Battery life thread

[Beable]

Yeah I'm sitting at home pondering that now. Not sure if I should wait til tomorrow and take it to a Verizon store to talk to them about it...maybe try to exchange it for an Iphone 4.

 

[carp00r85]

That doesn't sound right at all. Sounds defective, honestly.

Two days after I got my incredible 2, I really wanted to test standby battery life, so I literally left it off the charger overnight (8 hours). I went to bed with it at 52%, and when I woke up it was at 52%. Dead serious.

Something is wrong with yours.

 

[JimmyC927]

Beable, same here. I took my phone a VZW store and they tested it out for me. They charged it to 100% and then let it just sit on the counter for 2 hours, the battery drained more than 15%.

They gave me a new battery, popped it in and it was charged 48%. After 2 hrs 38 mins and only two phone calls lasting no more than 10 mins, the battery is now at 35%.

I am going to take it back and ask for a new DINC2, if that one is still defective, iPhone 4 it is.

 

[Beable]

I don't think it's defective (from a mechanical perspective anyway). It's running that task in the background. That task is making it so the phone doesn't sleep and it slurps a ton of the battery. I do agree that it makes the phone damn near useless and I'm very frustrated by it.

I wish I hadn't gotten water in my original droid, because it held charge like a champ and didn't have any bloat on it.

 

[Beable]

I did the temp root thing and my battery problems seem solved. I went to sleep last night with 100% and woke up with like 93...and I used the screen some in between. 7% over 7.5 hours is way better than 5% every 20 minutes.

What I did:

1. purchased Bloat Freeze for $.99
2. Followed the instructions in this thread: http://forum.androidcentral.com/incredible-2-rooting-roms-hacks/82423-how-temp-root-dinc2.html to temporarily root the phone.
3. When the phone was rooted, run Bloat Freeze, and choose the two Blockbuster apps that appear in the list and Freeze them.
4. Unmount and disconnect the phone, reboot, and I was good.

 

[dfettero]

Please explain what steps you took to achieve this remarkabke battery life?

 

[jshaffer75]

See that's what I hate about bloatware. It actually effects phones performance. Verizon should be ashamed of themselves but we all know they aren't

 

[bik2101]

if you read through the thread, most people have said that after a few charge/discharge cycles, that's when you see the full potential of the battery. unfortunately, i am in the minority of people who have not been able to get anywhere near the kind of battery life a lot of other dinc2 owners are seeing.

 

[bik2101]

See that's what I hate about bloatware. It actually effects phones performance. Verizon should be ashamed of themselves but we all know they aren't

i read in another forum that even though the bloatware is there, if it's not actually running, it won't affect anything. and i think that for most people (myself included) the blockbuster app never actually does run, nor does any of the other bloatware. or at least if it runs, it never shows up in the breakdown of battery usage.

 

[Beable]

See that's what I hate about bloatware. It actually effects phones performance. Verizon should be ashamed of themselves but we all know they aren't

I agree. It's incredible that this wasn't found in QA testing.

 

[Tarpit_Carnivore]

See that's what I hate about bloatware. It actually effects phones performance. Verizon should be ashamed of themselves but we all know they aren't

I've done nothing with my phone in the terms of temp root and achieved 30+ hours of battery life on a single charge.

 

[Tarpit_Carnivore]

Also to further clarify the bloatware debate:

I just looked in my phone's battery use info and not a single thing is related to bloat.

 

[bik2101]

I've done nothing with my phone in the terms of temp root and achieved 30+ hours of battery life on a single charge.

damn... are you doing anything with settings though? like what are your location settings? (vzw, google, gps?) and auto sync is always on? sorry for all the questions. just jealous of the battery life everyone else seems to be getting.

 

[Beable]

Also to further clarify the bloatware debate:

I just looked in my phone's battery use info and not a single thing is related to bloat.

I'm not sure that clarifies anything, or that there's really a debate. I don't have too much of a problem with Verizon putting apps on the phone, but I do have a problem with unprofessionally putting apps on the phone that haven't undergone testing.

It is an interesting data point though (that your phone runs fine and didn't have the problem). We can only speculate about why my phone (and many others) was affected by the Blockbuster app, and yours was not. One possibility is that I've seen it also linked to using the "sync media" setting when you connect your phone via USB to your computer. I did do that erroneously the first night I got the phone. Perhaps that or some other innocuous action wakes up the blockbuster app. Or perhaps we got slightly different software packages based on when we bought our phones. Etc etc.

 

[LowFire]

I did the temp root thing and my battery problems seem solved. I went to sleep last night with 100% and woke up with like 93...and I used the screen some in between. 7% over 7.5 hours is way better than 5% every 20 minutes.

What I did:

1. purchased Bloat Freeze for $.99
2. Followed the instructions in this thread: http://forum.androidcentral.com/incredible-2-rooting-roms-hacks/82423-how-temp-root-dinc2.html to temporarily root the phone.
3. When the phone was rooted, run Bloat Freeze, and choose the two Blockbuster apps that appear in the list and Freeze them.
4. Unmount and disconnect the phone, reboot, and I was good.

I am glad the How To helped you, was reading through and was gonna point you there, then saw this. I appreciate the "Thanks" as well!


For those wondering about what is running or not, using Bloat Freeze will help you with that as well, because as you go through your list of apps it shows you what is a running app and what isn't. I ended up freezing a number of those bloat apps that were running in the background...Beable is proof that the process works

 

[Tarpit_Carnivore]

damn... are you doing anything with settings though? like what are your location settings? (vzw, google, gps?) and auto sync is always on? sorry for all the questions. just jealous of the battery life everyone else seems to be getting.

Gmail is set to push/auto-sync (2 accounts), all other accounts are either auto update or no-sync
Weather updates every 4 hours (Beautiful Widgets)
Auto Brightness
Wifi & GPS stay off unless they're needed

That battery life was achieved when I was not working in my dungeon of an office with moderate use (check seesmic every 1-2 hours, music streaming for 1-2 hours). Even when I'm at work and using my phone more heavily I can still go from 6:30am - 10:00pm without any concern for my battery running out.

It is an interesting data point though (that your phone runs fine and didn't have the problem). We can only speculate about why my phone (and many others) was affected by the Blockbuster app, and yours was not. One possibility is that I've seen it also linked to using the "sync media" setting when you connect your phone via USB to your computer. I did do that erroneously the first night I got the phone. Perhaps that or some other innocuous action wakes up the blockbuster app. Or perhaps we got slightly different software packages based on when we bought our phones. Etc etc.

Information like this is important to helping identify battery issues. I've never touched a single VZW pre-loaded app besides Slacker so that could be why I'm not seeing them show up. My phone doesn't sync any media and I make sure I go in and modify any apps that have some type of sync feature.

I'm not trying to call you so don't take offense. Maybe you using the sync media option kicked off the music manager and other things but that could happen with any app you get out of the market. So I guess that's why I I think it's silly to crucify Verizon.

 

[Beable]

I'm not trying to call you so don't take offense. Maybe you using the sync media option kicked off the music manager and other things but that could happen with any app you get out of the market. So I guess that's why I I think it's silly to crucify Verizon.

The difference, of course, is that any app I get out of the market I can uninstall. This thing you can't just uninstall. You can just look at it while it chews your battery up and do nothing about it.

 

[bik2101]

Gmail is set to push/auto-sync (2 accounts), all other accounts are either auto update or no-sync
Weather updates every 4 hours (Beautiful Widgets)
Auto Brightness
Wifi & GPS stay off unless they're needed

That battery life was achieved when I was not working in my dungeon of an office with moderate use (check seesmic every 1-2 hours, music streaming for 1-2 hours). Even when I'm at work and using my phone more heavily I can still go from 6:30am - 10:00pm without any concern for my battery running out.

thanks for that info. sadly my settings are pretty much identical to yours. part of me wishes the phone had some flaws that could tempt me to return it but besides for not being able to get the battery life seen by others, it's just about perfect. i already have the extended battery so i guess that will help me out.

 

[danz3113]

Not getting the Batterly life I want

Can someone give me tips on how to increase my battery life? I have an app killer and use it a lot. I dont know how apps get turned on but even when I havent opened any apps I use the killer and find that it kills 10+ apps. Is there a way to turn off the apps that are always running in the background? Im sorry I am new to this phone and am easily overwhelmed by all this tech stuff. Thanks!

 

[AliceBToklas]

Can someone give me tips on how to increase my battery life? I have an app killer and use it a lot. I dont know how apps get turned on but even when I havent opened any apps I use the killer and find that it kills 10+ apps. Is there a way to turn off the apps that are always running in the background? Im sorry I am new to this phone and am easily overwhelmed by all this tech stuff. Thanks!

Do the apps you find running use up the battery? If not, I'd recommend you stop worrying about them. Task killers have also been linked to causing battery drain. I avoid them altogether. What sort of battery life are you getting and what are you expecting? These are not like the old simple phones for certain. Have you tried letting it drain completely a couple of times. Some people have reported that helping.

I forgot to plug mine in last night but when I checked it this morning it still had close to 40% or so left. That's 24+ hours with, for me, normal use (a few emails, web, maps, radio listening, maybe a call or 2 - can't remember). The bottom line for me is that I do nothing at all and get quite good battery life.

If nothing else helps you can always fall back to the support desk favorite - factory reset. I did that a couple of days ago to try and get rid of random reboots. Still too soon to tell if it helped.