It bears mentioning again some things that are pointed out on the first page of this thread (I've added data from Battery University to give you better details).
- You should fully charge the battery before you use it the first time. The batteries are shipped with some charge but since they are stressed at full charge or discharge, they are not fully charged.
- You don't condition the battery, you condition the phone. And you do that by running the battery down until your phone shuts down and then charge it fully without doing anything else. Your phone maintains a status file (batterystats.bin) and it must learn about your batteries capacity. It may take up to five days for it to get it completely right. I would resist doing this more than once a quarter or so since the battery is also stressed at low charge and discharge. It can only sustain a certain number of charge/discharge cycles. I expect that the phone and charging system might work to help protect it from full charges or full discharges, I just haven't seen any reliable information saying so. From my experience, leaving your phone in the charger will not do much damage to it and others I trust have said similar things about discharging the phone completely on a monthly basis. My Droid 1 (or OG for you urban types:biggrin
battery lasted for its entire life without any measurable difference in strength and I almost never discharged it completely and always kept it in the charger all night.
Some other things to note:
Update your roaming list (perhaps monthly). If your phone is not aware of the closest towers or their capabilities you could be using a tower with less strength. Naturally if the radio has to work harder to maintain a connection, it will use more power.
Using WiFi instead of 3G is not only faster but seems more battery efficient. I'm not sure if the efficiency is true with 4G but would guess so.
Leaving your WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth... on when their isn't anything for them to do will eat away at your battery at a higher rate since they are constantly searching for a signal.
What you use is almost more important than how you use it. Under Settings, Battery and Data Manager you see a nice picture of a battery that roughly shows its strength, along with a percentage. Note that the percentage is in tenths and rounds as it should. So 60% could be anywhere between 55% and 64%. Circle battery widget will give you a better representation of your battery strength.
If you touch the picture of the battery on that screen, you'll see a graph of your usage and a list of what used the battery. Each of these things will give you more detail if you touch them. Its easy to be driven mad by the list of what used the battery so you should scrutinize it if you are having problems, but remember, as soon as you turn on the phone, something will be using it. These percentages are the amount of the used battery that each item is responsible for. Probably the most useful data can be obtained by touching the graph at the top of the screen since it will give you a graphical representation of things like screen on and awake. This is useful as well for comparing use over a period of testing.
As I said, what you use is almost more important that how you use it. Consider the data an app is likely to use before loading it. You can load your phone up with data intensive apps and widgets and end-up one unhappy user, or you can load it up with widgets that use very little data and have lots of batter left at the end of your day.
And finally, task managers. You'll see and hear many folks saying not to use them. The reason is mostly that you can kill things that then get reloaded, or cause unstable behavior by unwittingly killing important things. The Android OS is not like the Windows OS that so many of us are familiar with. It segments its memory better and it is more efficient. Lots of things get preloaded without using any real battery or processor during the day. The phone tends to run better if its memory is full. If you are going to kill something, pay attention to whether it is running, and to whether it reloads after you kill it. It may be that some other app is using it and killing it is only slowing down your phone and may eat-up more battery. Resist adding things to the auto kill list.
That said, the bloat is reported to be chewing up the battery on some phones. I cannot independently confirm those claims with any real veracity, nor have I seen any real data to suggest they are true. I trust several of the folks who have made the claim so when Root is reversible on your phone, you may find more relief in rooting and carefully freezing the bloat.
