Battery suddenly dying quick... cell standby using 19%

[atomicwedgie]

I have loved my Rezound for the last week. Very few complaints about this phone at all! Battery was lasting me the entire day which was, for me, fantastic.

Suddenly, for the last three days the battery has been dying fast. 15% per hour in some cases. I've rebooted, uninstalled several recently installed apps, etc. Today I noticed while checking the battery usage, 1 hour and 24 minutes. I am already at 75% battery. Cell standby has used 19% of that! This is something I don't ever recall seeing.

Anyone else seeing this?

 

[BayouFlyFisher]

Consider doing a factory reset (see last paragraph). Do not sync apps, wifi connections, etc. with Google services as that may cause a problem. Install all apps and wifi connections from scratch. A bit of a pain, but not too bad.- install a home/launcher replacement. I use Go Launcher EX, which is free, and I love it. No reason not to try out an alternative launcher as you can always go back to how you had it.

- Don't use an automatic task killer--not even the one that comes with the phone. Reboot your phone and look at what's running. If anything that you've installed is running and there's no reason for it, then uninstall it and find an alternative that behaves. Ignore any stock apps that run on boot as I've found them to be more or less benign.

- Weather widgets, live wallpapers, news/social feeds, any app or service that you use that runs--do without it if you can. If you can’t do without it, lengthen it’s refresh time.

- Don't use antivirus

- Set your WIFI sleep policy to never. The default is "turn off when screen turns off". This will cause the wifi to reconnect every time you open the phone. From any Home Screen select Menu/Settings/Wireless & Networks/ and then use the Menu button to see some new options - select Advanced. Then select Wifi Sleep Policy and set it to Never. Home key to return to Home Screen.


- If you have access to wifi, leave it toggled on as it is more efficient than 3G. Wifi consumes less battery power than 3G.

- I leave GPS toggled on too by the way. Apps use it as needed. When I'm done with Maps or an app that uses it, I'm sure to return to the home screen so GPS can stop. Under wireless settings turn on "Google location services" so that an app is able to use network resources to get your location instead of GPS. I have "VZW location services" turned off--don't know why that option is even there. By the way, I increase the speed of voice output > text to speech > speech rate because I like the directions to get spit out faster. That saves a bit of battery. Turning off the display and just listening for directions help. Also, often I just get the directions and then exit back to the home screen: GPS uses so much battery I try to get it over with ASAP.

- When you get a 1) new battery, 2) do a factory reset, or 3) an OS upgrade - run your battery all the way down until the phone shuts off and then charge the battery all the way up. This will calibrate the phone's understanding of the battery's capacity. Do this once every month or two also, but don't do it too often if you can help it.

- I have my battery set to "Performance Mode" and data is on all the time because I am on call 24x7. If you don't mind, try out a more conservative battery profile to save more gobs of energy.

- Set screen brightness to "Automatic"

- Under Accounts, click on any account listed and turn off sync for any items that you're not interested in syncing. For example, Google Books if you don't use it. Don't use Backup Assistant--I prefer syncing my contacts with Google. You don't need both. Also go into your contacts > menu > display options > backup assistant > UNCHECK. Also do contacts > menu > more > settings > contact storage > and select your Google account and "remember this choice"

- Turn on Bluetooth only when you are going to use it.

- Consider turning off voice privacy. This may not be a big deal but it will save some processing (and therefore battery). It may also improve call quality.

-T off haptic feedback, animations, and any un-needed sounds in Android settings and in your apps

- Set your screen timeout to as low a time as you can stand (I use 1 minute) and manually turn the screen off when you’ve finished using the phone.

- Turn off in-pocket detection

- Keyboard: turn off vibrate on key press and sounds for any keyboards you use

- Use a red or black screen background. On the original Droid screen--not sure about this Bionic screen--red was the most efficient color that could be displayed.

- Camera app: I like keeping location on and flash on auto. Consider turning location off or at least returning to the home screen ASAP when using camera if location for camera is on.

- In stock browser the default home page is Google and it uses your location. This is a bad idea as it can waste your battery for no reason. Make something else your home page and make sure to close any web page that uses your location when you're done viewing it.

- Charge your phone via the wall charger instead of computer USB as it is faster. Also, don't use long USB cords--use regular power extension cords instead. I stick with the charger that came with the phone. Put the phone on charger when you go to bed every night.

- Consider install the Home Replacement app Zeam. It is basic app that uses very few resources and will help with battery power.

This is a link to some very good videos about saving battery power on the Bionic (there are 4 parts and the other parts will show up as available videos when part 1 finishes):

Battery Saving Video

Part 1: [video=youtube;cvWg7SbUgsI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cvWg7SbUgsI[/video]




If your problem persists "grit your teeth" and do a Factory Reset. These have gotten pretty painless lately by following these simple steps: 1. Make sure Backup and Restore are checked in the Privacy setting. 2. When going through the setup after the reset, turn on wifi as soon as you can (assuming it is available). 3. After you have entered your Gmail account info, you will be presented with a screen that has two check boxes. Basically they are "Do you want Google to backup and restore this phone”. Make sure you check both of those. Your apps will then automatically reinstall (paid and free). Set the phone aside for a minute or two and let the apps download and install.

 

[atomicwedgie]

Thanks for all the valuable info. I am going through the phone trying to figure out what I changed a few days ago that created this issue. I already uninstalled the two apps I installed right before that. I've used a few of you tweaks but to be honest, the battery was doing very well before this.

I've considered the factory reset with dread... I personalize Go Launcher (install it on every phone) and a few other apps will require me to retweak them.

 

[atomicwedgie]

I had switched back to Sense for five days because I was starting to like it. I switched back to GO Launcher and adjusted a few basic things and today, I am at 12hrs with 44% battery left! Woohoo! Moderate use today but this is a good sign and battery life I can live with. Once I see it's stable, I might go back to Sense and see if that's what is killing the battery for sure. Maybe something went wonky somewhere.

 

[leroybrute]

My wife has a charge and I have the rezound and strange enough about same time your battery started draining quick both of ours would be very low within 3 to 4 hours. Happened for a couple of days. Noticed today we are back to normal. In fact I got 16 hrs wife got about 11 hrs, and we used them more today than we have been. Since we both had this happen at once we decided not to mess with it to see if network or something might be causing it. I think the network was involved with ours. I searched and searched but nothing was acting up, or seemed to be causing it.

 

[atomicwedgie]

Well I have to say I am stumped. Went back to Sense today and while it's not as battery friendly as Go Launcher, usage is back to tolerable.

Leroy you might be onto something there. Hmmm... maybe only certain areas and certain phones were affected?

 

[mikeinctown]

I'm about to call vzw support. I have been getting hurrendous battery life. I have No widgits, No GPS on.. No Wi-Fi... No sync other than yahoo and Google email, and I'm down 25% battery life in an hour since it shut off at 100%. All I have done is sent 3 texts and a few dozen instant messages. Phone was in my pocket most of the time.

Even when I'm not using it, battery life goes down almost 10% an hour. It's at a point where I did more with my og and after 2 years the battery still lasted longer.

Sent from my Rezound using DroidForums.

Edit that.. after 5 minutes on the forum, I'm down below 70% now

 

[acles003]

Have you guys tried downloading the Watchdog app? It's not a task killer but rather alerts u that there is an app going haywire on your phone.

Sent from my ADR6400L using DroidForums

 

[BayouFlyFisher]

I'm about to call vzw support. I have been getting hurrendous battery life. I have No widgits, No GPS on.. No Wi-Fi... No sync other than yahoo and Google email, and I'm down 25% battery life in an hour since it shut off at 100%. All I have done is sent 3 texts and a few dozen instant messages. Phone was in my pocket most of the time.

Even when I'm not using it, battery life goes down almost 10% an hour. It's at a point where I did more with my og and after 2 years the battery still lasted longer.

Sent from my Rezound using DroidForums.

Edit that.. after 5 minutes on the forum, I'm down below 70% now

Do a factory reset.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[mikeinctown]

Ok, dumb question, #1 how do you do a factory reset? and #2 will doing that delete contents off a SD card, like my backup assistant stuff for backing up text messages? #3 will all photos be deleted? Need to figure out if I need to save all that stuff to a computer or if I can do it while I'm at work.

 

[SquireSCA]

There has to be another way to get better battery life than doing a factory reset every month... It doesn't fix the inherent problem, it just deletes it temporarily, but it will come back.

 

[mikeinctown]

Down to 30% now and I've been on here and on the market for the last half hour. This after charging to 100% at 11:00 am and it's 2:20 now.

I watched the NFL game Thanksgiving for 10 minutes and the battery went down 25% in that time. It's insane.

Sent from my Rezound using DroidForums.

Edit that, by the time I posted I'm at 25%. I also noticed that if you leave it plugged in that it doesn't stay topped off. It just shuts off. I did that the other day and noticed my battery was down a few percent but it showed No charger connected.

 

[SquireSCA]

Down to 30% now and I've been on here and on the market for the last half hour. This after charging to 100% at 11:00 am and it's 2:20 now.

I watched the NFL game Thanksgiving for 10 minutes and the battery went down 25% in that time. It's insane.

Sent from my Rezound using DroidForums.

Edit that, by the time I posted I'm at 25%

it seems that HTC learned nothing from the Thunderbolt debacle, where VZW had to give out free extended batteries to keep people from tossing them. I don't understand how companies can do this...

They know that a phone like this is meant to be USED. That amazing screen is not there to sit dormant for fear of turning the phone on and having it dead before lunch time... How can a company keep making the same mistakes over and over?

If this phone eats power, then they need to design it with a extended batter as standard, and make it wider and thinner so that the phone is still compact. This crap of turning everything off, disabling all the features, never being more than 4 feet from a charging jack and being afraid to use the phone is complete horse $*%^. Make a phone and put a battery in it that can last the better part of a day. Is that really too much to ask? We can put a remote controlled robot on Mars, we can splice DNA and split atoms, but we can't make a cell phone with a decent battery? LOL

 

[mikeinctown]

Well update time. HTC reps went over some stuff with me and after I told them I disabled all their factory widgits and have GPS etc turned off, they transferred me to the battery people. New battery coming my way. FWIW my phone was reading 4 hours and 46 minutes and 32 seconds just before it turned off on low battery. LOL This was from 100% charge.

I am worried that the phone may be the culprit however because it still doesn't explain why it stops the charge all together at 100% instead of keeping it topped off. It just stops charging until I pull the cord and re-insert it for charging.

 

[Quicksilver7714]

I hate to say it but it seems as if HTC has yet to address the battery problems that the thunderbolt suffered from. I had a Tbolt for a month and went back to my DX because the battery was so horrible. I could get 16 hours on the TBolt if I had all syncing turned off and did not use it at all. But with normal use and minimal web use I was averaging 5-6 hours which is completely unacceptable. Re Bionic however had a great stand by battery time, 36 hours no use, and was averaging 14 hours normal use, I am a moderate to heavy user, on 4g.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk