Battery Life Thread

Our smartphones have the highest battery capacity a smartphone has ever had (not including Galaxy Note which isn't really a smartphone anyway).

Unfortunately, people get mixed results with the battery.

In this thread, post your battery life results and personal usage. It could help people see the potential our battery actually has and could also help stop battery woes.

It will also be interesting to see the results from different ROM's and different kernels.

Here's what you post:
- Display time
- That battery graph thingy
- Battery mA statistics (install this app).

Posting screenshots of the above would be MUCH more helpful than just saying, 'Oh, my phone lasts 2 days with heavy usage.' Heavy usage is variable for each individual, so being specific would be much better.

Please also post your personal configurations, ie. brightness at x%, 3G on, Wi-Fi on xminutes, 'Tasker' profiles etc.

Hopefully, if people participate, we will be able to identify how people get great battery life and how some people get really bad battery life. Then we could compare personal configurations and see what settings/apps/tweaks affect battery - in a positive or negative way.

This should also clean the forums of the daily 'bad battery life' thread's in the forums.

I will keep some posts reserved for the future, where there could be battery tips as well as the highest display time and the lowest mA statistics.

Good luck!

Reserved this to increase my post count

Our phones use lithium-polymer batteries, not lithium-ion. Lithium polymer batteries are lighter and can be made any shape, but have worse energy density and lower cycle count. I.E. their maximum capacity will reduce faster with use compared to Li-ion. (No, there's no way around that, every time you charge the Li-PO battery will have a tiny bit less capacity.) That's part of the reason most high end phones still user Li-ion, they degrade, but not as fast.

This is important to remember when comparing battery life in different roms. Often people seem to forget that the ROM from two months ago was running on a significantly better battery.

Note, there's no easy way to read maximum current capacity. The battery reports theoretical maximum when made. To calibrate, an app has to fully discharge the battery while monitoring energy consumed, then work out actual available storage. This gets confused as voltage fluctuates with temperature and draw. Additionally, Android will determine that the battery is almost discharged at an arbitrary voltage and slam the door shut. However, an old battery could have sustained the lower voltage for greater proportion of time, so there builds up a greater amount of inaccessible residual charge: skewing the results and making the ROM look like it's chewing through the battery faster than it really is.

The only way to avoid this mess, is to get a new (reputable) battery regularly. Once a year is about right, if you are a heavy user, I estimate you should have about 2/3 of the original charge left. That's a real rough guess as it will be dependent on your usage pattern, charging pattern, climate where you live, how long the battery sat unused before you got it, etc, etc.. I've seen year old batteries with less than half the charge, still reporting as in good condition to the OS. Li-polymer is really bad like that..

This is why, posting screen grabs of your battery usage is pretty much pointless. Post the graph of your drain, if you must.

p.s. Li-PO hates trickle charging, avoid charging through USB ports or having it sitting on your charger being charged and discharged a couple of percent all the time.

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

harisled said:

I'm a new user to Motorola Atrix, only got it for a week. The first two charges were good (still had the stock rom-no root yet) afterwards I installed neutrino 2.2 and battery doesn't last long. My previous HTC Desire lasted idling for 14 hours and more at the same settings: HSDPA only with data, bluetooth on paired with bt headset and several apps with push notifications.

These are today's results:

Seems hopeless!

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

This is the 'bluesleep' bug in my ROM.
It will be fixed in the next update.

For now, move the files in the attached .zip to /system/xbin and set permission to 777. It will considerably improve your battery life.

I've made a lot and a lot of test and I found that the cause of Battery Drain are applications,every single application. So I've found that replacing some app with some others implies benefit on battery life. Here is a list of app that use less current:

-Boat Browser https://market.android.com/details?id=com.boatbrowser.free&hl=it
-Pimp My Cpu (ten times better than SetCpu) http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1018411
-Poweramp https://market.android.com/details?...GwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5tYXhtcHouYXVkaW9wbGF5ZXIiXQ..
-QuickPic https://market.android.com/details?...51bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5hbGVuc3cuUGljRm9sZGVyIl0.
-SlideIT Keyboard https://market.android.com/details?...SwxLDEsImNvbS5kYXN1ci5zbGlkZWl0LnZ0LmxpdGUiXQ..
-Zeam Launcher https://market.android.com/details?...rch_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsIm9yZy56ZWFtIl0.
-Facebook Feather (a little application I wrote (attached))
-Email optimized http://xdaforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=493158&d=1295364531

I found that Facebook for Android uses a LOT of current, followed by Gmail and Stock Browser. Also launchers like Go, Adw and so on are really beautiful,I know, but their beauty is inversely proportional at their current usage!!!!
I highly advice to configure your Gmail account with "Email" above.
I absolutely discourage the use of task manager (every kind of task manager), I advice instead the use of Startup Manager https://market.android.com/details?id=imoblife.startupmanager&hl=it