Does anyone sell an extended battery yet?

[R1Lover]

Just an update on mine today...

Current status
Time since unplugged: 12H 58M
Battery status: 60%

I sent about 15 txt today
played a couple games of solitaire
Made about 15 minutes of phone calls
checked e-mail all day, sent and received about 50 e-mails.

wifi is the only thing off, everything else has been on all day.

 

[dajakal]

I'm a little bummed about battery life too. Right now I'm at 15h 35min from the last full charge, and 40% life. No calls, like 5 texts and maybe 20 total min of browsing+marketplace. I've had wifi, GPS, and BT off, brightness at the lowest setting. The battery status says display, phone idle, and cell standby are the biggest power drains at 34, 16, and 14%. At this rate I wouldn't be able to go more than 24 hours without charging, which to me seems like awfully shoddy performance...
On another note, the battery widgets I've tried seem to only display the % remaining rounded to the nearest 10 (and rounded down, I suspect). Is there anything more precise?

 

[b34st1y]

Any word on either a fix for better battery life.....or a larger capacity battery?

 

[darreno1]

Today I got a full 12 hours of usage with 20% remaining when I got home. I had some phone calls, did some web browsing and the GPS was always on (I never turn it off). No bluetooth or wifi. Seems like the more charge cycles it gets the better it works. When I first got it, it would be close to dead by 5.00pm with the same amount usage.

I also like how quick this thing charges.

 

[employeeno5]

Here are some suggestions for people who seem to be struggling with battery life while others are doing just fine.

I too get a great battery life (for now) when I keep Wifi and Bluetooth off (have no use for Bluetooth personally, so can't say anything about it otherwise) but everything else running. I can get a full 12 hours including some calls, a good amount of web browsing and market browsing off and on, playing some games & testing some apps, making many texts and emails, etc.; similar activity to what others have reported here as a full day with good battery life.

However, initially I was tearing through my battery life even with my phone mostly idle on my desk. What did I change to improve things? I made three small and unobtrusive changes to my settings.

The first thing that I changed was to turn off Facebook sync in the "Accounts & Sync" section of the phone's settings. This may not have made a big difference, I'm not sure, but the bottom line is it's one less process using 3G through out the day. Unless I've added a new contact and I know they're on my Facebook profile, I don't need that sync turned on all of the time. If I do add a new contact and want it to sync with their Facebook profile, I just need to turn it on for a minute, it will then sync, and then I can turn it off again.

The second setting I changed was on Twidroid, the very popular Twitter app. I'm not a Twitter fiend, but I do have friends who will frequently message me with it. I set it to alert me on mentions of my name and direct messages and to check every five minutes. That may have been a mistake. While something like your Google account doesn't seem to eat-up too much battery with frequent checks all day, a random app like Twidroid might not be so well optimized. I changed it to check only once an hour and got a huge improvement. Once an hour seems still more than frequent enough for something like Twitter. If I want to check sooner, I merely need to open the app.

Finally, in taking a cue from my apparent success with Twidroid, I set the Facebook app to stop updating me all together. Why? Because while the Facebook app has a native way to notify you of messages, it does not open these notifications in the Facebook app, it just opens them in the browser for you. You can set your Facebook account to notify you by email instead (I imagine many people were already using that method). Android is already checking your email at regular intervals and the alert you get will open up the message in the browser just like the Facebook app's alerts (or you could just read them in your email if you don't need to reply). Keeping my Facebook alerts as emails kept a possibly unreliable and battery-eating third-party app from regularily accessing my 3G in the background. The email updates allow me to still get Facebook updates as often and reliably as ever, and in no less of native way given the app alerts just redirected you to the browser anyways.

I don't know if anyone of these helped more than another, but all together my battery life went from ****ty and awesome. I'm guessing it was mostly asking Twidroid to update so often, but my Facebook tweaks surely couldn't have hurt and likely help at least a little.

Perhaps these kinds of things won't help those with serious battery issues that could be due to just bad batteries, but I found they not only made a difference on my phone, but that they made a huge difference. Regardless, good luck to anyone out there with disappointing battery-life

 

[b34st1y]

good news so far. I turned off the auto-sync...as the previous post suggested....running 14+ hours with 20% battery left. I used 3g....wifi....bluetooth.....moderately throughout the entire day. *happy*

 

[Backnblack]

not interested in an extra battery, I am interested in a bigger capacity battery.

Only if it uses the stock battery door. Otherwise not interested.

 

[jstrick5]

Check settings under "Location & Security" Turn off "Use wireless networks" if you haven't already. This will DRASTICALLY improve battery life.

 

[ThePhoneGuy]

good news so far. I turned off the auto-sync...as the previous post suggested....running 14+ hours with 20% battery left. I used 3g....wifi....bluetooth.....moderately throughout the entire day. *happy*

All your doing is restricting the support and information that runs the DROID, check your battery usage (with sync on) and you'll see the big killer is display.

not system or OS

 

[b34st1y]

of course. This phone is a battery hog...so the best counter to that, in order to maximize battery life.....is optimizing the resource usage.

 

[jstrick5]

good news so far. I turned off the auto-sync...as the previous post suggested....running 14+ hours with 20% battery left. I used 3g....wifi....bluetooth.....moderately throughout the entire day. *happy*

All your doing is restricting the support and information that runs the DROID, check your battery usage (with sync on) and you'll see the big killer is display.

not system or OS

Not true in the least... none of that "runs" the droid. It is data that supports secondary app's. ANY sync you do is killing battery life by forcing the phone to use it's data connection. Fewer data connects = less battery power consumed...

Of course the display is the primary consumer of the battery - however when you add all sorts of other things that consume the battery (Facebook sync) it will consume faster. I installed a clock widget and i noticed the clock widget was consuming 10% of my battery when unplugged. Guess what? Removed the clock widget and my battery life significantly improved. Not rocket science here.

 

[ThePhoneGuy]

Two steps forward and one step backwards logic.

 

[jstrick5]

Two steps forward and one step backwards logic.

How so? I'm assuming you're talking about disabling new technology. If Facebook sync is killing battery life (proven) How is turning it off on a day to day basis, and turning it on for a few minutes when you know you've added facebook contacts to it can sync before you turn it back off to save battery again? Doesn't make sense to drain your battery on a daily basis for something that might update once every few days at best... that's backwards or just irrational logic.

Sync's for email are a different story. Gotta bite the bullet on that.

 

[YardApe]

I bought a docking station to help during the day... also, have you trimmed your system to be the most battery efficient?

 

[richelesro]

I had a couple of interesting experiences with charging and battery usage. One night, I was playing around with various apps right after charging. Everything was fine; battery went down to 90%. I turned off wifi and put it back in the dock.

The next morning, the battery was at 50%. Hmm. Shut down the phone, put it back in the charger (which turned it on, of course). An hour later it was at 100%. Went to work. The next time I looked at my phone, two hours after charging it, it was down to 30%. WTF? No apps running. Dead by noon.

Went home, charged again, and it was fine. No explanation.

Last night, I had it connected to my computer to transfer files. Battery went from 80% to 20% in three hours and the battery was overheating at 129 degrees. I went to the battery usage screen and got this:

com.android.email - 40%
Android System - 29%
Display - 13%
Phone Idle - 8%
Cell Standby - 6%
Media - 5%

This isn't the first time I've seen com.android.email sit at the highest battery usage. In fact, it usually is even though I have Exchange set to sync every 15 minutes. (I can't control GMail.)