found my podtrapper app stuck on updating the engadget podcast. My battery was in the yellow in 3 hours.
Sent the logs to the Dev, he is very good at fixing problems.

Didja try moving all apps back to phone, then using your fav file mngr delete the file " android.secure" then reboot. 2.2 has had a nagging issue with apps to sd something with how it handles it. I have also notice this prob when downloading an app and it says "error 18 installation unsucessful" the fix for that is to unmount the sd then remount after installing.

 

[flipteg]

i have said this before but it is very hard to tell remaining battery life by just looking at the percentages that the phone is reporting. lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries have a maximum voltage of 4.2v per cell. when the phone is unplugged, that voltage will quickly dip to around 3.9v to 3.85v range where it will flat line there for much of battery's charge cycle. i think this is what most people see when they complain that the battery life drops to 80% only an hour after unplugging with minimal use.

one thing i noticed on my phone is that when the phone was new, the percentages the phone is reporting varied quite a bit in relation to actual voltages. for example 4.2v should always read 100%, but when the phone is new, the 100% reading was varying in voltages from 4.15v to as low as 4.1v. this is also what i think is happening when people talk about "bump" charging. realistically, bump charging is not possible. once a lithium polymer or lithium ion battery reaches 4.2v per cell, that's it. a properly programmed device will never allow a battery to charge over 4.2v. charging these types of batteries to 4.25v will cause it to heat and puff up. at 4.3v these batteries will burst into flames. this is what happens on those devices that had a recall due to batteries catching on fire. it's not really the battery that was the problem. it's the software that's controlling the charger that is causing the battery to burn up.

one time, i had the phone plugged in and the reading was already at 100% but the battery voltage is only at 4.10v. i unplugged it and waited a couple of minutes and plugged it back in. because the reading is still very close to 100%, the phone did not try to put any charge on the battery even though the battery is still not yet at 100% as indicated by the voltage reading.

this discrepancy between percentage readings and the actual voltages improved quite a bit within a week. this phone's "learning period" is what i think most people assume as battery conditioning. yes, lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries benefit from proper conditioning, but in reality, the benefits is only seen when used in a high current applications such as big electric motors. even then, the benefits of conditioning is mostly seen as increase in the number of charge cycle rather than the day to day charge and discharge time.

it's impossible to tell anything from battery "conditioning" in low current draw devices such as cellphones. when the phone's software learning process is taken out of the equation, if a battery on a phone only lasts 5 hours while the phone is on standby, no amount of conditioning will ever increase that to any perceptible length. either the battery is broken out of the box, or the device is really drawing that much power either by design or by a rogue application.

my recommendation is for the first week or two, completely ignore the percentages that the phone shows. regardless of the percentages indicated, 4.2v is 100% and ~3.66v is empty. when my phone was new, it was showing 20% when the voltage is still at around 3.75v. which is still a lot for a low current draw device. now it's showing 20% as 3.69v which is more in line to the discharge curve of a lithium polymer/ion battery.

from my RC airplane hobby. this is the typical discharge curve for lithium polymer/ion batteries per cell.
4.00V--84%
3.96---77%
3.93---70%
3.90---63%
3.86---56%
3.83---48%
3.80---43%
3.76---35%
3.73---27%
3.70---21%
3.67---14%

 

[flipteg]

i just wanted to add. the only main thing i did for battery life is under settings > accounts, i made sure to stop syncs on the things i don't use. by default, news and weather are set to synchronize. i don't use news so i disabled that. the weather app that i use i set to a reasonable sync time of every hour.

generally, i'm always weary of using apps that have to poll a server on set time intervals. i avoid using them especially when an app with the same function that has push notification is available. i just don't use polling apps (at least i don't let them poll) if i don't necessarily need the constant notification. for example, i use the Facebook app but i don't let it poll at all. i don't care that the application notifies me of every updates my friends make. i see all that when i have spare time and open the app.

i do install a lot of apps but i generally watch out for apps that keeps the phone from sleeping or apps that don't close properly when i back out of them. chat programs are notorious for this. which is why i paid the $5 for Trillian when most people can't understand why anyone will pay money for a chat program when so many are available for free. right now, Beejive and Trillian are the only two chat programs that i know of that uses push notification. and yes, i've used Fring, Nimbuzz, Palringo, and eBuddy extensively in the past.

push is also the main reason why i have all my email accounts going to my Gmail. even though some of my email accounts only offer POP3, the polling intervals are done on the Gmail servers and not on my phone. once Gmail fetches an email from a POP3 account, it then pushes it to my phone immediately saving the phone's battery from having to constantly poll each individual email accounts.

i'm on 4G and do not turn it off. i usually get 14 hours with 2 hours of screen use and an hour of talk time. i am on my second Thunderbolt. i had the first one for a little over a week and was exchanged for some unrelated problems. both phones have performed similarly using the precautions i have mentioned.

also, if you have the phone laying on the table for a few minutes and you pick it up, the phone should be at room temperature. i.e. cool to the touch. if it is at all warm, something is using up the processor or the phone is not asleep. you can use a program like Watchdog Lite to monitor this. you can set threshold on processor usage and have it notify you if an app is above the processor threshold that you have set. i don't particularly like task killers and Watchdog Lite can indeed be set to automatically kill apps, but i have never used this feature. i only use it solely to let me know if there is a rogue app.

 

[androidburn]

(1) You can apply all the wishful thinking you want. It's a 1400 mAh battery and should have been as large in capacity as the one the new EVO is getting. Hard to believe it's smaller capacity than the old EVO. Even the Incredible 2, which doesn't even feature 4G, has a LARGER capacity battery than the Thunderbolt. That said, let's talk about reasonable life expectancy.

(2) I've noticed the battery meter jumps all over the place. Sometimes I'll show near 100% even after talking on the phone for 20 minutes. A short time later it will drop. No matter what intermediate number I'm getting, it's only approximate and the end result is my battery is depleted before the end of a business day with somewhat moderate to heavy use.

(3) If you use the Internet, especially chat clients even if they run in the background, best of luck with your phone lasting the stated 14 hours without a charge for average use during the day for business. If you've got 3-4 email accounts like I do, with 2 checking every 10 minutes and gmail, your battery will burn more quickly. When Skype is released, look forward to 50 minutes of usage.

The phone is "usable" as is but you must play the conservation game if you use 4G to any reasonable extent during the day. My idea of a reasonable battery life is not playing guessing games every day as to whether the phone will last. This is why I got an extended battery, reluctantly. While I do like the phone, I've absolutely had it with HTC playing games of "how cheap can we skimp on essentials" with every new phone they release. While the HTC Sense interface was a definite plus, it's as if someone there decided they can skimp on the hardware and pocket extra money from sales.

As much as I love the phone, Motorola has to be laughing hard. HTC put in a small battery (which we all knew about) and a fraction of the internal memory (that we didn't know about). No HDMI out either. But they did have loads of extended batteries available -- as if they knew what was coming.

If you have a charger, the battery won't be an issue. But this is just a repeat of the Incredible, where the stock battery was absurdly underpowered. And the Incredible 2 makes this phone an "extended" laugher. Enough is enough. HTC sucks and I won't be buying anything from them again. If it wasn't for a great deal I had (and didn't want to lose), I'd have waited for another option.

 

[Edwill86]

(1) You can apply all the wishful thinking you want. It's a 1400 mAh battery and should have been as large in capacity as the one the new EVO is getting. Hard to believe it's smaller capacity than the old EVO. Even the Incredible 2, which doesn't even feature 4G, has a LARGER capacity battery than the Thunderbolt. That said, let's talk about reasonable life expectancy.

(2) I've noticed the battery meter jumps all over the place. Sometimes I'll show near 100% even after talking on the phone for 20 minutes. A short time later it will drop. No matter what intermediate number I'm getting, it's only approximate and the end result is my battery is depleted before the end of a business day with somewhat moderate to heavy use.

(3) If you use the Internet, especially chat clients even if they run in the background, best of luck with your phone lasting the stated 14 hours without a charge for average use during the day for business. If you've got 3-4 email accounts like I do, with 2 checking every 10 minutes and gmail, your battery will burn more quickly. When Skype is released, look forward to 50 minutes of usage.

The phone is "usable" as is but you must play the conservation game if you use 4G to any reasonable extent during the day. My idea of a reasonable battery life is not playing guessing games every day as to whether the phone will last. This is why I got an extended battery, reluctantly. While I do like the phone, I've absolutely had it with HTC playing games of "how cheap can we skimp on essentials" with every new phone they release. While the HTC Sense interface was a definite plus, it's as if someone there decided they can skimp on the hardware and pocket extra money from sales.

As much as I love the phone, Motorola has to be laughing hard. HTC put in a small battery (which we all knew about) and a fraction of the internal memory (that we didn't know about). No HDMI out either. But they did have loads of extended batteries available -- as if they knew what was coming.

If you have a charger, the battery won't be an issue. But this is just a repeat of the Incredible, where the stock battery was absurdly underpowered. And the Incredible 2 makes this phone an "extended" laugher. Enough is enough. HTC sucks and I won't be buying anything from them again. If it wasn't for a great deal I had (and didn't want to lose), I'd have waited for another option.

Ok to clear up this Im not going 100% by % of life left

Im going by when the phone basically died and in most cases did die.

yesterday I got 15 hours and it was still alive and in the green and today I have 9 hours off the charger with med. use and am not hat 50% yet. So you can make whatever assumptions you like.

and by the way the Incredible has a 1300mah so its SMALLER then the Tbolts 1400mah. It should hav had a bigger one stock, but HTC obviously had a reason they could not/ did not put one in .

this thread is more to assure ppl that with a little patients the life will improve over time..