Database Users

Gmail push

When adding a Gmail account, it seems to have a push function. But doesn't this drain the battery? I've been trying to find out what kind of push this is, if its exchange style, or checking the email every 30 secounds, the battery has to be drained quicker than having it to check i.e. every 3 hours?
I cannot find any settings for gmail, where you can choose how often it should check for new mails

arxx said:
When adding a Gmail account, it seems to have a push function. But doesn't this drain the battery? I've been trying to find out what kind of push this is, if its exchange style, or checking the email every 30 secounds, the battery has to be drained quicker than having it to check i.e. every 3 hours?
I cannot find any settings for gmail, where you can choose how often it should check for new mails
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Hi, I have Legend only few days, but when I lived 2 years with HTC Diamond, my experiences were that when I had push enabled, my battery seems to live longer. Maybe it's because the battery is much more drained during onnecting and disconnecting, I don't know. But be everytime connected due to a push seems to be not so bad.

arxx said:
I've been trying to find out what kind of push this is, if its exchange style, or checking the email every 30 secounds, the battery has to be drained quicker than having it to check i.e. every 3 hours?
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By definition, anything that is polling a server for new email every X hours is not using push email.
A proper push email system means that a persistent data connection is opened between your mail application and your mail server, and when new mail arrives at the server it is pushed down to the device. On balance, push email systems will probably use slightly more battery than a polling solution, but probably not enough to worry about.
Regards,
Dave

[Q] What's the best option for push Hotmail without killing the battery?

Coming from a BlackBerry I want my Gmail & Hotmail to push to me instantly. Gmail works as expected, but for Hotmail rather than setup a POP3 account to automatically check mail every so many minutes, thus draining the battery, I decided to set up another Gmail account and let it pull my Hotmail for me:
(Can't post links, Google "Android Central Using Gmail Your Own Personal Push Mail Server")
This should do Gmail push for my Hotmail thus saving battery but more often than not I am NOT notified of new Hotmail unless I push the refresh button, putting me right back at square one with no push and battery drain by refreshing all of the time.
So the question - is Gmail checking Hotmail my best bet or should I try ActiveSync? My understanding is Android's implementation of ActiveSync is a major battery hog being that it is always connected to provide said push services, so I've stayed away from it however my current setup doesn't seem to be terribly optimized. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Hotmail does push now through activesync.
Google it. I cannot post urls.

Right, my question is how is the Hotmail/ActiveSync push performance and more importantly how does it affect battery life? My understanding is its pretty bad, was hoping someone here has tried it and can tell there experience with it.

i cannot really confirm it... but since enabling hotmail push for me personally... i cant even make it past 1 day with a full charge.... even a full charge plus a half at work for the remainder of the day barely gets me to 9pm
like i said... i havent confirmed this by turning it off, but quite simply... im blown away by how bad my battery life has become on my galaxy s

SEVEN is a great email app that I'm using that pushes all 4 of my Yahoo, 1 Hotmail, 1 Gmail and 1 AOHell to my phone. It's far better than the stock email app, and I've never tried Moxier Mail that was installed on my Moment before I got the Epic.

ss4rob- the epic does not like people who eat sushi. It will drain your battery when it detects raw fish

exchange [corporate] email sync = useless phone?

hi everyone,
ive been using a slew of custom roms since our lovely heroes got rooted snd on everyone I setup my work email and calendar along w/ my gmail. When using sense roms it didnt seem to be a problem, same battery life/responsiveness with or without it.
I'm now using CM6, flashing the dailies actually. and after one flash my phone was extremely laggy and the power control widget wasnt working so i wiped, and it was running flawless, fantastic battery life to boot, best i ever had.
I then decided to resetup my exchange email, and boom the phone is garbage. laggy beyond normal use and watching the battery percentage drop from 94 to 89 in the matter of minutes, i chalked it up to it resycning the emails, so i waited it out about an hour, battery life was 67%...so that pinpointed my culprit...
even after setting all my accounts not to sync [i didnt see an option to pinpoint 1], i get the same responsiveness from my phone. It's only after removing it from my accounts and sync section the phone returns to normal.
ps i've only set the calendar (not contacts) to sync, and 3 days of email syncing every hour (longest delay, the sense roms let you pick longer or manual)
anyone have any thoughts? and please dont say use touchdown, i tried it and its not for me. thanks for reading.

Exchange Sync on mine drains the battery to, if its set to PUSH email, if you set it at an interval - even 10 minutes its not so bad. I have mine set to 1 hour and 1 day (About 100 emails a day), so it checks it 6-7 times through the work day, and then I can manually refresh when I am at home. I wish I could set a schedule on it - I don't need the exchange email between 8-5 because the people who email me are 30 feet away and they usually just yell after they send the email. After 5 if it switched to push on its own, it would be awesome.
That being said, the phone is still completely usable with exchange setup, just a battery whore.
EDIT:
I have noticed that even though it is set to an interval, if you are in the email app, or open it it seems to force a sync regardless of settings. I wonder if it does this in the background. I have never paid close enough attention to see.

thanks for the reply, good to know im not the only one whose corporate email sync is a battery hog.
in the mean time i've actually found a bit of a workaround i figure i share for anyone else in my situation. since i barely checked my email but used the calendar alot. I downloaded Google Calendar Sync software on my work pc and set it up to do a 1 way sync and put my Outlook calendar on my google calendar, which syncs with my phone obviously.
So far so good, but i hope the exchange sync issues dont go unnoticed within the CM6 dev team.

My Quest of finding a Solution to Battery Drain and some funny stuffs

I have got my galaxy S2 for a week now. I absolutely love the phone. Just that the battery problem is killing me. I only manage to get half day of usage for the phone. Then I started reading infinite number of threads on xda on battery issue. I basically tried every possible methods:
flashing so many roms (on decided to stay on KF2 right now),
deleting all widgets(could be),
root the phone and install titanium backup to delete a lot of software which ppl
classified as the source of the drain(could be),
disable fast dormancy(dun see the difference),
disable push email and sync(could be),
using advance task killer to kill app every hr (dun work),
juice defender(dun work)...
etc etc...
SOMEHOW, my battery drain issue STOPPED yesterday!!! I still dunno what exactly is causing it to stop draining. But I DID find out a pattern, when we go to the battery plot section, if the phone shows a solid "Awake" bar, then the battery drains very fast.
So I started trying very possible way to stop the phone being "awake", the above methods I marked as cound be are the ones that I think can actually help. Using advance task killer does make a "segmented awake bar" for a few minutes, but it becomes a solid bar soon after, so no use (i found "clean memory" function comes with the phone better than ATK). Deleting widgets wont stop the phone being awake but it certainly makes my phone feeling lighter and faster. Then I rooted the phone, and start using titanium backup to delete ( i cant just freeze with free version) the possible softwares, e.g the hubs, wifi-sharing, softwaire updates. Then all in a sudden, the phone tries to sleep!!!
For me, I think social hub could be making the phone awake (at least it must be one of them), but I NEED if I need to use the email app that come with the phone for receiving emails from hotmail.
funny stuff starts....
So solve it, I imported my hotmail account to gmail using POP so that I can use gmail app to check hotmail. But then my hotmail and gmail start going crazy...!!
Reason: I did similar setting before in my hotmail account to receive gmails in to my hotmail account. What happens next is... Yes.. I basically created a "loop function" which makes the two accounts keep exchanging emails automatically to one another.. I received 1000+ emails in just a few minutes and it keeps going faster and faster.!!! > < Therefore I wont try this again!!!!
Can someone tell me a solution of getting hotmail emails in other ways besides those stupid apps (e.g android mail) in the android market which basically acts as a bookmark to get you to the hotmail page? MANY THANKS!

One of these might help:
POP your hotmail into a new yahoo mail account and install yahoo mail client.
Set up a new gmail account and POP hotmail into it, use gmail client to read main and this new account.
Figure out whats wrong with your phone that makes samsung stock mail waste juice, I use it for exchange mail and it's just a bit more hungry than what I would have wanted, I get through a heavy usage day just fine.

JuiceDefender surely helps. I'm getting 2 days with medium usage, KE7 stock firmware. Yes, as you said if you have background tasks, that will kill the battery, but just close them if you don't need them. Also disable auto-sync, and let only your email sync.

Thank you kreo, i will try yahoo mail account with ur method!

MAJOR battery drain from Mail app

Dear all
I've only had my SGSII a week or so but have been very unimpressed with the battery life I've been achieving - not even a full working day.
I've been trying to work out what's going on, but this morning things really seemed to come to a head. I'd charge overnight but within an hour and a half of disconnecting the phone almost half the charge had gone & the back of it felt very warm to touch.
Looking at the battery stats and using the Watchdog program it looks like the Samsung Email app is to blame. I also saw the phone was marked as 'awake' much of the time, presumably due to a partial wakelock from the Mail app (battery history in Gingerbread doesn't seem to actually have partial wakelock as a category but this certainly looks like it). I've got three accounts setup in it - 2x Microsoft Exchange and 1x IMAP. Refresh times were initially push (MSEx 1)/manual (MSEx 2)/15 min (IMAP). I've tried changing them all to 15 min or to manual but it doesn't seem to improve matters. In case it is of relevance, the MSEx ones are imposing device & storage encryption as part of their policies (I've no choice in this).
Relevant screenshots below - would be grateful for any thoughts as to how and improve matters!

What firmware are you on? I believe the later ones fix the email app slightly, although I haven't seen any drain as bad as yours.
Another option, if you don't mind flashing a custom ROM, would be to install VillainROM 1.4, and use the Villain Tweaks app to get the vanilla Android e-mail app. It's what I've done, and it seems to work well!

Thanks for the reply. I'm just on the stock ROM that came with the phone (XWKE7) - both update on the phone and Kies don't report any further update being available for me (UK SIM-free unbranded).
I tried rooting this morning and used TB to freeze some of the Samsung rubbish (hubs, etc.) - however none of this made any difference to battery usage.
I wasn't sure how the stock email app handled MS Exchange accounts that required encryption? The Samsung Mail app isn't that bad, I particularly liked the split pane view - it seems really badly coded though if it's causing this!
Short of a total ROM replacement any other thoughts from anyone?

delete the data from the app
settings/applikations/all/email/ delete or wipe user data (all data).
make a new Mailaccount.

spline1 said:
delete the data from the app
settings/applikations/all/email/ delete or wipe user data (all data).
make a new Mailaccount.
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Thanks - had been looking for this but couldn't find anything under 'Mail' - found it under 'Email' as you mention As soon as I deleted the data it recognised the device encryption policy had been removed and this triggered a decryption of system and external storage. I'll monitor battery usage for a few hours then reinstate the IMAP account and monitor things again before finally restoring the ActiveSync account.

OK definitely some progress so far - only IMAP account added just after charging stopped and battery usage has dramatically improved...
Now going to try adding an MS Exchange account!

OK, so far so good - MS Exchange account added back in and left on overnight...
I wonder if the mistake was when first setting up the account picking the special Samsung 'premium account' option??

OK - I'm now suspicious that it is manual sync setting that is causing the issue - re-added a second Exchange account and put it all to manual - phone almost totally drained in a couple of hours, with the sharp drop occuring just after I added that:
Have tried removing just that account and hope that will do the trick. If so, will then try adding it again but setting a sync time rather than leaving it on manual.

I've switched to touchdown for my corporate ms exchange account (push) instead of the samsung app.
Battery life gone from 7 hours to about 16 hours. I can't believe the native app is so thirsty. (KE7 stock)
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

What's interesting was that I was getting around 16+ hours too with the stock app having an MS Exchange account (on push peak times and 15 min other times) an IMAP on 15 min and a few Gmail accounts. It seemed to be adding the 2nd Exchange account on manual sync that sucked the battery life again. Am going to try readding it but paradoxically leaving it on a more frequent sync setting to see how that does.

If i remember correctly, it was observed that the mail app (non gmail) and wifi interact to cause a lovely wakelock, and that it happens with stock and samsung.
Maybe try something like k-9 mail?

Intersting - it certainly seems to behave like a wakelock. As I say though with one account on push and one in 15 min it was working fine - it was only when I tried to add a second exchange account on manual that I started to run into problems. Pretty poor coding on Samsung's part though regardless! Does anyone know the best way to raise these sort of issues with them?

Get in touch with Seven as well they produce the email app. I have mine on push with exchange and no bad battery drains, also I run manual when in the office once again no heavy drainage. I am on VR though.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

alanjrobertson said:
Does anyone know the best way to raise these sort of issues with them?
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In USA, they just introduced this
http://www.facebook.com/SamsungMobileUSA?sk=app_158125230916392
but obviously I doubt we can use this for SGS2 that is not out in the US yet.
You can however say that you are traveling, in the States right now

Thanks for the suggestions, folks - will try them. The @SamsungUK twitter account never seems to reply to any Tweets, but will see if they have a comparable FB page. Have found Seven's website so will get in touch with them too.