so i have been getting around three and a half to four hours of screen on time with wifi turned on and powersaving features turned off on my GS3. is that decent? battery usually lasts around 10 hours. from what i have read thats a little under par compared to other users...
Battery life??
- Thread starter asperber
- Start date
One of the things you can count as darn near a given is that if you have the display turned off and are experiencing lots of data loss, then an app is to blame. To know for sure, do what was described by xluryan above. I would control for differences in usage by letting the phone run for several days and take an average of the use before I loaded an app, then run for the same period and record the difference before loading another app. If this seems all too drawn out to bother with, try doing more than one app at a time. Just make sure you keep track so you can fall back when you find a big jump in battery use.
One bit of misconception is that the battery needs calibrated--its actually the phone that needs calibrated to the battery. The phone keeps a file that allows it to predict and report battery strength. Knowing this allows you to understand why sometimes you're told to discharge fully and then shut the phone off and recharge the battery. This is also the reason you may experience a battery that seems to be performing better than it did last week--a full re-calibration can take about a week. The full discharge/recharge cycle, resets the batterystats.bin file and the phone starts re-calibrating. Charging the phone while shut-off allows it to get to full strength before starting the re-calibration--so it truly knows what 100% charged looks like. It is often suggested to do the full recharge once a month or once every three months. I would simply say that if you haven't added apps or changed your usage and the battery seems to be getting worse, then do it, otherwise leave it alone. These batteries are more stressed at low charge and full charge--which is why they send it to you at around half charge.
Another thing we see lots is folks who charge their phone and then leave it out of the charger all night. You will not damage the battery by leaving it in the charger. While that won't make the charge last longer, it will make your day less stressful.
Finally, remember that Android doesn't work the same way Windows works. Forums are full of the great debate on using task killers on Android. If you're using it successfully, then go at it, but if you are still unhappy with battery use, record your use each day for a week and then uninstall the task killer and record for another week. That should tell you whether its of much use. From what I've read, Android loads lots of things in memory in order to make accessing them faster. Since Android has a different memory management profile than windows does, this doesn't necessarily lead to a slower phone or more battery use. If you find lots of apps you never use loaded in memory, then either parts of them are being used by other things, or the manufacturer has configured the phone to preload those apps. So if you don't know what you are doing you can actually slow the phone down by causing it to reload apps, or to burn more battery by adding the apps to an auto kill list that results in near constant killing and restarting of the app. There are times when an app gets locked-up and you need to kill it, but that probably means the app is poorly written. My read on all this is that you should resort to task killers only as a last resort and then, test and document thoroughly so you can reproduce solid results.
One bit of misconception is that the battery needs calibrated--its actually the phone that needs calibrated to the battery. The phone keeps a file that allows it to predict and report battery strength. Knowing this allows you to understand why sometimes you're told to discharge fully and then shut the phone off and recharge the battery. This is also the reason you may experience a battery that seems to be performing better than it did last week--a full re-calibration can take about a week. The full discharge/recharge cycle, resets the batterystats.bin file and the phone starts re-calibrating. Charging the phone while shut-off allows it to get to full strength before starting the re-calibration--so it truly knows what 100% charged looks like. It is often suggested to do the full recharge once a month or once every three months. I would simply say that if you haven't added apps or changed your usage and the battery seems to be getting worse, then do it, otherwise leave it alone. These batteries are more stressed at low charge and full charge--which is why they send it to you at around half charge.
Another thing we see lots is folks who charge their phone and then leave it out of the charger all night. You will not damage the battery by leaving it in the charger. While that won't make the charge last longer, it will make your day less stressful.
Finally, remember that Android doesn't work the same way Windows works. Forums are full of the great debate on using task killers on Android. If you're using it successfully, then go at it, but if you are still unhappy with battery use, record your use each day for a week and then uninstall the task killer and record for another week. That should tell you whether its of much use. From what I've read, Android loads lots of things in memory in order to make accessing them faster. Since Android has a different memory management profile than windows does, this doesn't necessarily lead to a slower phone or more battery use. If you find lots of apps you never use loaded in memory, then either parts of them are being used by other things, or the manufacturer has configured the phone to preload those apps. So if you don't know what you are doing you can actually slow the phone down by causing it to reload apps, or to burn more battery by adding the apps to an auto kill list that results in near constant killing and restarting of the app. There are times when an app gets locked-up and you need to kill it, but that probably means the app is poorly written. My read on all this is that you should resort to task killers only as a last resort and then, test and document thoroughly so you can reproduce solid results.
JFrawls
Member
My battery life seems to have mood swings... yesterday around this time I was in the low 30's today its @ 81. I have been forced to turn off mobile data, and wifi while at work to preserve the life of the battery. Since the service is god awful in my building for data... that seems to do the trick, even though my usuage details show the android OS as the biggest drain I have
Well I found what was draining my battery personally, but the result was definitely not what I had expected :blink:
The first day I got my phone, I rooted it. I will never posses a non-rooted Android phone. There are many reasons I root my phone, and one of them is the system sounds that come stock. For example, the camera shutter sound, which is also obtrusively played when you perform a screen capture. Yeah, I get that they have to do that because if you open the camera app then take a screenshot, you're essentially still just using the camera, but come on...
So, immediately after I root a phone, I remove all the garbage I don't like. Sounds, apps, etc... After I had installed all the apps I wanted and still had good battery performance, I figured it must be a system app that I was deleting that was causing the drain. As if perhaps the phone was trying repeatedly to launch an system service that I had removed, thereby killing itself. So this time around I skipped deleting apps and just removed the sounds.
Now, I keep referring to the sounds as a catch-all. However, I'm really referring to a few things. System sounds are one, but the startup/shutdown sounds and boot animations are also on my "purge immediately" list. So I removed those :icon_ devil:
That's when **** hit the fan.
After a couple more hours of resetting, reflashing, testing and tinkering, I found that specifically, it was the bootsamsung.qmg, and bootsamsungloop.qmg. Those two files are responsible for the boot animations you see when you power on your phone. I personally hate them, which is why I always delete them. But for some reason if the phone can't find them when it's booting, you get ridiculously horrific battery life.
Since I know now what not to do, I can install whatever else I want, remove any stock apps I don't like, and still have an awesome battery. Check the attachment for what I get now :icon_ banana:
I'm still investigating how to remove the boot animations without hurting the battery. But as a side note, you can still remove whatever sounds you don't like; they have no affect on battery life.
Happy hacking!
Ryan
P.S. @Fr33dom More info on the batterystats file: source. Hopefully people don't still believe deleting that file will "re-calibrate" your battery.
The first day I got my phone, I rooted it. I will never posses a non-rooted Android phone. There are many reasons I root my phone, and one of them is the system sounds that come stock. For example, the camera shutter sound, which is also obtrusively played when you perform a screen capture. Yeah, I get that they have to do that because if you open the camera app then take a screenshot, you're essentially still just using the camera, but come on...
So, immediately after I root a phone, I remove all the garbage I don't like. Sounds, apps, etc... After I had installed all the apps I wanted and still had good battery performance, I figured it must be a system app that I was deleting that was causing the drain. As if perhaps the phone was trying repeatedly to launch an system service that I had removed, thereby killing itself. So this time around I skipped deleting apps and just removed the sounds.
Now, I keep referring to the sounds as a catch-all. However, I'm really referring to a few things. System sounds are one, but the startup/shutdown sounds and boot animations are also on my "purge immediately" list. So I removed those :icon_ devil:
That's when **** hit the fan.
After a couple more hours of resetting, reflashing, testing and tinkering, I found that specifically, it was the bootsamsung.qmg, and bootsamsungloop.qmg. Those two files are responsible for the boot animations you see when you power on your phone. I personally hate them, which is why I always delete them. But for some reason if the phone can't find them when it's booting, you get ridiculously horrific battery life.
Since I know now what not to do, I can install whatever else I want, remove any stock apps I don't like, and still have an awesome battery. Check the attachment for what I get now :icon_ banana:
I'm still investigating how to remove the boot animations without hurting the battery. But as a side note, you can still remove whatever sounds you don't like; they have no affect on battery life.
Happy hacking!
Ryan
P.S. @Fr33dom More info on the batterystats file: source. Hopefully people don't still believe deleting that file will "re-calibrate" your battery.
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meishkov
Member
Dam xluryan that's some serious battery life son!!! Just got my s3 yesterday and battery life has been dam impressive thus far. I used to check running services very frequently on my OG to make sure some junk wasn't running on its own and stealing performance and battery, but no use with this thing as there's like 70 different things running and don't yet know what can go and what can't. Gonna delve into that later this evening after work. I just monitor the built-in task manager to close things that way.
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Droid Forums
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Droid Forums
droid doctor
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Nice battery life. I get around 8-12 on heavy use.
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Today I got 5 hours with almost NO use
Battery shows 83% consumed by Android system. Power saving is on. I don't understand what is causing this
Try what I outlined in post #105.
k1ngr4t
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Just want to chime in that coming from a Rezound and Bionic, the battery life on this phone is great. Are most of you coming from extended batteries or something. What phone did you have before? OG or DX? 2100mhz it a great battery for this phone. I get about 15-18 hours with moderate to heavy use. Rezound was about 12 hours with light use. I am extremely satisfied.
frank_drebin1
Member
I too am thrilled with the battery life. I am coming from a X. I typically have 15% left after 20 hours of what I consider normal usage. This includes wifi, moderate blutooth usage, and some music streaming.
droid doctor
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Same here I don't know what problems you guys are talking about, I get great battery life.
SteveSchweer
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I had a similar situation. Traced it down to the Weather Channel ap. it seems that even though I had declined to let them use my GPS position, they did it anyway. They were hitting my GPS on an almost constant basis. Force closed Weather Channel and phone cooled down (literally). You can verify GPS use with the GSam battery monitor ap's "charts" feature... Hit "others".
mkstn
Member
I get real good battery life. No complaints here. I do not talk for hours & hours though. If it needs a charge it seems to charge up real quick!
Beka27
Active Member
My battery life is getting better and better. I'm now averaging over 22 hours. I'm happy with that.