Battery Life

[wrightp]

Hey guys, thanks in advance for your help.

I got my Droid X a few days ago and love the device but the battery life so far has been pretty lame. Verizon gave me a replacement battery and the short life has remained. I'm hoping you can tell me if I'm doing something wrong or if it's possible that the phone itself is defective.

Today I unplugged my phone mid-morning. 6 hours and 2 minutes later, the battery was at 20%. The battery manager showed that 49% of use was from voice calls, 47% was from the display, and 5% was from cell standby. There were 41 minutes of voice calls as well as 2 hours and 7 minutes of display use. I wasn't doing anything particularly data intensive, mostly text messaging and reading stories on the NYTimes app (short bursts of data, but not continuous drain, right?).

I'm using advanced task killer so I'm only running the Browser, NYT, ScoreCenter Alarm & Timer, Text Messaging, and Gmail in the background. GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth were all turned off the entire time.

So, is this just a really battery hungry model? Or is this particular device malfunctioning. Verizon has offered to send a replacement but I don't want to waste my time (and theirs) if this is just the way it is (I'll get the extended battery instead).

Thanks again,
Peter

 

[mkthnx001]

Based on what you said, that seems like fair battery life. Try these tips to extend battery life:

- Lower the screen brightness.
- Increase widget update times (longer, wider intervals)
- Make use of "Battery Manager" in the settings menu. (smart mode, battery saver mode, etc.)
- Set a short screen time-out period.

Also, Android is a *NIX-based operating system; it deals with memory, background processes, etc. on its own. Try disabling "Advanced Task Killer" and see how how your battery life fairs.

 

[wrightp]

Great, thanks.

I'm sure this is a silly question, but how do I go about changing the update frequency on my widgets?

 

[mkthnx001]

Great, thanks.

I'm sure this is a silly question, but how do I go about changing the update frequency on my widgets?

I can't really answer that, as I don't know what widgets you use. Basically if you have any widgets that update, such as weather widgets, news widgets, etc., just go into the options and change the update interval.

 

[Wrx-man]

Ive also heard some battery problems with the sportscenter widget. Maybe try the just the app.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

 

[bowlingotter]

I had bad battery life issues when I first started using this phone. It's really all down to a slight learning curve in optimizing it.

First off, I downloaded Juice Defender and enabled it. That helped tremendously right off the bat.

Second, I got rid of every auto-updating widget.

Third, I put the battery in Battery Saver mode.

After all of that, my battery life improved by almost 3x. I have since read up on Juice Defender a bit to tweak it and started using a couple widgets I like, but carefully. Now I have the phone working very nicely under relatively heavy use and have very adequate battery life.