How to isolate and fix battery drain (and maybe lag, too)

[DaNaRkI]

battery stats

Wanna know how I can tell my battery stats need resetting due to ROM changes?

Phone on: says 32%
Phone off (and charging): showed well over 50%, when I first plugged it in.

Was trying out a few ROMs over 3 days of flashing back and forth and noticed the battery % appeared to be jumpy. I looked at what it showed was left, turned off and plugged into wall charger. As soon as it came back on and went into charge mode, it shows way more then 30% being left, more then 50% actually, i'ed say about 52%.

If some others can validate this, or know how to intentionally mess up the battery stats to test it. This could be a quick indicator that one needs to wipe stats or "recalibrate."

Not sure which yet since I'm currently in the process of fully charging my phone and going thru the steps to fix, will update later when I get it back in sync.

tl;dr - check if batt % when on = when off

 

[smokarz]

hi everyone, been having my Samsung Captivate for less than a week and flashed to Cognition 4.5.3.

i guess this question probably belong in here.

how do you quit/exit apps and games? i usually just clicked on the "Home" button on the phone. by doing this, am i properly exiting the app? and how do i know which apps/games are still running?

i asked the above question, because it seems like i need a charge everyday. and i use the phone sparingly. i turned off GPS, only turn on Wifi when i am at home, check emails few times a day, make less than a handful of calls.

i am not watching youtube clips or doing anything heavy duty with the phone, so it seems that it might be using more battery than it should

and, how often do you charge your phone? once a day with normal usage?

thanks!

 

[TheYar]

hi everyone, been having my Samsung Captivate for less than a week and flashed to Cognition 4.5.3.

i guess this question probably belong in here.

how do you quit/exit apps and games? i usually just clicked on the "Home" button on the phone. by doing this, am i properly exiting the app? and how do i know which apps/games are still running?

i asked the above question, because it seems like i need a charge everyday. and i use the phone sparingly. i turned off GPS, only turn on Wifi when i am at home, check emails few times a day, make less than a handful of calls.

i am not watching youtube clips or doing anything heavy duty with the phone, so it seems that it might be using more battery than it should

and, how often do you charge your phone? once a day with normal usage?

thanks!

After flashing a ROM, your phone will need a few days and a few charge cycles before it charges and drains at a stable pace.

Unlike Apple iDevices, the home button does not necessarily close all apps (depends on the app). Try using the OSMonitor I mention in the OP to see if anything in the background is using a lot of CPU or bandwidth.

With light usage, you will probably still need to charge once every two days, if not every day. That is the nature of most smartphones these days.

 

[smokarz]

thanks for the response, it's been a full 3 days since i flashed my phone.

i will give it a few more rechage cycles and see how it behave. drained the battery to 0%, while phone is off, recharge to 100%?

also, i forgot to mention that i have the "Fancy Widgets" running. does that use a lot of battery?

 

[the newguy]

Excange push email

I switched from the AT&T released 2.2 to the I9000 2.3, and found that the email client was using much more battery than it had been before - I'd get 8 hours on a charge where before I would get 20+. I had 3 email accounts configured - two exchange set to push (one being Gmail) and one IMAP set to sync every hour.

I tried removing my Gmail account from the standard email client and just using the Gmail app, and switching the remaining exchange email account from push to sync every 4 hours (which is fine for that account, since I don't get a lot of emails, and nothing urgent). So far, this seems to have made a huge difference. It's been off the charger for over 4 hours (and I have been messing with it more often than normal to look at battery stats every so often), and it's still at 87%. It seems like for some reason, the 2.3 ROM uses a lot more power for push accounts than the factory ROM did...

 

[billd104]

Thanks for all of this info in 1 place!! Great job.

 

[TheYar]

Thanks for all of this info in 1 place!! Great job.

Sure thing. Since some people are still finding this thread, I updated the OP.

 

[gtabowner]

Would like to thank you is is great info
Where the heck is the thanks button
Thank you very informative will wait before I complain
Jaye

 

[x.SkiTzO.x]

Battery Solution

I'm sure this has been covered many times, but your battery life can amount to many different things.



Charging Habits:

-Do you fully drain your batter before charging?

-Do you charge on the go with a car charger instead of a AC Wall charger?

-Do you charge your mobile device with it powered off instead of on using CPU resources/memory?

Custom ROMS and Background Processes:

-Do you run custom ROMS?
--Some ROMS require running background processes.

-Do you have a lot of programs/apps running in the background?
--Check by downloading Advanced Task Killer and using on a frequent basis. Has a widget that you can add to your phones desktop for kill all and this will make sure things get closed that you exit. The more programs you have running and using memory will suck away your battery life faster than normal.



Age of battery:

-How old is your battery. All batterys have a limit of how many times they can be charged. Example, the Samsung Galaxy Tablet has a charge limit of 400 charges before the battery goes to poo. It may be time to purchase a new battery. Josh may have your solution over at MobileTechVideos. He has great deals on everything. 2 Batteries, Charging Dock- $20.
mobiletechvideos.mybigcommerce.com/samsung-galaxy-s-battery-2-dock-charger/

Hope this helps!