Diamond consumes a lot of power

[Private-Cowboy]

Hi there,

just a short question. I've update my Diamond to the naked version of the official 2.03 ROM (can be found around here) and the radio 1.09.something (that quad band radio with supposedly good battery life and gps reception).

After a clean hard reset I only installed powerguard to measure the drain as a reference (so I can compare what installations of some programs might do).

I was shocked to see that the drain was 167mA out of the box with 3G already disabled, no WiFi or anything running. Is that normal? The auto brightness kept the level at around 5/10.

I was able to bring it down to 64 by disableing auto brightness and lowering the level to 2/10.

When the brightness dimms completely I get 53mA.

Are those values that are normal for a Diamond? Those 60-70mA with lower brightness would at least give you some time to work with the device but at ~170mA the battery drains like nothing and would be flat in less then 8 hours (the 1340 battery that is). You don't work with the device constantly but the drain out of the box shocked my quite a bit.

[Usper]

Yes, thats our beloved Diamond alright.

[Private-Cowboy]

Well, around 60-80mA are workable and much better than the close to 200mA out of the box. But I wonder where HTC got the claim for stanby usage from. Standby (with display off, just sleeping away there) my Diamond consumes 15mA. Using the standard 900mA battery would keep the Diamond on the net for 60hours. Using the 1340mA battery this increases somewhat to 90hours.

The official claims are in the 300+hour range though for phone standby times. That would mean that the drain would be as low as 3mA. Where on earth did HTC measure that???

The 1340mA battery should give me 2 days of Diamond before needing to charge (mainly standby, some data tranfer, little WiFi and GPS) and that's not much worse than my old Eten X500 was able to do with its 1500mA battery.

[A|ex]

with extended battery and 3g off, i am able to get a weeks (7 days) worth of odd phone calls, a fairshare of txt messaging, a little bit of gprs, no gps. If i turn the 3g on the extended battery lasts around 3days with a fair bit of usage.

I think its just the phone, no matter what powersettings you have its just power hungry. I went through many different power settings, roms etc to finally find something not as hungry and what free'd up ram

[Private-Cowboy]

Lets do some math here -> 7 days would mean roughly 160 hours. With the extended battery (we're talking about the 1340 one do we) you're average drain would have to be as low as 8-9mA - including the spikes when you do some work. I think that's highly unlikely given the fact that the diamond usually does never fall below 10mA just sitting there on standby. Usually I see values of 12-15mA during that state.

Doeing work once in a while and making some calls, I'd say my average would be around 30 giving me barely two days of usage.

I simply rely on the base 900mA battery as backup so far. It's light to carry around and when my 1340mA one is done I quickly change them and get another couple of good hours. At home I recharge both. Battery changing is done very quickly on the diamond and the rubberdized back of the 1340mA set holds the stock 900mA just as well (so I don't have to carry around two back covers). This way the 900mA stock one also gets trained and does not sit idle in the case degenerating over time.

And since the 1340s are relatively cheap atm (I paid 25 Euros for one including the back cover) I may end up simply getting another one of those. Those two and the stock would get me through the work week and on weekends it's recharging time.

I can't really remember how the old phones did it. My first mobiles would last two weeks on standby and my first Qtek would achieve 1 week. They did not have larger batteries did they?

The Diamond is not particularly power hungry though. I ran some test on the HP messenger (914C that was) of my coworker today and this one has a large battery (close to 1900mA as far as I remember) but struggles just as much to get through two days, maybe even more so then the Diamond as the 914C seems to drain even worse. And the oh-so-hip iPhone 3G (we have three guys at work with those) barely gets through a single day. Those poor souls always carry a charger. Guess modern devices are just hungry for electrons.

Another question is about the "training" of the battery. The usual consensus is that the battery need a couple of cycles to reach its potential. But who does this work mathematically/electronically? The drain values don't get lower as they are system depentend and the battery does not generate more capacity then the 900mA or 1340mA. So where does the extra runtime come from???

[Private-Cowboy]

Some more observations...

1.) There has to be something wrong with the PowerGuard app. Either the measurements are rubbish or the Diamonds can fall into some sort of deep sleep when not used for a longer time that PowerGuard is not aware of.

I recharded my 1340mA yesterday morning (that was over ~40hours ago). I used it through two full working days now with normal usage for me (2-3 shorter phone calls a day, some download using Edge and some WiFi and some 15min of GPS each day). Now I'm at 40% battery. That would even get me a third day of usage like I need.

Not sure if the power drains measured by PowerGuard are higher than reality or if the Diamond goes into some sort of deep sleep when not used for a longer time with even lower drainage then the 12mA.

Whatever I'm quite happy to see that the 1340mA will give me two full days of heavy usage (for my standards) or three days of standard usage.

2.) The Diamond drain is relatively good compared to other devices. We did some more tests today at work and especially the HP models drain their battery much faster resulting in shorter life then the Diamond - and they have 1900mA batteries.

We did equal tasks on the devices and the "drop per task" on the Diamond was better then on comparable modern devices. Some older ones are way better though including older HTC models that some of us still use.