Database Users

Is your 4G a battery killer?

I tested the following:
Turning 4G on in a full bar area and letting it stand idle for one hour.
I lost about 20% battery in one single hour.
The phone had the screen off, wifi off and all apps but the essential ones off.
On 3G i lost about 5%/hour.
4G is supposed to be an "always-on" service with such a battery drainage?
I was sure it was supposed to be a power efficient service, like WiFi or at least like 3G.
Note the phone also gets a little hot after one hour if being idle with 4G on.
I wonder if other people are seeing the same results?

clubtech said:
4G is supposed to be an "always-on" service with such a battery drainage? I was sure it was supposed to be a power efficient service, like WiFi or at least like 3G.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ummmm...
Wow...
ummmm...
4g = bad for battery

OK...Thanks!
I really wanted someone else to test this and report back.
Maybe it is just my unit or the ROM that i am using?

clubtech said:
OK...Thanks!
I really wanted someone else to test this and report back.
Maybe it is just my unit or the ROM that i am using?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
LoL sorry brotha' I was just messing around
You gotta admit though, you set yourself up for that one
In all seriousness, 4g is an absolute battery killer! ESPECIALLY if your in an area where you don't get good 4g signal.
If your in a good area and surrounded by 4g then the phone doesn't really have to work at all to keep the signal BUT if your in an area where there's not much 4g signal, like most of America, then it will destroy your battery life (and make your phone hot) because your phone keeps searching for it over and over which chews up the battery. I would ALWAYS keep 4g off unless your downloading something until the 4g becomes more expanded across America. Also download the app battery indicator and make sure you keep track of your battery temperature with it in the status bar. I never let my battery get above 99*F since that will cause permanent damage. In your first post you were talking about losing 20% in an hour while on 4g which would alot of sense since the phone (on 3g) is only slated to get 4-5 hours of talk time, with 4g on always searching for signal the 20% loss seems about right.
Sorry again for messing with you earlier

np.
I am with full 4g bar when testing, so it is not a signal issue.

Yeah, it's a huge battery drainer. I forgot I turned it on in town, took a nap and had 85% battery left, fell asleep and took a 2 hour nap, woke up and it was dead dead mofo dead.
So yeah, it's a battery killer.

Good thing you can barely use the main advertising feature of this phone.

roybotnik said:
Good thing you can barely use the main advertising feature of this phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
LOL A+
stupid10char

[Q] EVO heating up....wtf???

Has anyone experienced their EVO heating up? Since the kick stand is metal or sumn, it gets super warm, enough to make u wonder how hot will it get. I'm a noob so I'm not sure if this is normal.
any feedback or suggestions will be appreciated.

Yes this is natural. My battery will top out at 110f with normal use. The kickstands does a nice job of heating up. I wouldn't worry.
Sent from my PC36100

It's normal. A lot of GPS use also gets it pretty warm pretty quick. Don't worry.

It is normal but you should probably not use it when it gets so hot, let it sit for 5 min and it should drop below 95F.

My evo would also get pretty warm after normal phone operations and would get extremely hot when using gps. My phone was so bad and so hot that it would begin randomly rebooting and wouldn't stop until I put the phone next to the ac for a few minutes or removed the battery for a few minutes. It made my phone reboot a minimum of 10 times a day. I got so frustrated with it that I had to get a replacement and lose my root. Now I'm hoping that stock 2.2 is rooted soon. No problems out of my refurbished EVO so far.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

Mine gets warm fast when trying to find signal, other than that it stays cool.
Oh and wifi tether for two hours straight over 4g made it hit 115°f the other day.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

I have no complaints about this - it stays cool for me throughout. I do remember noticing it got mildly warm a couple of times, but it happens so rarely and it's so unimportant, I didn't bother checking for anything, or even remember what I was doing on it at the time.

Both times I tried to use GPS (Google NAV first then Copilot) my phone got up 130°F and locked up. I had pull the battery and let it cool down. Disappointing at best.

bludragon742 said:
Both times I tried to use GPS (Google NAV first then Copilot) my phone got up 130°F and locked up. I had pull the battery and let it cool down. Disappointing at best.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Woah....130? That's crazy, surprised phone didn't fry. It'll probably have to get hotter than that. As long as the phone doesn't mess up, I will continue to enjoy this phone.

My phone generally only gets really hot in the car, when I'm using gps. Luckily I use a vent holder for it, so I just turn the air on low, and the phone is cool to the touch when I get to where I'm going. Don't know what I'll do in winter though...
Sent from my blah blah blah blah

Mine starts to overheat when the sun hits it when sitting on my passenger seat in my car. The phone is black, and my case is black. It's going to absorb the suns energy.

mine got really hot to the point where the led would flash green then red....135 or 145 degrees Fahrenheit I forget
I was only charging my phone for maybe 15-20 minutes
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

spencelk said:
mine got really hot to the point where the led would flash green then red....135 or 145 degrees Fahrenheit I forget
I was only charging my phone for maybe 15-20 minutes
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine does this too and as soon as I unplug it the led turns off. Think it might be the overclock. I had mine clocked at 1.2 and scaled it down to 1.9 due to phone locking up and rebooting. Sometimes I have to wipe cache and davlik cache and reflash firmware and kernel along with all my mods due the phone not going past the splash screen.

Are you running ota froyo? Ive heard alot of people complain about heat issue with it.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

mchunu said:
. I got so frustrated with it that I had to get a replacement and lose my root. Now I'm hoping that stock 2.2 is rooted soon. No problems out of my refurbished EVO so far.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Guess u didn't want to get yelled at for posting elsewhere about root so you felt the need to slip it in here there was no need to mention as it has nothing to do with OP. Root will happen sooner or later grow up and wait like the others who are waiting no need to toss it in unrelated topics...we are all getting sick and tired of people *****ing about not having root! You probably made your comment up just so you could add your little remark about not having root!
Back on topic.....you guys have to remember there is a 1 ghz processor in our bad ass phones so there will be some heat unlike a computer there is not any fans or big heatsinks that will absorb the heat so with heavy use or game playing its gonna get hot plain and simple its not a defect so nothing to worry about until it starts melting in your hand....then I would say something is wrong...

Yeah, mine is running at 40 C all the time, upwards of 60 if I use the GPS.

You know...I actually hadn't noticed....and I use my Evo a lot. Only time I've really noticed it overheating is when I use WiFi tether but that's expected.
Sent from my Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Evo!

Mine usually only gets hot when I leave it sitting somewhere without proper ventilation or when I'm riding in the passenger seat and it gets some sun. Otherwise, its pretty uncommon unless I'm really running everything at once. If you have all your radios running at max (downloading large files, checking your location on Google maps, tethering, listening to pandora through bluetooth, all at the same time) then its going to happen no matter what because all the phone's components are pretty powerful and aren't ventilated like computers due to size constraints. I know the kickstand gets hot when the phone warms up, but as long as you don't see the overheat lights, and you don't let it stay hot for extended periods of time, there should be absolutely no danger. I believe there are failsafes if it overheats for too long, but I don't know. My G1 used to get hot a lot, and it was no where near as powerful. Those were the days...

This damn issue was the fact I returned my Evo 4G to Sprint to get it replaced. The Phone was getting so hot to the point the screen was hot towards the bottom of the phone, the back was hot, and the phone kept doing restarts. My phone im Pretty sure had a defect. Not even a week after rooting thru the unrevoked method, I installed Wifi tethering App and **** went down the drain no later then a few days after. The phone began heating up and going thru 15 minute boot loops at a time. The only way to stop it was to pull the battery and let the phone cool down. The phone had to be in optimal Tower range with strong signal strength to avoid this overheating during data sessions. If i was in areas with three bars or lil lower and began running youtube, I could not go thru 4 or 5 youtube videos in a row without the ****er restarting. It was annoying and frustrating. I got a feeling something got ****ed up along the way after rooting and installing Wifi tether. I realized using Wifi tether heated the phone up real damn bad. Something must have got fried or the way the phone processed data after that was just crapping out.
So yeah my issue was way worse becuz of this overheating

I am having the same problem as you drewtorrespr. I rooted a while back using the Toast method and everything ran fine until 2 days ago. Now it seems everyday around mid day my phone heats up and starts rebooting. Not sure if its the ROM ver or hardware defect or rogue program.
How do I flash the original factory ROM back on the phone so I can take to sprint and have them look at it or does it matter. Will they just reload it for me ya think?

3rd day with phone, 2 self resets already

Ok, so what happenned on the 2 instances that this happenned was all of a sudden I lost cellular signal and the phone made a sound and the signal bars switched to a circular sign with the line across it. I put the phone in airplane mode but nothing happenned, within a min phone restarted it self...
The phone is stock. No root or anything like that.
Ps... using the keyboard to type this, and its much easier compard to my old droids kb.
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App

Weird. Haven't experienced that before myself. I have had it lose signal and display the circle with a line through it but it's not very often and only for a second or two.

Just did it again when I went into pandora. I realized its actually not resetting, but the phone freezes up and everything reloads. Including signal and 3G... the screen shutz off and you can't turn it back on until it reloads
Sent from Epic 4G

I had the same problem with mine. I exchanged it for another one and have had no problems since
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App

Damn. Just when I get it the way I wanted it... Ugh...
What exactly was yours doing big jim?
Sent from Epic 4G

Your second thread mention "problems" you have with your phone. Go to a Sprint store.

I agree exchange it urs must be defective. A couple others have hd same issue.
Sent from my Epic 4G

I had the same problem on my original Epic. I had three problems in total on that phone.
Samsung's crap coding that caused the phone to not sleep. (fixed after 2nd update)
The phone would randomly restart itself
During calls, the screen would freeze while illuminated. The call wasn't interrupted, but aftwards I had to pull the battery.
In the end I had to exchange the phone for another. Only problem was, the new phone had that couple millimeter gap with the slider. Sprint said it wasn't enough for third exchange though.

Man, this sucks... Just when I put all the apps I wanted on it and got it running the way I want it...
I'm gonna give it 1 more week see what happens, then return perhaps for another epic. I'm pretty sure I'll be sticking to the epic though, i really like the camera capabilities of the phone.
I'm actually going to run 4 tests this week
I'm going to leave the phone untouched from 10:00 to 21:00 and note the percentage in battery with juice defender on/off and also noLED on/off, see what happens... to make it even, i'll just leave the phone in my car, and it won't be used except it's usual email checking/texts/missed calls etc.
my droid unused for that period of time usually was around 80%. it was running a custom rom with 1 ghz kernel as well, so same power requirements i'd say. except epic has a bigger battery.

Battery is pretty bad with the Epic but Im not surprised at all about that. I have about 50% right now with heavy texting, a few phone calls, and listening to music. 8hrs unplugged. I think it would make it to 14-15 hrs easy with heavy use.
Phone calls kill the battery the most I believe.
And I'm using Juice Defender.

Mine was dying with heavy texting, some GPS and browsing within 6-7 hours, no phone calls....
I did a little test today.
When I'm at the police academy my phone is in my car from 1000 to 2100. My rooted 1ghz droid would be at 80% by 2100. it'd get it's regular share of texting/emails and all that I couldn't look at until 2100.
I did the same thing today with the Epic, with juice defender, it was at 79%, so pretty much exactly the same...
tomorrow I'll do the same test with JD off and see if it makes a diff

HI
razorseal said:
Man, this sucks... Just when I put all the apps I wanted on it and got it running the way I want it...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Use titanium backup and u can restore all ur apps n settings in a jif
Sent from my Epic 4G

I have just installed Juice Defender (free version) and using it as installed. I'll see if it helps. I have a question about the status of TRAFFIC, it is listed as "Leave Data/WiFi enabled while >50KB/15s", what does this mean? I can guess that JD will leave the Data connection ON, even if it is scheduled OFF, if the phone is sending/receiving data at a rate greater than 50KB/15s. Is this close?
Thanks
arewin

othan1 said:
Weird. Haven't experienced that before myself. I have had it lose signal and display the circle with a line through it but it's not very often and only for a second or two.
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Click to collapse
Mine has been doing this every once in awhile. Even in a good signal area, its like the radio randomly decides to reset. I'm currently trying to see if its a software or hardware thing.

Sadly the modem was backported from the samsung moment. It has only partof it power managment system in it it will befixed swhen froyo comes
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App

I am having the same problem with my phone suddenly. If I have multiple apps open, such as radio, browser, and facebook at the same time, it seems to cause it to reset itself. It's not a full hard reset, but more of a soft one, screen goes black and everything starts up as if the phone was just turned on.
Maybe it's time for a replacement?

HTC Shift Keyboard has the Desire/iPhone Cursor Magnifying

So glad I traded in my Epic today for the Shift. This just topped it off.
Word.

Moved to general

You make a good point OP. I'm curious why you moved from the Epic? I'm actually contemplating going the other way around although I might give the Shift a second chance. It's starting to grow on me so as long as I can get around the battery dying in 4 hours thing.

silex said:
You make a good point OP. I'm curious why you moved from the Epic? I'm actually contemplating going the other way around although I might give the Shift a second chance. It's starting to grow on me so as long as I can get around the battery dying in 4 hours thing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As a current owner of all 3 sprint 4G phones DONT DO IT dont move to the epic stick to one of the Evo's if the wobbly keyboard of the epic doesnt get you the laggy RFS (which can be corrected now) filesystem will, or lack of official froyo (yea the leak works great but lacks the polish feel) you also have the lack of girth it just feels like its going to break in your hands and the screen isnt quite as bright its vivid but only gets about 75% as bright as the evo.
I have some side by side shots if you would like to see em.

^ It's okay, but thanks for the offer. I played with all 3 in the Sprint store for an hour before making a decision. I'm just having second thoughts, because I'm missing a larger screen, but I'm hoping to get around it.

Ok, I'm not familiar with this feature. What is it?

When you are typing a box, try holding down your finger. You will see a magnified popup either above or below your finger. At this point you can see easier so you can slide the cursor around effortlessly.

silex said:
When you are typing a box, try holding down your finger. You will see a magnified popup either above or below your finger. At this point you can see easier so you can slide the cursor around effortlessly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just used your instructions to try it out. That's awesome
Sent from my HTC Evo Shift 4G

Yeah I found that nifty little feature my 2nd day owning the phone. It is so awesome, just another notch on the cool wall for this phone. Gmail still has the old select text feature but I think I can live with that haha.
Sent from my PG06100 using XDA App

silex said:
You make a good point OP. I'm curious why you moved the Epic? I'm actually contemplating going the other way around although I might give the Shift a second chance. It's starting to grow on me so as long as I can get around the battery dying in 4 hours thing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I nearly returned the phone for the same reason. I did a factory reset, then charged the phone until the light turned green, then unplugged and turned the phone off and recharged until the light turned green, then unplugged till the light turned off and then plugged in again until the light turned green.
It took about an hour each time, but now my battery is working great. I am only adding one app each cycle and will watch my battery usage.
Got 13:41 on my last charge! Give it a try.

silex said:
You make a good point OP. I'm curious why you moved from the Epic? I'm actually contemplating going the other way around although I might give the Shift a second chance. It's starting to grow on me so as long as I can get around the battery dying in 4 hours thing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There must have been something wrong with your setup. I'm 36 hours without a charge and at 30% battery left. I'm not doing anything different than I ever have. I've never had an android phone last this long not even my Optimus S which I thought was the best on battery.
I'm guessing you had something running at 100% cpu in the backround. I noticed I had a download hang up in the market and that killed my phone in a few short hours the first day I got it. I didnt know it was stuck trying to download until the next time I went into the market.

silex said:
^ It's okay, but thanks for the offer. I played with all 3 in the Sprint store for an hour before making a decision. I'm just having second thoughts, because I'm missing a larger screen, but I'm hoping to get around it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is a very handy feature...good looking out.

i think the battery life is great, i'm getting between 13 and 15 hours a day and the battery is still at 35% when i plug it in.
i have Sync set to one hour: 2 gmail accounts, facebook and weather.
WiFi is always turned on (and connected about 80% of the time)
Bluetooth is always on and connected to my headset
4G is off (don't live in a 4G market)
GPS is off (turned it off to test 3G speeds and never turned it back on, i don't think it does much in th way of impacting battery life)
and my brightness is set to Auto.
i'm sure i could get more life out of it but i can't justify turning off all the phones features to do so.
this thing is night and day better than my Evo when it comes to battery life, i bought the Seidio 3500mah battery for my Evo and it only gets about 19 hours on a good day, stock battery i was lucky to get 8 hours.
haha funny thing though, i have my Evo on me for testing roms and such, i'm at 40 hours and it's at 27% on the extended battery, thats with everything but WiFi turned off and i hardly touch it during the day.

ttown said:
I nearly returned the phone for the same reason. I did a factory reset, then charged the phone until the light turned green, then unplugged and turned the phone off and recharged until the light turned green, then unplugged till the light turned off and then plugged in again until the light turned green.
It took about an hour each time, but now my battery is working great. I am only adding one app each cycle and will watch my battery usage.
Got 13:41 on my last charge! Give it a try.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Happy to report my battery woes are over! I was getting 4-6 hours out of the box, but then yesterday I did a hard reset with PRL+Profile update and that seemed to have done it! I will try power cycling it as suggested to help even more!

R800x 2.3.3. battery life absolutely deathly

Okay so I posted here a week or so ago about how my Xperia Play was epicly failing....it was force closing everything and dying in just hours.
So I factory reset and used Titanium to restore all of my apps and stuff...and so far the crawling speed/force closing has for the most part abated (opening up texts and contacts still sometimes takes forever or force closes)
but the battery issue remains. My battery is absolute garbage at the moment. It drains by 10 percent per half hour if being used or even more!! And it gets hot constantly, and obviously at that time it really sheds the power and dies quickly.
If I'm CHARGING the phone WHILE using it heavily, it WON'T power ABOVE the % it started at!! It stays constant or goes down!!
I'm not sure what to do. Should I let the phone die, keep it off, and charge it while off till its 100%?
Or maybe my phone is approaching the situation it was a week ago...I constantly check the running apps and its the usual suspects, nothing crazy. I had to delete official facebook app because it almost ALWAYS lagged and oftentimes force closed.
It says cell standby is using 40%, wi-fi using about 22%, voice calls 17%, phone idle 15%, and dialer 14%
What happened to my phone? Why is it such a clusterf*ck lately? Any ideas/advice?

Are you leaving wifi on because that will really suck the battery down? Also do you live in an area with bad signal? Put it in airplane mode and see if the battery still discharges as fast.
Sent from my R800x using XDA App

007shark said:
Are you leaving wifi on because that will really suck the battery down? Also do you live in an area with bad signal? Put it in airplane mode and see if the battery still discharges as fast.
Sent from my R800x using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My r800x dies in 6 hours whether it's on airplane mode or not. I've re calibrated the battery like 5 times so far, and it just won't get better. I'm regretting moving to verizon to this. I should just get a sim card and go back to my HTC Inspire. I can leave the r800x in idle with the screen off, while in airplane mode and it will still die in 6 hours. It doesn't even last a whole day of work. Mine's also rooted. I need some serious help with this phone.

Turn off wifi.
If you have it on it will search for wifi networks all of the time (unless you're home and connected to your own wifi) and it will suck your battery dry.

I don't even use wifi. I don't have access to the router at home, and my data is turned off when I'm not using it.

Perhaps you have a bad battery? Maybe replacing that will solve the issue.

It could be. Every time I try to check my battery's health, no matter what app I use, or even if I do it from the service menu it reads at "unknown". One app says that my phone doesn't even have a battery stat service, or something along those lines. I was considering just buying one of those mugen batteries for my phone, considering that I brought the issue to verizon's attention, and they told me they were gonna send me a replacement battery, but I never got it. This was all about 2 months ago though.

wow, sounds bad. mine will last all day, its an r800x on 2.3.3 as well but i can use it like normal, play about a hour of games on it, talk on it a lot, use wifi and 3g and do some average surfing and it will last at least 24-30 hours...
i'm thinking it must be a bad battery as well

Im running 2.3.3 verizon from the FTF and my r800x would last almost 3days, and thats with texting/talking/surfing using 3g and playing a shyt load of sonic . I would replace the battery with a genuine Sony replacement, dont ever buy a ebay knock off ! Furthermore, I don't believe apps that check your battery health are accurate at all, so dont waste your time.
Best way to check (imo) - Before you charge it up, let it go to 0% and die. Boot recovery and wipe the battery stats, turn the phone on and charge to full. After its fully charged, let it sit 10-15 mins on charge. Then pull of the charge and use normally, if it still dies fast, replace the battery.
If this idea was already posted sorry for double post

How do I go into recovery? My boot loader is still locked. As much as I want to unlock it to put abc xperia play rom on, I don't want to pay 25 bucks.
Sent from my R800x using XDA App

[email protected] said:
How do I go into recovery? My boot loader is still locked. As much as I want to unlock it to put abc xperia play rom on, I don't want to pay 25 bucks.
Sent from my R800x using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You cannot boot into recovery without an unlocked bootloader
Sent from my R800x using Tapatalk

I swapped mine out for similar issues. The replacement doesn't have the same issues yet but I haven't put a single app on it. I can't say that adding apps caused it before because I remember it similarly not getting anywhere when charging while using. I also experienced it dropping while charging but it turned out to be a that the MTP device wasn't starting on the PC so it showed as plugged in and charging even though it wasn't (check the Device Manager). My Alienware M11x actually supports charging devices off that particular USB port when it is turned off so it was a bit hard to figure out when it seemed to charge some times and not others.

So I got a new battery. Battery life oz still terrible, phone still can't detect battery health.
Not sure why, but my battery voltages are higher than 3.6 :/
Sent from my R800x using XDA App

Hate to tell you but it sounds like your Play is defective.
The only way it would always get hot like that is if it was always running, that would be mainly driven by being in a REALLY bad service area that its always searching. I have a boatload of games etc on mine and my battery life varies from 2 days to 3/4 of a day depending where I am. Heck my battery life varies as to whether I leave my phone on my desk at work or on the shelf above me (lasts longer on the shelf).
But the fact you said that even in airplane mode it eats the battery, and a new battery didn't do the trick. I would say you got a bad one. Still under warranty I hope?

i'm not entirely sure. I got mine through verizon in august or september of this year. Not sure if Verizon would handle replacing it, since I didn't buy their extended warranty. I read somewhere that SE themselves can handle it since it's not a year old yet, but my phone is kinda required for work.