Battery life??

sbenson said:
Out of the box, this phone as phenomenal battery life. My wife has been running hers in 4g constantly and playing with it quite a bit over the weekend and she was getting 20+ hrs a day with 2+hrs of screen time on.

I've been keeping an eye on the vitals and I haven't come across any wakelock issues (except for instant photo uploads) or signal issues. CPU is in deep sleep the majority of the time, so as of now, I'm not seeing any glaring issues with the battery life on this phone.
Click to expand...

What app are you using to monitor the CPU status? Are you rooted? I'm wondering because over the past few days I've had something sucking the life out of my phone. I did a little bit of research and it may have something to do with a corrupt media file on my SD card that can't sync with the phone (I haven't formatted it yet since taking it out of my Droid 1).
 
Trapper31 said:
What app are you using to monitor the CPU status? Are you rooted? I'm wondering because over the past few days I've had something sucking the life out of my phone. I did a little bit of research and it may have something to do with a corrupt media file on my SD card that can't sync with the phone (I haven't formatted it yet since taking it out of my Droid 1).
Click to expand...

No, my wife's phone is not rooted as of now.

You'll need two apps to diagnose. First is CPU Spy. The other is GSam Battery Monitor (previously Badass battery). Install both and then open CPU Spy and make sure it's recording your cpu states. Now just use your phone like normal for a bit and let those two apps run in the background collecting data.

After a bit open up CPU Spy and see if your phone is going into deep sleep. You may have to hit the menu key, then refresh to get the current reading. Deep sleep should be the bottom slot. As long as you're going into deep sleep you should be good to go.

If you have 0% deep sleep, you'll know you have issues with an app wakelock keeping your phone awake constantly. I'll make a quick note here: most phones can't enter deep sleep while charging, to my surprise, my wife's GS3 does. However, to be certain, I'd run this test with the phone UNPLUGGED from the charger.

Moving on. If you've determined you're not deep sleeping, open up GSam and look at what's using your battery. Screen should be one of your highest offenders. Radio should add a bit as well. The highest will probably be app usage. Click on app usage and it will bring up a detailed view. Are those the normal apps you use? Does anything seem abnormally high?

The bug you mention about the corrupt sd card will show under System (*wakelock*) and the process will be called mediaserver. Click on system to see this. If system is in the 1-5% range you're probably fine.

The wakelock that I DID diagnose on her phone was caused by Google+ instant upload. For some reason it wasn't uploading pictures properly and was keeping the device awake the entire time. I had to manually force the picture uploads under the Google+ settings and all was good after that. Now it sleeps like a baby and pictures upload the way they should.
 
Last edited:
sbenson said:
No, my wife's phone is not rooted as of now.

You'll need two apps to diagnose. First is CPU Spy. The other is GSam Battery Monitor (previously Badass battery). Install both and then open CPU Spy and make sure it's recording your cpu states. Now just use your phone like normal for a bit and let those two apps run in the background collecting data.

After a bit open up CPU Spy and see if your phone is going into deep sleep. You may have to hit the menu key, then refresh to get the current reading. Deep sleep should be the bottom slot. As long as you're going into deep sleep you should be good to go.

If you have 0% deep sleep, you'll know you have issues with an app wakelock keeping your phone awake constantly. I'll make a quick note here: most phones can't enter deep sleep while charging, to my surprise, my wife's GS3 does. However, to be certain, I'd run this test with the phone UNPLUGGED from the charger.

Moving on. If you've determined you're not deep sleeping, open up GSam and look at what's using your battery. Screen should be one of your highest offenders. Radio should add a bit as well. The highest will probably be app usage. Click on app usage and it will bring up a detailed view. Are those the normal apps you use? Don't anything seem abnormally high?

The bug your mention about the corrupt sd card will show under System (*wakelock*) and the process will be called mediaserver. Click on system to see this. If system is in the 1-5% range you're probably fine.

The wakelock that I DID diagnose on her phone was caused by Google+ instant upload. For some reason it wasn't uploading pictures properly and was keeping the device awake the entire time. I had to manually force the picture uploads under the Google+ settings and all was good after that. Now it sleeps like a baby and pictures upload the way they should.
Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks for the great instructions. The media server issue is what had me Googling my fingers off yesterday, it was the second highest battery drain next to the screen. So something is up with that. I went into all of the accounts I have on my phone and turned off any photo syncing. I'll install these programs and see what they tell me, I hope it's nothing more than something goofy with my SD card though, which I suspect because I deleted and moved a whole bunch of things this weekend and I think that is when my probably started.

Thanks again for the quick reply!
 
Trapper31 said:
Awesome, thanks for the great instructions. The media server issue is what had me Googling my fingers off yesterday, it was the second highest battery drain next to the screen. So something is up with that. I went into all of the accounts I have on my phone and turned off any photo syncing. I'll install these programs and see what they tell me, I hope it's nothing more than something goofy with my SD card though, which I suspect because I deleted and moved a whole bunch of things this weekend and I think that is when my probably started.

Thanks again for the quick reply!
Click to expand...

Do you have an sd card in your phone? Or are you using the virtual sd on the internal storage?

If the internal is corrupt, unfortunately your only option is to factory reset. If it's the sd card, then a simple reformat should do. However, if it continues to happen, your sd card is likely done.
 
sbenson said:
Do you have an sd card in your phone? Or are you using the virtual sd on the internal storage?

If the internal is corrupt, unfortunately your only option is to factory reset. If it's the sd card, then a simple reformat should do. However, if it continues to happen, your sd card is likely done.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah it's an external SD. I took it right out of my Droid 1 and put in in the S3, then while it was in the S3 I deleted and moved a bunch of crap around on it. I'll see if a reformat helps.

Thanks!
 
I did as sbenson had suggested. I charged the phone to 100% and installed those apps. I set the phone down b/c I had some stuff to do and just now looked at it. Is this what I should be seeing?
 
Trapper31 said:
Oh yeah it's an external SD. I took it right out of my Droid 1 and put in in the S3, then while it was in the S3 I deleted and moved a bunch of crap around on it. I'll see if a reformat helps.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

More than likely, its not a corrupt file but a DRM protected file. It seems that DRM and ICS don't play nice together.
Some reports have been from music that was downloaded from yahoo. Yahoo turned their DRM servers off. The phone will keep searching until it gets the permission it is looking for.
 
This is from last night, screen shot took first thing this morning. I had the phone charging and it still looks like it went into deep sleep.
 
Thank you! I appreciate your input on this! This wasn't something I was familiar with and now I know! :)
 
I just wanted to give a quick update. I ran the battery down to around 7% yesterday, turned it off, and gave it a full charge. I then reformatted the SD card and only put pictures and music back onto the phone that I really wanted, while getting rid of all of the other junk I had downloaded during the 2.5 years with my Droid 1. Immediately after unplugging from the computer I noticed a huge improvement, with the battery only discharging 1% while being unplugged for about 90 minutes. So far so good today as well.

Also, I love the CPU Spy and GSAM Battery apps, those are very useful!
 
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