Poor battery life / long recharge times..?

[keiichi25]

Settings > About Phone > Battery Use continuously claims that ~60% of my battery usage is display. i have brightness set to the lowest setting and it still runs down before the end of the day. and the last 15% ran off while i was playing a flag football game for an hour without the gps, wireless, or bluetooth on.

are there any free apps for decreasing the lowest factory setting for the backlight?

I think Power Manager was mentioned as a possible one, but strange about what you are saying about running out like that.

Can you specify when you started from charged (IE: Disconnected from the charger) to when you finally got through the day?

Not to say you don't know how to handle your phone, I just went through an entire work day for myself, which is from 6:30 AM to 4:30 PM with about 50% or so battery power available.

Also, I recommend using Battery Widget instead of constantly going to the About part. Nice little widget to display percentage battery power on the desktop, albeit not 100% digital accurate, it is better than eye balling the gauge or having to browse to battery status.

Another option is also to make sure you are running on the bare minimum apps. Even with the Wifi, bluetooth and gps off, some apps will still use your 3G connection which in itself sucks power.

 

[peeyourownpants]

keiichi, it turns out i must have been playing on it much more than i thought i was. during a day at school where i text in class and surf wikipedia for lecture details, i didn't even go through half the battery. still not sure what happened though in the last 15% when it was in my bag sleeping over the course of an hour...

also, i charged it before i went to bed, and without google sync, wifi, bt, or gps on (conditions it would be in as my alarm clock when i'm away from home) i still had >90% battery after 7.5 hours. then, i had sync on half the day by itself and it didn't drain any faster than with it off. i love this thing!

i tried the free version of power manager before and didn't see anything about changing the brightness below the original settings. also, the free one rates pretty poorly as a recently updated trial for the full one and a few reviews say the full version isn't entirely working for droid yet. any truly FREE ones?

 

[pkdesigns]

UPDATE: with my automatic task killer, my phone ran from 9am to 10pm today, accepting texts and emails (around 10 an hour at least) and playing music for approx 3 hours total. mix in a little web browsing. thats 13 hours of run time! This phone is really starting to prove its worth!

 

[lumns]

yesterday was the 1st day it died on me. It was fully charged at 1pm. there was about 15mins of nav, about 20mins of playin trap, 30mins of music and a decent amount of web browsing died in jus over 5 hours.


dont know if thats acceptable or not. Def gonna need to either find/wait for an extended battery (dont want to do coz the phone is already big enough) buy another battery (will prob do) and get a car charger ( hate these things, makes interior of car not flow, but is a necessity in emergencies)

 

[jscotti]

I think what we are finding out with our new Droids is that we have to be careful what we have running on the machine. The ATK task killer is essential to keep spurious apps from eating up the battery charge. If you use the Droid as a simple cell phone, you probably don't load many apps and you get lots of run time. If you are like me, you load apps left and right and sometimes one or two of them are power hogs without you realizing. That and I'm going to have to keep a charger at work as well as at home so I don't have to carry one around with me all the time.... And maybe get that spare battery too....

I have to say after a couple days with my new Droid, I was very disappointed in the battery capacity. But I've been paying lots of attention to what I leave running and I've gotten much better performance out of a full charge in the last day or two.

Jim.

 

[ZeRo_C0oL]

Mine seems pretty slow to charge via USB.... at least on my laptop, anyway. It charges faster when plugged into the wall. I think it seems to do fine when powered by my desktop though.

I'd like to pick up an extra battery and battery charger so I can use the phone as much as I want all hours of the day.

 

[lumns]

i wish there was an option to close a program without using the app killer.


example, i took a picture. dont need a camera again, but the camera app is running in the background. Settings, once changing a setting, i dont need settings running in the background....etc...

list goes on, sometimes i hit the wrong app, hit back or home, program keeps running.

 

[Dream]

after reading the link above to the Verizon forums, I looked at settings > about phone > status and if you scroll all the way to the bottom the "up time" should be a "low number" according to that thread. Mine is currently at 2:47:60. I have had my phone off the charger since about 7am and 2 hours later its down to 80%. I dont use the app killer program after reading this thread:

http://www.droidforums.net/forum/dr...-not-worry-about-apps-running-background.html

So my question is; Is my phone running something a faulty app thats keeping it "awake" all the time killing the battery? I feel like a 20% drop after 2 hours of little to no use is pretty lame.

 

[HEMDROID]

My batt died fast until I put the pre installed toggle bar to turn on/off wifi,bluetooth,autosync, gps, and display dimmer to my home page. I get several emails an hour so I manual sync my email and leave everything off untill I need it and batt last all day, the dimmer is great to have manual when you are in sunlight you can just tap it and wha la its full bright.

 

[HEMDROID]

settings > applications > running services.

 

[HEMDROID]

see above answer

 

[Dream]

settings > applications > running services.

I just noticed that my google talk app was running and my calendar. I shut both of those off since I never use them. Odd.

 

[wsbsteven]

My battery went 14 hours yesterday and had 20% remaining. Here is a break down of what I did:

-Played on snesoid for 2 hours with full brightness(battery leech)
-Texting
-MMS videos
-Emails (of course)
-Voice calls for around 30 or so minutes (I don't use many minutes normally)
-Pandora in the shower
-Light web browsing.

If I didn't use snesoid I bet I could have gone two days as I was at 60-70% before that.


This is what I did to make it last that long:

-Screen as dim as it goes
-Turned off wifi, bluetooth, gps
-I push the sleep button when I set the phone down
-I turned off my twitdroid notifications (don't need it unless I travel)
-Uninstalled apps that I didn't use or seemed like they would kill the battery
-Stopped clearing my programs with task killer

There really shouldn't be any issue with having the phone die. My phone has been on over 3 hours now and it still says 100%. The funny thing is phone idle is at 38% which is 18% more than the screen has used so far.

Apps I have installed:

-Bible
-Compass
-Decibel
-Dockrunner
-Google Voice
-GPS Speedo
-Pandora
-Snesoid Paid
-Tv.com
-Twidroid
-Twit.tv
-Wifi Analyzer

 

[Cdubski]

re:

Why would you stop killing apps with taskkiller? you mean you exit each manually or just leave everything thats running running?

 

[jkayner]

I had this same problem with my droid. It all started after the update. Before I had no battery issues. After the battery would die in about 4.5 hours. This is with little or no use. If I had a full charge when I went to bed and unplugged it, the phone would be dead when I woke up. It was also taking forever to charge. Using the droid chargefr/cable it would get 20% an hour. I then started having other issues. The phone would become unresponsive and the screen would seem like it was refreshing constantly or something. For example, if I was on a screen that scrolled I could scroll down and in about 1 second later it would just go back to the top by itself. Would do this repeatedly. I tried factory resets with no apparently and same thing would happen. I ended up going to a verizon store and showing them. They agreed it was acting crazy and swapped it out. The new phone works great, battery lasts long like when I first got the original. I have loaded all my favorite Apps with no issue.
Oh yeah we tried a new battery at the store and it did the same thing, but they gave me a new one with the new phone anyway.