Battery life on MIUI

[ZeroBarrier]

MIUI v6.4
Slayher's 800 Mhz kernel
CPU auto-overclock 250-800 with interactive governor (24/7)
Automatic 32MB swap partition with swapiness set @ 10
Firerat's Apps2EXT method with over 225 installed apps

This is with light to moderate use, a few phones calls, possibly 3 quick texts and the occasional email that I read (didn't write any emails), listened to internet radio through XiiaLive for about an hour to an hour and a half.

I'm a firm believer that almost everyone with poor battery life just doesn't know how to put their phone down and give it a rest. They'll turn the screen on several times a day and just flip through the home screens or do whatever just to look at their cool ROM. The display is the number one battery hogging reason on any smart phone.

Edit: To make it clear, I do not use SetCPU. I overclock the CPU and change the governor through a couple of commands I've included in "/system/etc/init.d/". SetCPU is not even installed on my phone.

 

[ipadl]

ZB, let me get this straight. You only use your smartphone for a couple of phone calls, a tiny bit of streaming, reading a few emails, and sending a few texts and you think that your great battery life is because you use your phone correctly?

No offense meant, but I certainly did not buy my Droid for this type of use. I use it constantly for corporate, personal, and committee email when not at my desk, for a phone book of over 2000 contacts, to for VPN and and remote desktop to make changes on servers and workstations, as well as providing a bit of data connectivity to my laptop when traveling. I use it for navigation, streaming music, and a host of other things as well. To me, and for what i use this device for, I will never see the battery life that you see, although I wish I would!

Perhaps we, as users, ought to do a better job of explaining what type of use our device sees. This would help us to determine if the battery life that we are seeing is similar to somebody else with the same type of use.

Thanks,

Seth

 

[yakitori]

I have corporate email too. G mail use pandora radio. I frequent forum etc too. Fb and a little gaming and still get decent life out of my battery. If you use heavily like it sounds you do you should get a cable and plug your phone in at work when you can.

sent from a rogue droid

 

[killjoylm1]

I used SetCPU for that last 3 days and my bat life was terrible. So, I'm back to letting MIUI just handle the bat on its own and no SetCPU. Yes, I did get better performance with SetCPU running, but the cost to my bat was too high. Back to letting MIUI handle the bat by itself. When I went to do the bat recalibration I too noticed my bat stayed @ 5% for about 3 hours with the screen left completely on to help kill the bat. These phones don't seem to be able to read the bat accurately without calibration or proper flashing techniques. Just my .02

 

[ZeroBarrier]

Perhaps we, as users, ought to do a better job of explaining what type of use our device sees. This would help us to determine if the battery life that we are seeing is similar to somebody else with the same type of use.

Thanks,

Seth

This is exactly my point. People complain ad nauseum about poor or horrible battery life and do not consider the fact that their use is a direct correlation to their battery life.

We should all already be aware that the display is the number one worst battery hog in a smart phone, and as such, the longer you keep the screen on, the faster it's going to eat away at your battery.

It's not rocket science, but people on these forums try to desperately squeeze every mV out of the battery in hopes they'll gain an extra 6 hours. And I think that's a fools hope. If you have poor battery life because you use your phone more often than not and you don't want to charge it more often than not, then purchase an extended battery or two. If your battery life is sufficient for your use, then you don't need to do anything.

Sure, we might be able to gain an hour or two off the top using certain methods/settings. For instance, I keep the screen on the dimmest setting while indoors. This has a really good impact on battery life and is simple enough for nearly everyone to do. But at the same time I keep seeing people complain and ask how to get good battery life and it boggles my mind. Do these people really think a different ROM/kernel/App/SetCPU profile/etc. is going to grant them 6 to 12 extra hours of battery life? If they do, then they need to wake up and smell the coffee (black, 3 tea spoons of sugar please).

I guess my point was to hopefully open peoples eyes. To get them to understand that battery life isn't affected as dramatically as they seem to believe by the regular suspects (ROM/kernel/SetCPU profiles), but that the biggest impact is the user himself/herself.

I just saw someone in another thread say they get better battery life on 6.3 than 6.4, and it just makes me go like, "WTF, seriously?". I'm sure, almost positive, it's because they didn't recalibrate their battery stats; and most likely think that just because they hit 20% in 5 hours, or something similar to that effect, that their battery life suffered because of an updated ROM. And they didn't try and let their phone die off; if they would have, they would have noticed that it would have hung at 5% for about 3 to 4 hours.

So we have people in a vicious cycle here thinking something is definitely wrong with the ROM/kernel/SetCPU profiles; and that just hurts everyone because we don't get our facts straight.

 

[yakitori]

Perhaps we, as users, ought to do a better job of explaining what type of use our device sees. This would help us to determine if the battery life that we are seeing is similar to somebody else with the same type of use.

Thanks,

Seth

This is exactly my point. People complain ad nauseum about poor or horrible battery life and do not consider the fact that their use is a direct correlation to their battery life.

We should all already be aware that the display is the number one worst battery hog in a smart phone, and as such, the longer you keep the screen on, the faster it's going to eat away at your battery.

It's not rocket science, but people on these forums try to desperately squeeze every mV out of the battery in hopes they'll gain an extra 6 hours. And I think that's a fools hope. If you have poor battery life because you use your phone more often than not and you don't want to charge it more often than not, then purchase an extended battery or two. If your battery life is sufficient for your use, then you don't need to do anything.

Sure, we might be able to gain an hour or two off the top using certain methods/settings. For instance, I keep the screen on the dimmest setting while indoors. This has a really good impact on battery life and is simple enough for nearly everyone to do. But at the same time I keep seeing people complain and ask how to get good battery life and it boggles my mind. Do these people really think a different ROM/kernel/App/SetCPU profile/etc. is going to grant them 6 to 12 extra hours of battery life? If they do, then they need to wake up and smell the coffee (black, 3 tea spoons of sugar please).

I guess my point was to hopefully open peoples eyes. To get them to understand that battery life isn't affected as dramatically as they seem to believe by the regular suspects (ROM/kernel/SetCPU profiles), but that the biggest impact is the user himself/herself.

I just saw someone in another thread say they get better battery life on 6.3 than 6.4, and it just makes me go like, "WTF, seriously?". I'm sure, almost positive, it's because they didn't recalibrate their battery stats; and most likely think that just because they hit 20% in 5 hours, or something similar to that effect, that their battery life suffered because of an updated ROM. And they didn't try and let their phone die off; if they would have, they would have noticed that it would have hung at 5% for about 3 to 4 hours.

So we have people in a vicious cycle here thinking something is definitely wrong with the ROM/kernel/SetCPU profiles; and that just hurts everyone because we don't get our facts straight.

I completely agree.


sent from a rogue droid

 

[ipadl]

ZB and Yak,

Thanks for your input, I think we're all on the same page at this point. I, personally, have learned the importance of the battery calibration. I have never done that on any other ROM and I honestly haven't been adversely affected in the same way that I was with this one, but in hindsight, it's quite possible that it was perceived - i.e. when I hit 5% after 2-3 hours of normal use for me, my thought was: "Something is running in the background on this ROM/build/etc. that is killing my battery."

At this point, I'm happily on 6.4 with a device that, for me, runs great and long (14 hours last night with med use). I have a few other bugs to work out before it is 100% usable for me, but I'm very content at this point.

Thanks again,

Seth

 

[fizeke136]

I was just wondering, how exactly do you (re)calibrate your battery? I tried searching for it but from what i found i still dont really understand what it means. Any help or a point in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[ipadl]

Read back through this thread and you'll find instructions from ZB. In essence, you should always flash a new ROM when you have 100% battery, but if you do not, you can charge to 100%, delete the battery statistics in Recovery, then do a full discharge (to the point that your phone shuts itself off, full charge, then a second full discharge (phone shutting itself off again). After this, you can use normally once again.

The important thing is that you don't interrupt the charge or discharge cycle before they have completed - i.e. put your phone on the charger for a few minutes during discharge or pull it off of your charger before you hit 100%. If you do, you need to start over.

Seth

 

[ZeroBarrier]

I was just wondering, how exactly do you (re)calibrate your battery? I tried searching for it but from what i found i still dont really understand what it means. Any help or a point in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks

Read about it here, or just read this thread since it's mentioned like 5 times and in post #65 I even give a rundown of what you should do.

 

[ZeroBarrier]

And this is what I get after setting screen brightness to the highest possible, playing a few games, making a few more calls, browsing the web while streaming music and basically not letting the screen turn off.

36 and a half hours, not bad by any means.

 

[fizeke136]

Thanks a lot both of you...im not sure how i missed the instructions in this thread but i appreciate the help.

 

[yakitori]

I was just wondering, how exactly do you (re)calibrate your battery? I tried searching for it but from what i found i still dont really understand what it means. Any help or a point in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks

Charge your phone completely to 100%

boot into recovery...go to advanced menu, wipe battery stats

reboot

dont charge your phone again during the calibration period...let it run down all the way till it powers off because its out of juice.

plug your phone back in and let it charge 100% again w/o unplugging.

Let it run down again,

plug it in and charge it 100% again....

done. Not recommended to do this often to your battery as it shortens life of your battery.

Next time you flash a ROM, make sure you have your battery charged 100 percent before flashing...it will prevent you from having to calibrate again.

Use normally.

I actually posted this near the beggining of this thread...and ZB did clarify by posting these same steps. I just assumed people knew how to do it.

You CPU will learn end points for "discharged 0%" and "charged 100%" and it will report your actual battery percentage after do this.

 

[Jason13L]

I know this issue has been beat enough, but I am at a loss for what I am experiencing. First, the basics:

I followed yakitori and ZeroBarrier's steps to calibrate my battery. Charge to 100%, clear battery data, let it run out of power and charge back to 100% without disturbing it.

I am running a D1 with stock 6.4 and Slayher 1.0GHz LV (which may be a problem)

I installed from a clean wipe (3x).

Now for the problem. It seems like my screen is taking almost 80% of my battery. I litterally have watched my battery go from 50% to 20% while checking gmail in a matter of minutes. I posted a screen cap of what I am seeing consistantly. I usually run at either auto brightness (which is crap) or lowest brightness since I am generally indoors in reasonable light. Any advise would be appreciated!

Thank you,

Jason

 

[ipadl]

Hey Jason,

I had some battery struggles of my own, and found that 2 complete charge/discharge cycles made a world of difference for my experience with this ROM.

I was also pretty quick to load new kernals on this ROM and found that I actually got really good performance out of the stock kernal even when it was underclocked. I am used to running Simply Stunning overclocked to 900MHz, but this ROM is as snappy (or more so) with the stock kernal underclocked 200MHz.

Hope that helps.

Seth