Database Users

WiFi kills battery when Universal is switched off?

Hi there,
With my BlueAngel I could leave the WiFi on all night as when the phone was switched off it did not eat up the battery - when the phone was switched on it would spend a couple of seconds reconnecting to the wireless point.
The Universal seems to behave in the same way, yet it eats up all the battery overnight even when I have switched the phone off and it is not connected to the WiFi access point.
Is there some setting or registry key I can alter to fix this?
Cheers,
Quilty

@Qulity, if you don't close PIE I have found the battery can be drained. I assume overnight you are using Flight Mode.

Are you closing the flip and presuming that the device gets turned off or have you actually set your device to turn off after a fixed period of inactivity in the power settings?
If it is the former, then the device actually does not turn off if there is any activity in the background like active GPRS or WiFi etc. A simple solution to this would be to press the hard-ware on/off button once you are done irrespective of whether wfi is active or not in the background.
Try it out and post your results here.

My device is set to turn off after 2 mins on battery power, but I made a special point of turning it off with the hardware button before testing last night. As I said before my BlueAngel never behaved like this.

my jasjar was turned off yesterday, and every 5min i heard sound for new wifi network!! same problem, i solved it with turnig wifi off!! any other solutions?

how to switch off a MDA PRO Universal and battery life

How do you switch it off ? I have set the thing to switch off automatically after 2 minutes, but its still on after 3 hours and the battery has dropped from 99% to 40%. I had the bluetooth on and everything else switched off.
It is one week old.
Is the battery life normal ?
I'm sure it didn't switch off.
thanks

I have a jasjar. First thing i did, i uninstalled antivirus and skype. I keep it all day on with bluetooth active, and everything off at night. Based on calls and activities i put it on charge every 3 or 4 days.

I have set my MDA Pro to turn off after 3 minutes, and it does indeed turn off. If I don't touch it (turn it back on), the device can go all day with negligible battery usage (a few %).
Bluetooth is off. WiFi is on. 'Incoming beams' are off.
I sync by cable, so the device is powered while syncing. If you sync via bluetooth, then perhaps activesync is keeping the device awake even though it is not powered.
If you turn it off manually (power button on edge near SD card slot), does it turn itself back on? Mine does that when activesync is running and connected. Otherwise it is happy to stay off until I get a call or some reminder.

go to the phone options and change from Auto band select to GSM. Using 3G sucks battery like a mofo

my main issue is that it should have turned itself off
1) in the comms menu, only bluetooth was on
phone was off
wireless was off
beam set to off as well
From 98% charge to 40% in 3 hours, when I hadn't used it at all.
I am sure that is not usual.
So gsm/3g/gprs shouldn't have any bearing on the batt life, as it was set to off ....

was bluetooth actively doing anything during this time or just on and sitting there?

Firestomer, the following eat batteries:
- PIE running in the background
- Camera app running in the background (can be activated when you shut the camshell as it is easy to hit the camera switch on the front)
- UMTS (which is not a problem for as your radio is off)

hi joe
BT wasn't doing anything - I closed the clamshell and left it expecting it to switch off, but I guess it didn't since it chewed through nearly 60% power in 3 hours.
Also, what is the technique for switching it off ? I have pressed the power button to the left of the SD slot, all it does is switch the backlight off. I have held it for 0.5 seconds, 1, 5, 10 ....
I am loosing patience with the thing - wifi isn't working for me and TomTom5 keeps forgetting it has a GPS connection ...
btw what is PIE ??

firestomer
PIE = pocket IE
Two clicks of the off switch will turn the device off
On my device BT only uses about 10/15% of battery over a 12 hr period

Are you talking about svitching the device entirely off? i dont think that can be done...exept if you take the battery out and put it back in and dont turn it back on

yes as close to off as possible when I am as sleep etc, but it guess it needs to keep the clock and alarm and keypressed detect powered ....

What is killing my battery life?

My 8125 is suddenly running out of batteries very fast. I suspect this is because of some activity running - if I turn the unit off, and leave it on my desk overnight, it is exhausted by morning (I, on the other hand, am exhausted by morning only if I am turned on. Sorry.)
I have checked for:
alarms and notifcations that are set to go off - there seem to be none
mail and other internet access items - there seem to be none
programs (like SPB Weather) updating themselves too frequently - there seem to be none
My energy settings are normal; sleep in one minute, backlight down, etc.
Is there anything I'm missing? Any suggestions?

wifi, bluetooth. make sure they are turned off.

That's exactly, WiFi and BT even when active in standby really drain the battery quickly.

thanks so much, but.... Wifi and Bluetooth are off - I never turn Wifi on, and I almost always keep Bluetooth off (though I wish there was a way to quickly - or even automatically - turn it on or off, ie, whenever I use it in phone mode, BT would turn on, and when I hang up, it turns off.)
any other thoughts?

Battery Gone Bad
Hey I think your battery is gone bad.
BT Off
Wifi Off
Backlight Down
Sounds to me battery is ready to go to the recycle bin lol
Also check your MSN Msnger Is not onn all the time.
Bernie

maybe it is the battery. the unit is less than a month old, but I just bought a spare battery. I'll compare run-down times on both.
a related question: why would WiFi and Bluetooth consume battery power if the unit is asleep?
-thanks-

I started getting horrible life out of my battery as of last month, but then I upgraded the ROM on it and have been getting FANTASTIC battery life. Better than when I first got the device.

which Rom did you upgrade to?

Summter <sp?> 2.3 for Cingular

soulbarn said:
My 8125 is suddenly running out of batteries very fast. I suspect this is because of some activity running - if I turn the unit off, and leave it on my desk overnight, it is exhausted by morning (I, on the other hand, am exhausted by morning only if I am turned on. Sorry.)
I have checked for:
alarms and notifcations that are set to go off - there seem to be none
mail and other internet access items - there seem to be none
programs (like SPB Weather) updating themselves too frequently - there seem to be none
My energy settings are normal; sleep in one minute, backlight down, etc.
Is there anything I'm missing? Any suggestions?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you solve your battery problme?

when i am out in the country, where i might rarely get a signal, my battery drains real fast, prob to do with the constant searching for a signal to connect to.

I came upon this thread after my 8125 began having problems with the battery life last week. I'm wondering what kind of battery life people are getting and which settings they have.
For instance, before last week, I was getting little battery drainage during a 9 hour shift at work. Then this week, I was getting close to 55% battery drainage over the same duration. Just a few moments ago, I checked my battery settings and I found out that for some reason, my phone wasn't shut off after 2 minutes of idle time as it was originally set at. Okay, I'll test my battery usage tomorrow at work, but I suspect that was the problem.
Then it got me wondering how long other people have for battery life. With Bluetooth on, wifi off, lowest brightness setting and my auto shut off set at 2 minutes, I was able to last an entire 9 hour shift on standby with only about 4 - 5% drop in battery life. Hopefully, that is what I'll have tomorrow when I test it again with the auto shut off setting in place. What are others getting for battery life (please specify your settings).

I've forgotten to charge my phone at night before, and have had no problems making it through the second day of usage, though I'll usually get a low battery warning.
I keep Bluetooth and data connection on constantly. Don't use Wi-Fi unless I need something really quickly. Backlight is at the lowest active setting. I would say I use it moderately throughout the day. I use it to take important notes and make reminders for myself, along with surfing the internet without worry.

hi
Please check out activesync which drains the max battery..
make sure that activesync is not running in backround. once after disconnecting your mini-usb cable connectivity from PC please check for the activesync status.. if running turn it off.
--tux

Fast Battery Drain over night

Hi guys,
I have a problem with my Jade. I've charged it last evening and I've barely used it. When I've went to bed it was 96% charged (ARIELbattery) and 10 minutes used.
This morning, when I've woke up, The battery was 33% and and the phone was 34 minutes usage time.
Something is wrong. Since there were no bluetooth, no wifi, no anything activated. And for sure, nobody played with the phone during the night.
This is not the first time when I see this behavior, but is the first time when the decrease is so big.
I suspect an app, but I do not know which of them. How can I see it?
Do you have other suggestions?
thanks!

There are some possible reasons:
Some SD-Cards seem to drain battery, so you can take it out for a test.
Some additional software is told to drain battery. Did you install something?
It is also helpful to switch to "flight-mode" over night. This normally reduces battery drain to nearly zero, if no additional consumers exist.

Hi,
Yes I've installed some software, like gAlarm, S2U2, icontact,ThumbCal, Skype, etc but last night none of them was started.
What can I do with the SD Card?! I need the SD-Card. Which card does not drain battery and which does?
I cannot turn off the phone over night.

Some clues here in this forum
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=514556&highlight=battery

I've read those before posting, but there was no answer to my problem. I have 67% drop of battery in 8 hours without touching the phone.

This is most likely that your device goes to screenoff or unattended power state instead of sleep. Your power settings might be corrupted. To change that go to your power settings advanced tab and change everything there (checkboxes and sliders), press ok and then change them back as they were, press ok. I'd suggest to keep the device turning off in one minute while on battery and none of the checkboxes for cord powered mode. There is a really freaky thing that even if you get your device to sleep with power button it will go back to screenoff mode after time specified by the turn off device slider while on battery IF you don't have that turn-off-while-on-battery checkbox checked there.

darfri said:
even if you get your device to sleep with power button it will go back to screenoff mode after time specified by the turn off device slider while on battery IF you don't have that turn-off-while-on-battery checkbox checked there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the answer. But I do not really understand what you are saying here.
My power settings are: 30sec for Screen Light and 1 min for Device (on battery).
None of the check boxes is set for the case when the device is powered.

It could also be due to the battery defect. After some time the battery could lose its storage ability (because of the defect), despite the mAH stated.
As a comparison, my battery is nearly one year old. On full charge, overnight drawdown (on sleep mode) is about 2%-3% .

ungureanub said:
Hi,
Yes I've installed some software, like gAlarm, S2U2, icontact,ThumbCal, Skype, etc but last night none of them was started.
What can I do with the SD Card?! I need the SD-Card. Which card does not drain battery and which does?
I cannot turn off the phone over night.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have no own experiences with this programs but Skype for example needs permanent connection to internet when activated (be care of the background job!). This uses data connection and this drains battery. I can not quantify this in %. In addition Skype does not allow the system to switch to deep sleep because it needs permanent connection!

None of the app was started. I just have Skype installed, but it was not used.

Uninstall S2U2 !!!!!

nicodbgh said:
Uninstall S2U2 !!!!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I found some German threads that discuss a problem with this software and battery life. Some loose 10% over night others 50%. I think you should try to uninstall (and afterwards soft-reset!) for a night and see what happens.
Please keep us informed.

First of all, I've disabled the 3G. Now it only gsm with gprs. Since I've done this it seems the battery drop is ... super ok. If yesterday morning I've had 33%, this morning I've had 20%, so 13% drop in 24h, and the phone was used normally as before.
last night the S2U2 was not started.
I will wait until the battery level reaches 10% an I will do a full charge.
I will keep you informed. Thanks to all for advices!

Some clues here too ...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=471365&highlight=battery+3g&page=2

Hi,
So now, 2 weeks later... after setting my Jade to GSM only (no 3G) I get 7-8 days of normal usage. As I said, before I always had to charge it the third day.
Normally, i get -28mAh drain in standby. When the screen is on around -130mAh (for wake up) and then -70mAh. In a gsm call i get around -250mAh.
I did not switch the phone back to 3G yet, but I will and I will see again the battery drain.
PS: the values were provided by Mobadi.

i believe i have S2U2 installed... and my phones fine!
i have the overloaded rom... and battery life seems great only needs charging every 3 or so days and i do use it quite alot!

so...
after some time of testing and re-testing I still have, from time to time, the behavior that during night I see a massive drop in battery level and an increase of the usage time.
I do not know what is going on, but I suspect that some app is waking up the device to do some work (without turning on the screen), and the Jade cannot go to sleep anymore for a while.
I've notice the same behavior on a HTC Diamond 2.
Since none of the app I have installed on my Jade are installed on my friends Diamond2, I have no idea what app could do that.
If anybody has any idea, feel free .... I am idea-less!

I've made myself a little application to log the current values of the power data. So, I've saw that my phone wakes up each hour by himself, without turning on the screen, does some work (cca -70mA) and after 30sec goes back to sleep.
Any ideea about this?

Battery Drain from WiFi

I'm sure there are others who have experienced this problem. Even though I show no wake locks my phone drains at an unacceptable rate while on my Wifi at home. My phone can have a 60% battery when I go to bed, and be almost dead by the time I get up. The only clue that shows up in Android System Info or Spare Parts is network usage by '0' which is something with root access.
This is happening regardless of Rom. I've tried stock, Syndicate Frozen, Urban Fury, Bonsai, Stock Plus, and maybe another I'm forgetting. They all drain the crap out of my battery with wifi on at home so obviously this isn't a rom issue.
This leaves me to believe that either something on my network is forcing data to my phone keeping it from deep sleep, or the router itself is the cause. Turning on my phone to 3G, my battery life is spectacular overnight. It deep sleeps like it's had a case of beer with a bottle of nyquil as a chaser before bed. 1% an hour.
So, I've ordered a different router to see if that's the issue. I've googled my current router which is a D-Link DIR-655 and seems like others have had similar battery drains using that router but no one can emphatically say it for sure is the router. Guess we'll see when the new router arrives if it is indeed the DIR-655. Otherwise the next step is disconnecting everything else that is connected to my network (3 computers, 2 printers, XBox, Wii and a Blu-Ray player. I just wanted to point out to anyone else having issues with wifi and weird battery drain, that it may not be the phone that is the problem.

I too have massive battery drain when using Wifi. It doesn't matter what Wifi network I'm attached to (work/home/friends/etc), I burn about 10% + per hour on idle; whereas on 3G is burning only ~2%/hour on idle. On stock, Wifi was my battery saving grace.
I've just given up on using Wifi for daily use. I use 3G for everything now.
I hope the newest version of SFR (whatever the new one will be called) will remedy this problem I have. I haven't posted about it in the rom thread since I had a feeling it was just my phone or another bad flash in CWM.

I've been using that OS Monitor app to try and find the problem. On 3G all the network interfaces have static receive and send amounts as long as I'm not doing anything that requires data. Connected to my home wifi, there is a constant trickle of data.
When I let the phone sit overnight, there was over 4mb of data received, even if I turn off any kind of auto syncs on the phone.

wifi settings
Don't know if this will work for you but you can try. In the wifi settings click the menu button and select advanced then set the wifi to never sleep. I know it's counter intuitive but I went to sleep last night at 61% and woke to 57%. Wifi has been fine for me since changing that policy in the wifi advanced settings.

android_mp99 said:
Don't know if this will work for you but you can try. In the wifi settings click the menu button and select advanced then set the wifi to never sleep. I know it's counter intuitive but I went to sleep last night at 61% and woke to 57%. Wifi has been fine for me since changing that policy in the wifi advanced settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine has been set at never sleep since I got the Epic in September, and I double-check after each custom rom flash. Good looking out though.

nikon120 said:
Mine has been set at never sleep since I got the Epic in September, and I double-check after each custom rom flash. Good looking out though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same here. Mines always been set to never sleep.
Edit: I just tested my phone on my work's wifi network. CPU Spy says it's going into deep sleep just fine. OS monitor shows a static data received/sent number once I was connected. Obviously something about my home network is the problem.

android_mp99 said:
Don't know if this will work for you but you can try. In the wifi settings click the menu button and select advanced then set the wifi to never sleep. I know it's counter intuitive but I went to sleep last night at 61% and woke to 57%. Wifi has been fine for me since changing that policy in the wifi advanced settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is my general experience, too. These settings usually keep my WiFi usage low overnight.
But some nights, inexeplicably, I will wake up to find a large battery hit from WiFi. I don't think it is my WiFi router's problem, unless there is some outage duirng the night I am unaware of. Come to think of it, I had that problem last night but did not investigate early this morning before I left. When I get home, I will check with my laptop to make sure my router is running.

I have noticed this too and in particular over the past few days. I'm on the latest bonsai build which does have amazing battery life on 3G but now wifi does draithe battery much more than 3G. This never happened before. I have had my wifi set to never sleep. Any other suggestions?

Obviously haven't tested it overnight yet, but I shut down my one laptop and the constant data trickle immediately stopped. Right now it's looking like something my computer is running might be the culprit. Going to leave it sit overnight to see how it goes.

I found the cause of my drain! Narrowed it down to something from my laptop as when I shut my computer down at night, the drain would go away. The culprit was the HP Printer software for my wireless printer. Once I uninstalled it, the drain went away. Noticed in resource monitor that HPZinw12 was sending a constant stream of data from my computer. Why in the hell it would be also sending to my phone keeping it from sleeping seems pretty odd, but I recommend if anyone else who is having battery problems over wifi and happen to also have an HP printer, you might want to look into this as well.

I'd also add that my solution to getting rid of the problem and still being able to use my printer was just to uninstall the crappy HP software that came with the printer and add the printer through the control panel and let windows 7 install it. It doesn't throw on that HPZinw12 file that apparently polls the entire network constantly.

CapsLockKey said:
I found the cause of my drain! Narrowed it down to something from my laptop as when I shut my computer down at night, the drain would go away. The culprit was the HP Printer software for my wireless printer. Once I uninstalled it, the drain went away. Noticed in resource monitor that HPZinw12 was sending a constant stream of data from my computer. Why in the hell it would be also sending to my phone keeping it from sleeping seems pretty odd, but I recommend if anyone else who is having battery problems over wifi and happen to also have an HP printer, you might want to look into this as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Since I have been experiencing similar symptoms intermittently and I also have a WiFi printer, I have tried to eliminate this as a potential cause. (I don't run an HP control app on my laptop, but already map the printer directly in Windows 7 like you suggest.)
In my case, I still get the excessive WiFi battery drain, and low battery level upon waking, sometimes overnight. But other nights the problem does not occur. So lately I have made sure that my laptop and printer are powered down before bedtime. And like you, a always have my WiFi sleep policy set to "never" and have a strong WiFi signal. But last night I still had the problem, and awoke to find the battery drained to 45 percent instad of its typical 90 percent.
Interestingly, I noticed not only high WiFi battery usage but also high "Cell standby" usage attributable to the well-known Time Without Signal problem -- and this despite my habitual use of the Airplane toggle workaround, which usually works.
Somehow, something caused both WiFi and cell radios to go crazy overnight.
BTW, I run a stock, unrooted Epic.

So far with SRF v1.1.1, my Wifi is back to normal.
On my work network, I've dropped 4% in 3.5hours with my work email syncing every 15mins. So that's pretty good usage given that sync interval.
I also do not have a printer at home, so the printer bit wouldn't have been a cause for me.

While the printer thing took care of the biggest problem for me, I still don't get as good of battery life overnight leaving my phone on WiFi rather than 3G. There is still something my computer is doing that wakes my phone up occasionally, but at least I'm not going to bed with a 70% battery then waking up to a dead phone. At least I have it narrowed down to one computer (total of 3 on my network), as when I shut that particular one down battery life for my phone is back to 1% an hour while sleeping. If I had to take a guess at this point, might be something with media sharing as I use that one as my primary location for music/videos to stream via Windows Media Center.

CapsLockKey said:
While the printer thing took care of the biggest problem for me, I still don't get as good of battery life overnight leaving my phone on WiFi rather than 3G. There is still something my computer is doing that wakes my phone up occasionally, but at least I'm not going to bed with a 70% battery then waking up to a dead phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How do you know it is your computer? Have you tried just turning it all the way off?
Do you watch the services running on your phone? I routinely stop the DRM service, for example.
Except for the mysterious episodes when I experience this intermittent problem, my overnight battery usage is typically about 1 percent per hour.

boomerbubba said:
How do you know it is your computer? Have you tried just turning it all the way off?
Do you watch the services running on your phone? I routinely stop the DRM service, for example.
Except for the mysterious episodes when I experience this intermittent problem, my overnight battery usage is typically about 1 percent per hour.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've tested over a few nights with a mostly full battery off the charger and reset the timer on CPU Spy. The nights I shut that computer completely off, I get very little battery drain and the phone is mostly in deep sleep according to CPU spy. When it's on, the phone shows a good chunk of CPU at 800mhz and more battery drain.