battery or signal?! - Hero CDMA General

so ive been running fipz radio ever since the initial release. never bothered to make benchmarks on speed, i was in it for the battery. last night i couldnt taken the cruddy battery anymore, so i flashed back. i fell asleep with my phone at 64% and woke up at 58%. yay! battery fixed!
but now, here i am, posting from my phone and almost sickened at just how S...L..O...W.. the damn thing is. i had never noticed it majorly, but that radio was giving me the extra boost in signal(obviously the issue with my battery) that made my phone bearable.
now im stuck with ssslllllloooowww browsing but amazzzzing battery (58% to 40% in 5 hrs, max use. heyyy, not bad!)
if you had to chose, which would it be?
battery or signal

Signal.
/10 chars

Definitely signal. I can always find a charger.

Related

Battery drains faster than it should

Hello there,
I would really like some advice - my battery is draining like water. I'm quite convinced it is the regulation of the unit; I bought a 2400mAh battery replacement and it lasted ages on first go, but then my G1 started draining stupidly fast after I'd recharged it. This also happens on the stock battery too (buy even quicker!). I'm convinced it is the regulation because a) I've never had battery problems previously and b) the battery meter starts at about 26% when I plug it it in (after the phone shuts off from it being dead and I then plug in the charger).
I actually have a bricked G1 that still charges batteries, so I thought I'd do an overnight charge on the battery that way, to 'remind' the other G1 what a 100% battery is like, but that didn't seem to work either.
Can someone help? Is this a known problem? I would really appreciate any advice.
Mark
Things that cause ridiculous battery drain;
Backlight, keep it at no more than 30%
Wifi - turn off search for open networks,
Gps - wow does this drain
gridlock32404 said:
Things that cause ridiculous battery drain;
Backlight, keep it at no more than 30%
Wifi - turn off search for open networks,
Gps - wow does this drain
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
GPS doesn't really drain battery unless it's actively being used...at least not on my phone.
You can also try disabling 3G if you're not in a 3G area. It will keep trying to find a 3G signal, which really drains battery.
For the record, I have a stock battery that I get ~13-16 hours on from a single charge... my backlight is at 40%, GPS is always on, and I use wifi whenever I want to surf the web and am near an open network.
OP...if your battery is lasting you only a couple of hours, then I'd try to reflash your ROM. Might help...
Wow 13 to 16, I am lucky if I get 6 with 30% backlight, and wi-fi and gps off, I have always gotten that on ever rom even stock with no widgets, you are one of the very few with good battery life cause I have seen many complaints about short battery ranges
gridlock32404 said:
Wow 13 to 16, I am lucky if I get 6 with 30% backlight, and wi-fi and gps off, I have always gotten that on ever rom even stock with no widgets, you are one of the very few with good battery life cause I have seen many complaints about short battery ranges
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, that's on a normal, moderate usage day. If I use it heavily, with a lot of wifi and web browsing, then I'll get around 10.
Maybe your battery needs to be replaced... could just be old and not holding a charge properly.
It's 2 months old, has done it from day one, I also have another battery that does it too that I kept from a previously brick g1, so one 3 phones, all the same battery life but then I use it quite heavily, always browsing on the web since my computer burned out
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=555048
try that? 3rd gen battery could help..
Thanks for the suggestions, but it's not a wifi/3g/brightness etc problem - I've had a G1 for six months, I know exactly how much power should be consumed. It's also not the battery; I have two stock batteries and a brand new 2400mAh battery, which for the first few charges lasted about 2 - 2.5 days and was brilliant (as it should be), but now doesn't last all that long.
I may have made the situation slightly better however - I did a Nandroid backup, wiped to factory (well, Cyanogen 4.0.4 anyway) and booted into that. I then restored the backup and when I plugged back in to the charger, the meter was at 85%, and seemed to take a normal amount of time to charge (and not jump to 100%). It remains to be seen if the problem is solved, I've yet to have the battery drain (this is a good sign though) an plug in the charger to see if it will jump from 0 to 25 or not.
I'll re-post when I know.
run the battery down until the phone shuts off without plugging it in.
charge the battery while the phone is off over night
do this 3-5 times and see if you get any improvement.
also remember some of the cheap 2400 batts from ebay and such claim 2400 but that is from 3.5V to 3.0V. The G1 considers 3.2V to be dead so you only get from 3.5V to 3.2V which sucks.
I'm with gridlock on this one. My batteries suck. It always needs a mid day charge. And to the poster that said to reflash a rom, that is bad advice. There is known issues with getting poor performance out of these batteries. I have 2 and both do the same. Got the second one from complaining to t-mo about how bad it sucks.
Reflashing seems to have worked...the 2400mAh battery seems a lot better now, it lasted nearly two days (it runs at 3.7v, according to my battery diagnostic), I've only just recharged it last night. When I plug it in, it charges normally and linearly now, instead of jumping straight to 25%.
So my advice, if anyone is having similar problems to me, would be to try a reflash.
Thanks for your help everyone.

Anyone notice battery life improvement with OTA update?

It is at 50% more than it usually is now. Weird.
ma2k5 said:
It is at 50% more than it usually is now. Weird.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To be honest not that weird. Nexus one never had battery issues the main problem was the network jumping from 3G to edge all the time. That was the major battery hog. The update has fixed that to a certain extent so we were bound to see a performance hike.
Cheers.
Mine's gone down really fast today, first day after the update. No obvious drains in the battery usage page... I'm at about 40 percentage points lower than usual right now.
gunnner said:
Mine's gone down really fast today, first day after the update. No obvious drains in the battery usage page... I'm at about 40 percentage points lower than usual right now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine seems to be doing better, usually I am at about 60-65% by this time, and I am at 77% right now with the same usage... 1hour of WiFi, 2 push email accounts, some video playback from the SD card, couple phone calls and txt msgs... actually might have used it a little more than usual since I downloaded some youtube videos, and I don't usually do that.
I will find out for sure later tonight when I get home and use it non-stop on WiFi for a couple hours.
Well one thing I noticed is that cell standby battery use has gone down dramatically (was nearly on par with display, sometimes even more). But I will report back tomorrow to see if this is still the case.
Mines definitely better today, not sure if it is because of the update or because of not running altered ROM's anymore. I seemed to have good battery life before rooting and installing roms and it seems to be back to about the same with the factory update so I might stick with this now instead of installing the ROMS and themes.
62% after 8 hours on WCDMA preferred.
Last time I tried that....it lasted about 13 hours total.
My shop(where the phone resides most of the day) has shoddy coverage for both edge and 3g.
I can confirm cell standby battery use has decreased dramaticallly after update. Gj google!
ma2k5 said:
It is at 50% more than it usually is now. Weird.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My battery life has drastically improved since the new radio. this phone gets better by the day, it seems!
Today, for me is the first day after the update and I noticed this morning that it was getting hot in my pocket. Took about 17% of the batter in a 40ish minute period... kinda odd.. did a pull and its been fine.. other than that, I'm on att so battery is always well.
mine randomly got pretty hot too.
I've seen a huge improvement, over 14 hours unplugged and I was at 79%. Before I would be at 50% within 12 hours.
My house 3g signal sucks, so I lost and additional 8% over the night, but at least it keeps a stable 3g signal here now (my G1 flip/flopped 2g/3g at my house since they put up the new 3g tower). I'm pretty pleased with the update, just wish they would have extended multi-touch to the keyboard.
I've been unplugged for 20hrs now. I used the phone yesterday as normal with calls, a couple of games, some browsing, downloaded a 14mb video and checked twitter at least a dozen times. My battery is at 54% so i'm VERY pleased. I'm going to try and go through the rest of today without recharging.
50% battery left after 8.5 hours uptime, so yeah, quite an improvement from the initial ~12 hours battery life.

Still having battery issues...

I rooted and flashed Fresh 2.0d about 2 weeks ago. I have flashed the Verizon radio, and if anything it made the battery life slightly worse. I was wondering if it is a consensus that people are getting worse battery life on fresh than on the stock 1.5 ROM? Today my phone died from a full charge in under 4 hours. I am expecting that I will have poor battery life due to a very bad signal, but it is far worse than the stock ROM. I am also starting to get concerned about the temperature. It has been sitting around 43C all day. I have had it plugged in for over 3 hours and it is only at 7%, which means that it is using almost all the current that can be supplied over USB. I am probably going to try DamageControl if I have time this weekend to flash it, but I like Fresh and was just checking to see what others thought. The battery use thing is saying that over 60% of my battery usage is due to cell standby and phone idle. I recently put setCpu on the phone, will that cause some of what I am seeing? All settings are onDemand with a 528 max and variable mins based on status(lower mins if lower bat or higher temp).
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=662581
Trying this fix, will update tomorrow when I give it enough time for a thorough test. Thanks...
Update: It works awesome, only 10% in 2 hours at little to no signal and roaming!

Interesting battery performance...

OK, I've had my HD2 since November, and I've never understood people who complained about poor battery life. I've consistently been able to go up to 2 days before charging. On the odd occasion, I've left TomTom running and it's drained the battery right down, but overall I've been pretty content with the battery performance.
Until about a week ago. I thought I'd maybe forgot to stick it on charge overnight the odd time, but now realise the battery has started to drain much more rapidly.
I did not change ROM, or install any additional software. I made sure nothing was running that shouldn't be in Task Manager. All of a sudden, I'm getting quite random battery drain - up to 20% drop in an hour. I put up with it for a week, thinking it just needed a hard-reset, so last night I decided to flash a new ROM. I updated to the latest radio ROM, and flashed bobsbbq's latest ROM thinking that would sort it, but after I took it off charge this morning it was down by 15% within an hour.
The drain has levelled off throughout the day, but it's still much higher than I'm used to. I don't use wireless, and I only have bluetooth turned on if I'm on AC power, so I've just got GSM/3G in normal use (and get good reception at home and work).
The fact that the battery drain changed so much in such a short period of time, with no obvious change in usage or software leads me to believe the battery itself is beginning to fail. I usually expect a good couple of years from a mobile battery before I see noticable drops in charge, but that's 6 months.
Is it possible the HD2 batteries are not very well made, resulting in some people having great battery life, and others complaining that it's crap?
elyl said:
OK, I've had my HD2 since November, and I've never understood people who complained about poor battery life. I've consistently been able to go up to 2 days before charging. On the odd occasion, I've left TomTom running and it's drained the battery right down, but overall I've been pretty content with the battery performance.
Until about a week ago. I thought I'd maybe forgot to stick it on charge overnight the odd time, but now realise the battery has started to drain much more rapidly.
I did not change ROM, or install any additional software. I made sure nothing was running that shouldn't be in Task Manager. All of a sudden, I'm getting quite random battery drain - up to 20% drop in an hour. I put up with it for a week, thinking it just needed a hard-reset, so last night I decided to flash a new ROM. I updated to the latest radio ROM, and flashed bobsbbq's latest ROM thinking that would sort it, but after I took it off charge this morning it was down by 15% within an hour.
The drain has levelled off throughout the day, but it's still much higher than I'm used to. I don't use wireless, and I only have bluetooth turned on if I'm on AC power, so I've just got GSM/3G in normal use (and get good reception at home and work).
The fact that the battery drain changed so much in such a short period of time, with no obvious change in usage or software leads me to believe the battery itself is beginning to fail. I usually expect a good couple of years from a mobile battery before I see noticable drops in charge, but that's 6 months.
Is it possible the HD2 batteries are not very well made, resulting in some people having great battery life, and others complaining that it's crap?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had read that some of the HD2 batterys were a bit dodgy as they were siphoning off the batterys from different manufacturers and as a result some are remarkably better than others.
elyl said:
OK, I've had my HD2 since November, and I've never understood people who complained about poor battery life. I've consistently been able to go up to 2 days before charging. On the odd occasion, I've left TomTom running and it's drained the battery right down, but overall I've been pretty content with the battery performance.
Until about a week ago. I thought I'd maybe forgot to stick it on charge overnight the odd time, but now realise the battery has started to drain much more rapidly.
I did not change ROM, or install any additional software. I made sure nothing was running that shouldn't be in Task Manager. All of a sudden, I'm getting quite random battery drain - up to 20% drop in an hour. I put up with it for a week, thinking it just needed a hard-reset, so last night I decided to flash a new ROM. I updated to the latest radio ROM, and flashed bobsbbq's latest ROM thinking that would sort it, but after I took it off charge this morning it was down by 15% within an hour.
The drain has levelled off throughout the day, but it's still much higher than I'm used to. I don't use wireless, and I only have bluetooth turned on if I'm on AC power, so I've just got GSM/3G in normal use (and get good reception at home and work).
The fact that the battery drain changed so much in such a short period of time, with no obvious change in usage or software leads me to believe the battery itself is beginning to fail. I usually expect a good couple of years from a mobile battery before I see noticable drops in charge, but that's 6 months.
Is it possible the HD2 batteries are not very well made, resulting in some people having great battery life, and others complaining that it's crap?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am precisely in the same boat. I am using my battery now for around 6 months. Since last week the battery seems to drain much faster than before. I am still analyzing what could be the reason, but I think it's the battery itself that is getting weak - far too early.
elyl said:
OK, I've had my HD2 since November, and I've never understood people who complained about poor battery life. I've consistently been able to go up to 2 days before charging. On the odd occasion, I've left TomTom running and it's drained the battery right down, but overall I've been pretty content with the battery performance.
Until about a week ago. I thought I'd maybe forgot to stick it on charge overnight the odd time, but now realise the battery has started to drain much more rapidly.
I did not change ROM, or install any additional software. I made sure nothing was running that shouldn't be in Task Manager. All of a sudden, I'm getting quite random battery drain - up to 20% drop in an hour. I put up with it for a week, thinking it just needed a hard-reset, so last night I decided to flash a new ROM. I updated to the latest radio ROM, and flashed bobsbbq's latest ROM thinking that would sort it, but after I took it off charge this morning it was down by 15% within an hour.
The drain has levelled off throughout the day, but it's still much higher than I'm used to. I don't use wireless, and I only have bluetooth turned on if I'm on AC power, so I've just got GSM/3G in normal use (and get good reception at home and work).
The fact that the battery drain changed so much in such a short period of time, with no obvious change in usage or software leads me to believe the battery itself is beginning to fail. I usually expect a good couple of years from a mobile battery before I see noticable drops in charge, but that's 6 months.
Is it possible the HD2 batteries are not very well made, resulting in some people having great battery life, and others complaining that it's crap?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You said it yourself, the batterys performance gets worse for every day and should be replaced with a new one every 6 month, atleast.
Some feedbacks in other threads pointed out a possible and unforeseeable cause, the microsd card.
Try removing it and check battery drain, if that's the culprit try formatting it before throwing it away.
Also, as I stated in at least 3 other threads p) it's always a good idea to check battery drain with battclock, it should be 4mA during standby, any big variations from that mean something's draining while phone should be sleeping instead.
steffen1337 said:
You said it yourself, the batterys performance gets worse for every day and should be replaced with a new one every 6 month, atleast.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
er... are you for real? poor iphone owners should send back their devices for servicing twice a year then
steffen1337 said:
You said it yourself, the batterys performance gets worse for every day and should be replaced with a new one every 6 month, atleast.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah mate, that's laughable. I've never had a mobile phone battery go within 6 months. Are you trying to jump start your car with your batteries or something?

Battery life experiences

Just starting a thread for battery life experience as people use the phone. Mine is pretty freakin' great right now, but I'll post some initial results after I get home later tonight. I finished charging to 100% almost 2 hours ago, and with just a bit of usage (maybe 10 minutes total screen on time) I still am at 100%. Though, we know that it sometimes takes a long time to drop from 100% to 90%.
What are other people's experiences? Please post display on time in battery stats, as that gives a good feel for how much you're actually using the phone.
Unplugged it at 6:30am with a full charge.
Took it to work, I put it in airplane mode when I'm in the building because I don't get a signal and don't want the radio searching for a signal and wasting power. GPS/Bluetooth/Wifi are all turned off. I turn the radio back on when I'm out of the building, and I'd estimate it's been on 2 hours since it was charged.
Have watched the latest episode of Family Guy and started on the latest episode of Dexter using Rock Player.
I estimate the screen has been on for about 4 hours. I can only estimate because I had to plug the phone in to transfer a file a couple hours ago which reset the stats.
I've downloaded and installed about 20-30 apps today over 3G networks.
At the current time of 3:15pm (8 hours 45 minutes since full charge), I have 30% of the battery left.
I think you're supposed to do a full charge and full discharge so the phone can "calibrate" the battery meter, which I have not done yet, but so far I'm very pleased. Puts my 2 yr old G1's battery life to shame...
Yeah it sounds decent. A bit better than my Nexus One was.
I would say it is on par with the Nexus One. Should get you through the day but you will be plugging it in at night. It is comparable to most android phones.
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App
Without explaining a bunch of boring details, it's definitely better than my N1 so far. Charged it up right after getting it from the UPS guy today for a couple of hours while I took a nap.
We'll just have to wait and see after a few days of use, charges and discharges. Looking great so far, though!
Played around with it at the store today, came in at 3 p.m after school. The demo unit was already at 45% when I got it, surfed the web for about half an hour, downloaded an app, watched YouTube for about 5 minutes and the phone died at about 4:30.
Not really impressed, but its an Android phone. Hopefully it can be better, the good thing is that the web browser is a lot faster than my iPhone 4. That's what keeping me on returning the iPhone, and it starts up a lot faster as well. Took about 20 seconds to boot up after the phone died on me, and the rep charged it.
Definitely will be needing to charge it every night.
3 hr bike ride with music playing used about %50 of the bat. So its way better then my G1 but not as good as my Iphone 2g.
I'm getting much better battery life then I was getting on the G1....love this phone
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App
How about someone download Battery Left widget and tell us what it says.
Will vary by user but it will be more accurate with remaining battery life.
So far the battery life on mine is terrible compared to my nexus one, and that was terrible as well.
I woke up 10am, phone on the charger, took it off, around 2pm made two phone calls. Went to work at 5pm, phone's battery was at 23% around 7pm. My nexus one around that point would be at ~50%. So far I'm not impressed with this phone, more work could have went into it.
I loaded a few webpages... did a video chat with someone on Fring for about a minute (lol), downloaded a few apps, had a few phone calls... one lasting about 10 minutes... and after being off the charger for 5 and a half hours.. i'm at 44 percent power... this is my first android device so I'm not sure if that's good or bad
Have you all that are reporting poor battery life done the full-charge/full-discharge thing to "calibrate" the battery meter. I'm not sure that it really matters, but I'm assuming it does since battery info is one of the things you can wipe in the recovery roms.
I'm still extremely pleased with my battery life.
I got the phone yesterday and played with it right out of the box till it was at 5% battery... i plugged it in lastnight and let it fully charge and i unplugged it at 6:15am this mornining... i used the gps to get to work to see how it was... i have watched videos on youtube, gone on the internet, checked and sent emails and texts, downloaded some apps... and played around with it today... i had it plugged into the computer thru usb for approx 5 min tops to set up some media files... and as of now at 3:33pm my battery is at 50%
Opening mine at 930/10pm, heavily used it to burn it to 0% and did that by 12/1230am. Charged it to 100% by 330am. Played with it a bit then went to bed, left it unplugged. Woke up today and burned it to 0% by 330pm. It's charging right now and we'll see how it goes throughout tonight. It will get a bit of pocket time so I'll get a real feel for the battery life.
Took mine off the charger at 7am throught the day had 20 incoming/outgoing calls all lasted at least 2or 3 mins each, downloaded a couple of apps, checked facebook and twitter a few times. showed it off to some friends and now it is almost 5:00 and still have 60% battery, so I am impressed especially since I had a G1 before this
Jorsher said:
Have you all that are reporting poor battery life done the full-charge/full-discharge thing to "calibrate" the battery meter. I'm not sure that it really matters, but I'm assuming it does since battery info is one of the things you can wipe in the recovery roms.
I'm still extremely pleased with my battery life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
They aren't changing them long enough. Lithium ion batteries don't have to be trained like the older style ones. Other other culprit could be the batterystats.bin but you can't access or delete that without root. Jut discharge the battery till it powers off and charge for 4-6 hrs.
charged mine last night while tethered to my laptop browsing - took it off about midnight
this morning the alarm sound (pre-alarm 5 minutes, full alarm for 10 mins and never woke me btw), spent about 2 hours+ talking, browsed the web for maybe 15 minutes, downloaded a few apps from the market and ran a few quadrant benchmark test - it's now almost 6:00PM and it's at 40% -
i'm happy with that - and from experience with my MT3G and the vibrant, battery life should improve with some cycling or useage
sino8r said:
Jut discharge the battery till it powers off and charge for 4-6 hrs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
leave it on the charger for 4-6 hours after its full or just to charge it from empty to full?
I'm very glad to hear about the excellent battery life. A friend of mine has even reported his phone being on for a full day and still having battery life left.
People make sure that you charge up your battery fully before turning the phone on. It's better to be safe than sorry. I know people say it does not matter but otherwise the battery won't be accurate if you just turn it on out of the box.
10 hours and some change later after normal phone usage and I had to charge it... I'm impressed to say the least

Categories

Resources