How to conserve battery life on Droid X?

[garath]

I've been reading these forums about all the people with great battery life and have determined I have to have a faulty phone. I've already had them swap my battery out and see the same problems. Yesterday I went through 2 complete charges in one day. I don't do any heavy usage! Through 2 charges I talked on my phone for a total of maybe 1 hour, ran no videos, played no games, did minimal browsing and text messaging, etc. I didn't have wifi, gps, or bluetooth running either. I don't have any widgets active. The only thing I do that uses constant data streaming is eBuddy for my instant messaging. I understand that I should expect it to use more battery since I stay connected to that, but let's get serious. My first charge yesterday lasted 7 hours. It then took 2 full hours plugged into the wall to get to 100%. Another 5 hours later, my battery was drained again.

This morning, I've had it unplugged for 2 hours. During that 2 hours I talked on the phone for about 5 minutes. Display is using 72%, voice calls 23%, standby 6%, idle 2%. I am at 60% battery. Thoughts?

Just out of curiosity, if you do a battery pull with the phone at 60% now, what is it reading when it boots back up?

 

[Inkarnit]

50% now.

10char

I've been reading these forums about all the people with great battery life and have determined I have to have a faulty phone. I've already had them swap my battery out and see the same problems. Yesterday I went through 2 complete charges in one day. I don't do any heavy usage! Through 2 charges I talked on my phone for a total of maybe 1 hour, ran no videos, played no games, did minimal browsing and text messaging, etc. I didn't have wifi, gps, or bluetooth running either. I don't have any widgets active. The only thing I do that uses constant data streaming is eBuddy for my instant messaging. I understand that I should expect it to use more battery since I stay connected to that, but let's get serious. My first charge yesterday lasted 7 hours. It then took 2 full hours plugged into the wall to get to 100%. Another 5 hours later, my battery was drained again.

This morning, I've had it unplugged for 2 hours. During that 2 hours I talked on the phone for about 5 minutes. Display is using 72%, voice calls 23%, standby 6%, idle 2%. I am at 60% battery. Thoughts?

Just out of curiosity, if you do a battery pull with the phone at 60% now, what is it reading when it boots back up?

 

[Grifter]

I also work in IT as a network Administrator, and even your operating system comes with a Task Manager that allows you to kill the applications you want. My feeling is that with your smart phone, you should have the same thing.

I get it, I used to be a Network Engineer before getting promoted, and before that I was a Help Desk dweeb...

While a PC OS comes with a task manager, it typically is only used if a program hangs. Also, when you end a task on your own, it even throws up a disclaimer that you may cause other issues with other tasks running. So, while you don't know why Amazon and the Music apps run, when you kill them, you may be causing one of the necessary core services to fail or produce some other performace issue.

PS: There is a free "app killer" on your Android phone... Go to: Settings>Applications>Running Services You can kill things in there and that "app killer" was written by the same people that designed the OS of the phone, not a 3rd party developer.

As I have seen lots of other places (not just this forum), "Let the phone handle the applications naturally, it does a fantastic job on its own."

So here's what I did......

I completely cleaned out the phone by formatting the SD card and then formatting the phone itself.

Since yesterday morning (where I let it charge over night), I have used roughly 50% of the battery power. I've used it mostly for email, little web surfing, played a game for a few minutes or so. So it appears to be better this go-round than the initial one. maybe tha twas due to the software upgrade? I don't know. But I am no longer using ATK.

 

[fishstick600]

I was wondering if the amount of snails i get is causing me to use a lot of my battery? I recently turned my display off unless im outside and got rid of my live background i get over 12 hours of moderate use which imo is amazing, but my dad is getting almost 24 hours. I get close to 100 emails a day because of forums and google groups.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

 

[iam8up]

• Finally and probably most important run it completely dead and set it on the charger over night.

This just isn't true anymore with modern batteries. You don't need to do this.

The SINGLE most important thing is to set the screen brightness to Auto. My screen uses 86% of the battery as I have it set to 100% brightness (it just looks so pretty!).

This was my thought exactly. I have it set to auto brightness and it still uses the majority (80% or more) of the battery. I guess we don't really have much of a choice to improve battery life, do we?

 

[xeene]

auto on screen brightness won't save you any power. set it to 3% unless you're in sunlight and it'll be good. my phone lasts from 7am to 10pm with moderate use(calls, email, surfing the net) but i don't have any widgets on(gps, wifi, bt) and no live wallpaper just black screen. battery is set to smart mode with off peak hours between 11pm and 7am.

 

[truffuls]

Battery draino

PS: There is a free "app killer" on your Android phone... Go to: Settings>Applications>Running Services You can kill things in there and that "app killer" was written by the same people that designed the OS of the phone, not a 3rd party developer.

As I have seen lots of other places (not just this forum), "Let the phone handle the applications naturally, it does a fantastic job on its own."

I found Running Services this morning and since I've killed all the stuff I'm not using the battery actually is doing better, sort of.

Currently the display is using 89% and the cell standby is 10%, there is a missing 1% somewhere.

Starting with Day 1 the battery pissed power like water going over Niagara Falls.

Starting with Day 2 the txt msgs started to lag terribly; 5 seconds from click icon to black screen; 40 seconds from black screen to black screen with white txt msg; and finally, 60 seconds to open the "conversation stream".

On Day 3 I installed Handcent and txt'ing results improved to 1 sec/6 sec/10 sec but by Day 4 it was lagging just as bad.

I had ATK and uninstalled it after trying to debug wtf is wrong with this phone. I uninstalled the few apps I wasn't using that I installed; got rid of ATK.

Today the phone has rebooted at least 3 times when I attempted to access txt msgs. After reboot #1 I uninstalled handcent but it didn't help. Since discovering the Running Services screen I've been killing crap I'm not using and magically, the battery is still about 75% charged. Every other day since July 15 it has been redlining by 4pm.

The phone is rooted. I did that on day 3 so that didn't start the problems.

Anyone care to debug this thing? Is it a lemon? Should I demand a new one? I'm just at a total loss with this thing.

 

[fbmustang69]

I had a battery problem untill i removed ATK, drained and charged over night. My phone would last about 4-5 hours before this. I removed widgets and tried each one I found the the ATK used about 10% more jucie an hour. I also take the battery out every morning for a fresh restart. My phone last about 9 hours with all the widgets installed back on. So i say no ATK for me. I just use the one installed on the phone. This helped me I hope it will help someone else.