Database Users

Sigh. My Evo's Battery Life is Rediculous (not typical)

Fully charged my phone night before last and went to work in the morning (9am). I didn't touch it all day, didn't even turn it on. On my drive home at 5pm it was dead, off.
I plugged it in with the phone off when I got home and saw that it was fully charged a few hours later around 10pm and I booted it up and left it alone. This morning it was dead, off.
Looking at the apps that take up my battery doesn't work because it doesn't retain information what happened to the phone prior to the last reboot. Not sure what to do. My awake time matches my standby time exactly. It's obviously a 100% awake time problem but what's triggering this?
I'm on Fresh .3 with absolutely no other mods. I don't think I have any apps that ping outside servers. So what the ****!?
EDIT:
lulz, I just realized I haven't been even able to use the phone in 3 days due to this issue

Something is eating your battery obviously.
Restore to stock and see if you have the same issues.

Bielinsk said:
Something is eating your battery obviously.
Restore to stock and see if you have the same issues.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's a PITA. This is a clean fresh .3 rom install with only logmein, dropbox and couple non-online games installed. Why is this phone such ****ing fail right now.

Have you removed the Favorites widget? Doing that stopped all battery drain problems for me. Just delete the widget.

First thing to check is if you have a sufficient cellular signal. If you are getting a weak signal it will cause poor battery life. If cell signal strength is not your problem then it is definitely something you have installed on it eating away at your battery. That said check/do the following:
1) Check how frequently you have your accounts syncing
2) Before the phone dies look in your battery use to see what's eating your battery
3) Install a task manager/killer (I use Advanced Task Killer)
4) You don't have to do this one but it does help. I use a program called Startup Auditor to disable startup on apps I don't need to run when the phone first boots (you'd be surprised how many are in there).

cbuc1125 said:
Have you removed the Favorites widget? Doing that stopped all battery drain problems for me. Just delete the widget.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
delete it completely or remove it from one of the home panels?

the "time without signal" workarounds seem to prove the most effective for me. in addition, reduce background usage and automatic update frequencies as best as you can.
according to this thread [http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=709768] (and link within), HTC has acknowledged some issues and is preparing to deploy a few fixes.

You are running someone else's ROM, there could be a problem with the radio, or a problem with the way it was loaded.
If you are in an area where you don't get signal, you are going to drain the battery, and FAST.
Do you have 4g on but not in a 4g area?

I am...
fully rooted and have fresh .3 as well. I am getting over 30hrs with moderate use and the last hour of that I had everything on to purposely run it down to dead. (was doing a toastch recommeded battery meter calibration).
Took my phone off the charger last night at 7:30 pm. It's 2:23pm and I have 31% left. I have Wifi, BT, and Background apps with auto sync turned on.
I would say you might be experiencing the Motorola cell tower problem. HTC has confirmed that the EVO is not playing well with cell towers that have motorola transmitters. It is causing the phone to use more energy to dial in the tower.
To be sure...
1. Set all apps and widgets to manual update or update once a day.
2. Get rid of the people app or widget from any home screen.
3. Go into Gtalk and uncheck auto sign in. Then sign out when you exit the program.
4. charge the phone until the green light comes on. Don't use a battery meter. The second the green light comes on, go into recovery and wipe the battery stats. Reboot the phone and run it until the battery dies and will not longer power the phone. This does nothing for the battery but does recalibrate the internal battery meter.
5. For maximum life...turn off: background data, WiFi, BT, and Mobile networks when not using. keep screen at 1/2 brightness.
If I do the above and manually update mail, weather, social apps, etc... and only turn radios on when I need them, I can get 40 hrs. out of my EVO and this is under moderate to high moderate use.
One other thing....plug your phone in for 10 minutes. Then unplug it and go into immediate stand by for like 30 minutes. Go to settings>about phone>battery>battery use>cell standby. Time without signal should be very low....anything over 10-15% and I'd suspect that if you did everything in 1-5, you have a towers issue robbing your battery.

I was having awake time issues with Fresh .3, so I switched to DamageControl, and everything has been great. Unplugged this morning at 7, and I still have 75% battery remaining. Better battery life than the Hero or BlackBerry Tour!

scirio said:
That's a PITA. This is a clean fresh .3 rom install with only logmein, dropbox and couple non-online games installed. Why is this phone such ****ing fail right now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't have any of those problems at all. You probably have a bad battery/phone.

sherman901 said:
I don't have any of those problems at all. You probably have a bad battery/phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i would agree with you but i am having a similar issue and sometimes i get great battery life and other times its just unacceptable. Check out my thread here :http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=709704

scirio said:
Fully charged my phone night before last and went to work in the morning (9am). I didn't touch it all day, didn't even turn it on. On my drive home at 5pm it was dead, off.
I plugged it in with the phone off when I got home and saw that it was fully charged a few hours later around 10pm and I booted it up and left it alone. This morning it was dead, off.
Looking at the apps that take up my battery doesn't work because it doesn't retain information what happened to the phone prior to the last reboot. Not sure what to do. My awake time matches my standby time exactly. It's obviously a 100% awake time problem but what's triggering this?
I'm on Fresh .3 with absolutely no other mods. I don't think I have any apps that ping outside servers. So what the ****!?
EDIT:
lulz, I just realized I haven't been even able to use the phone in 3 days due to this issue
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I seem to be having the same problem as you and it is quite frustrating. I get a steady 10% battery drain every hour even when its idle. I tried juice defender and setcpu and it is still the same. I turned off all my sync accounts and nothing. I also have systempanel and it doesn't seem like theres a rogue app eating my batteries.I'm going to truth to stock tonight to see if something is wrong with my phone. Did you ever figure out what was wrong with your phone?

AVA9 i get 20 hours a charge
but YES something is eating your battery install system pan have and let it run a bit and check the info id bet its
1 your evo spend a lot of tWOS
2 you have a rogue app eating your battery

Way to bump an ancient thread.

DOH dear god i did not look at that lol

I do apologize for bumping such an old thread, but I feel like this thread has already asked much of what I also wanted to ask but have not reached a conclusion. Therefore I would like to try and solve the problem or provide as much info as I can to solve the problem.
I indeed have installed systempanel and here are the screenshots for the day.
imgur.com/mzAE3.png
imgur.com/zA2Vi.png
imgur.com/OLDtt.png
(sorry my account is not allowed to post links)
As you can see besides the internet, there is nothing else thats taking up the battery. Also I took this pic after I put the phone on the charger for a bit, it was at ~ 13% before. The battery usage information says a majority of the battery was used by #1 android system and #2 cell standby, it was neck and neck almost, with #3 being phone idle. My weather app polls every 3 hours, my facebook syncs every 30 mins, my htc sense facebook syncs once a day, and I have not configured any other emails except for two gmail acconts, which received probably 3 emails throughout the whole day.
I just used setcpu today, it made absolutely no difference. Same results as yesterday when I did not have setcpu. Thanks in advance for the help!

dude you need to try my setup: superevo and setcpu
i got 7 days of battery using the evo as a simple phone.
http://edsandroid.blogspot.com/2010/10/7-days-battery-potential.html

proloss said:
dude you need to try my setup: superevo and setcpu
i got 7 days of battery using the evo as a simple phone.
http://edsandroid.blogspot.com/2010/10/7-days-battery-potential.html
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Why would anyone use an EVO as a simple phone.
I am beginning to think peoples opinions on moderate use vary tooooo much. The EVO is similar to an unplugged laptop. The more you make the cpu work the faster your battery is going to drain.
It seems some people just dont get that.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

scirio said:
That's a PITA. This is a clean fresh .3 rom install with only logmein, dropbox and couple non-online games installed. Why is this phone such ****ing fail right now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sounds like Operator error.

Battery Draining Bug?

I think I've discovered a bug on the X that's causing battery drain.
I installed Spare Parts and saw my phone had been unplugged for about 12 hours and that my phone was been Running (not sleeping) for 100% of that time.
After being methodical and getting data points after opening various programs, I determined that after I opened any program that accessed the GPS, the phone no longer would go into sleep mode.
To get the phone to start sleeping again, all I have to do is toggle GPS off and then back on again.
It's completely reproducible every time on my phone.
Now, I don't know what kind of effect this will have on battery life, but seems like it probably would have some effect.
If others can test this and see if it affect you at all, it'd be helpful to see if there's a potential major software bug here or if it's just something with my phone.
Easiest way to test is to start with a fresh reboot with GPS toggle on, install Spare Parts, plug in the phone for a second (to reset the counters), let it sit sleeping for a few minutes, then read the Running % in Spare Parts. Should be pretty low. Plug in the phone to reset the counters again. Then start Google Maps or any other program that will activate your GPS. Close that program and then let the phone sit idle for a few minutes. Check Spare Parts running time again and, for me, it's pegged at 100%.
It stays like that until I toggle the GPS off or reboot the phone.
Very curious to see if others get the same results.

lexluthor said:
I think I've discovered a bug on the X that's causing battery drain.
I installed Spare Parts and saw my phone had been unplugged for about 12 hours and that my phone was been Running (not sleeping) for 100% of that time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not trying to flame... but, after 12 hours your phone was unplugged, and still working... battery drain doesn't seem like a huge issue for me based on this information.
I would recommend an app called Tasker. I use it to turn gps off when it's not in use. I open google maps, gps starts. I close maps, gps off. I put my phone into the car mount, bluetooth starts, gps on, pandora on. unplug it, then everything off. I can have the cell radio off at night, but come on every 30 minutes to check for sms, email or whatever. I have Wifi turn on automatically when I get home, based on gps of course, and when I get out of the car, gps turns off and wifi turns on.
It saves a ton of battery for me, and might be something you'd appreciate. I have my phone running on performance mode all the time, and it still lasts all day and has 30+% to spare when I go to sleep. I'm a heavy user. almost 4GB of data this month with no tether.

That's not really the point.
The point is that there's potentially a bug with the phone that's not allowing the phone to go into sleep mode.
Seems like that might be a pretty important thing.

Point blank, the Droid X is one of the only Androids who last more than on day on the same charge! And what you all don't know is that if you use the blk taskbar and services.jar V.8 from teenfaces you will literally double or triple your life!
I have been unplugged for about 7 hrs and still have a sturdy 70%. All this with a normal discharge rate of about 5% every hour! That'd not bad! But then you have ATK set to aggressive... then the batt manager set to smart then cache mate running at full blast clearing caches every half hour. Plus the apps are killed and shut down when te screen ia off! So technically the X is dead till you power it up!
Take a look... I promise many will agree, that is if they did it right and are using V8.
Sent from my DROIDX via Telepathic DLNA.

What in the world is services.jar V.8 from teenfaces?
Ok, so then both of you are saying that the fact that the phone doesn't ever go to sleep once the GPS has been activated (even after the program that did so exists), isn't an issue?
Seems to me that you can only further improve battery life by having the phone sleep when it's not being used.
But who am I to argue I guess.

Seems like you dint understand my previous post. There is mod to change the task bar and shade. Like V8 is the latest with the services.jar replacment. Now how this affected my batt life i don't know, but, it did.
Now i see a lil longer batt life than with the original items.
Sent from my DROIDX via Telepathic DLNA.

this post is hilarious.
homeboy is trying to get bug testers, and people are talking about how to change the color of their taskbar : /

ixobelle said:
this post is hilarious.
homeboy is trying to get bug testers, and people are talking about how to change the color of their taskbar : /
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lol yea. Im gonna head home and try what ur saying. I use tasker for turning wifi on and off for maps and the new google places thing (because most of the time im in buildings) but maybe i should use it for gps too. My friend with the evo has his turned off all the time he says its a huge battery drainer. I say how could that be if it only runs when the icon is up. But this might just explain that as well.
Also other logging programs might keep it awak but this one ur suggesting doesn't i take it. Good to keep in mind. Will update later today
Sent from my DROIDX using XDA App

Sorry, I guess I'm lost/confused.
No one really has a concern that this is a potential system problem that's causing excess battery drain?

I do we still don't have an extended battery im very curious to what we can do with the battery life. If this is true id imgine tasker is the way we would go around fixing it. But went we getting 2.2 next week? Maybe that will fix it. Like i said when i get home im going to try what u said when i get home
Sent from my DROIDX using XDA App

Just noticed something, I formated my phone just today. (for some reason i had to activate again. is that normal never had to do that with my WM phone when i would put roms on it and stuff)
During setup it asked if i wanted to share anymous location info to google, which i know the fist time i said yes (actually maybe the guy at verizon said yes for me) in any case it says under it something "will anonymously collect your location data even if a location app isn't running"
which could explain why it stays on when the gps is on
if you can go into your system settings and it's on for you try turning it off and see if then leaving the gps switched on will still keep the phone on.

mavermc said:
Just noticed something, I formated my phone just today. (for some reason i had to activate again. is that normal never had to do that with my WM phone when i would put roms on it and stuff)
During setup it asked if i wanted to share anymous location info to google, which i know the fist time i said yes (actually maybe the guy at verizon said yes for me) in any case it says under it something "will anonymously collect your location data even if a location app isn't running"
.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think that's the option in settings->privacy, which I turned off the other day, so I don't think that's it.

Good find. Seeing the same thing. Repeated your test, and yep, system stays on till gps is bounced.
Certainly doesn't look right. Is it that once satellite fix is established, it's maintained (even if not used)? And on GPS on/off, the fix is lost and the system forgets about GPS till it's actually called?
Next step would be to see how it affects power consumption. Will try to run some more tests later in the day.

Is there an easy way to test power drain? it'll be very interesting to see what effect this is really having.

lexluthor said:
Is there an easy way to test power drain? it'll be very interesting to see what effect this is really having.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately with the Droid X only showing battery power in 10%, it's not easy to discern small differences without waiting for hours.
I wonder if looking at the voltage would offer more precision. But, not sure how reliable that is. After all, if it was, why wouldn't the 3rd party battery meters use that to show more precise % readings.

exempli_gratia said:
Unfortunately with the Droid X only showing battery power in 10%, it's not easy to discern small differences without waiting for hours.
I wonder if looking at the voltage would offer more precision. But, not sure how reliable that is. After all, if it was, why wouldn't the 3rd party battery meters use that to show more precise % readings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You'd actually have to write an event for every single percent in the Android system for anything to detect the battery much more accurately and Motorola is too lazy to do that. Its only gonna show every 10% because thats what Android was programmed to show.

just an update, i said no to google doing it's data mining off my gps. but then i found in location, when i check "use wifi" it asked me again. My guess is thats how they know where you are when you turn on wifi, because if you want that feature you also have to be used in mining data of where the wifipoints are physically located.
So maybe that has something to do with it.

Saw this on Android Central Yesterday.
I can confirm it, when used with fancy widget. When standard weather app is used, no major power drain. Fancy widget seems to pin the GPS and run it hard the entire time.

hijackerjack said:
You'd actually have to write an event for every single percent in the Android system for anything to detect the battery much more accurately and Motorola is too lazy to do that. Its only gonna show every 10% because thats what Android was programmed to show.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would think that if Android had 1% events some app would take advantage of it (there are certainly plenty of battery monitors in Market). But I don't know of any that show anything other than 10%. The HTC phones do 1%, and the battery widgets on HTC phones show likewise. Must be a Motorola implementation limitation.

Answers on battery life.

I've been seeing a lot of posts on crap battery life around here, and I was chasing my tail about some of them as well, following a lot of misinformation even by senior members. I think I have a good handle on it now, and picked up most of these tips from these forums, so I'm not taking credit for these ideas, just collecting them in one place. Some of my suggestions assume you have root and Rom Manager (see the Tips and Tricks sticky thread on how to get them).
1. If your battery drains in less than a day on standby, you probably have a bad flash of the JI6 modem (either from the OTA update or from a ROM). Flash the JI2 modem from here "www dot teamwhiskey dot com/home/downloads". If the flash fixes it, you may try going back to JI6 if you want, and it may stay fixed. I went back to JI2 and didn't bother going back to JI6, but it has worked for others. With JI2 and 3G on I get just over 24 hours in normal usage.
2. The #2 battery drain on standby is 3G. I turned it off (Settings/Wireless/Mobile networks/Network mode/GSM only) and my phone lasted for 40 hours on Edge with light usage (few phone calls, messaging, quite a lot of web surfing, 2 hours of podcasts). Didn't even feel too slow (I get 140kbps on edge). Can anybody suggest a really good widget for turning 3G on/off? I use the 2G-3G OnOff widget by Curvefish. It's not one-click, it's just a shortcut to Mobile Network Settings, but it works. Note that sometimes it takes a while for the data connection to re-establish after you see the 3G or E icon.
2.5. WiFi always on is a huge battery saver! It keeps 3g off. I can easily get 3+ days with light usage on my home wifi. Settings/Wireless and Network/Wifi Settings/Menu/Advanced/Wifi Sleep Policy/Never.
3. Don't need a task killer. I wasted all my time killing tasks trying to chase down my crappy battery usage, but since I fixed my modem and turned off 3G I know that the 3-5% CPU usage at idle does not hurt my battery. Taskiller for me was actually hitting the CPU constantly, lightly but for no reason, so I got pissed and uninstalled it.
4. Install a CPU usage monitor like Usage Timelines. It sits in the notification bar, very easy on the battery, but tells you if you have a rogue app pegging your CPU and draining your battery. These are the only apps you should be worried about killing. Astro File Manager has a task manager that shows CPU usage for each app, so you can kill the rogue one. I shoot for about 5% cpu usage at idle (at 200mhz - at 100mhz it would be a bit higher).
5. The app Autostarts lets you disable any app from starting on boot or other events like connectivity changes. This is not strictly necessary unless you have a lot of crap apps installed on your phone and they like to start themselves and waste CPU time behind your back.
6. If your battery reads less than 100% as soon as you unplug it from the charger fully charged, or your battery meter sits at 100% for a long time after you unplug it, you can recalibrate your battery meter. To recalibrate: 1) charge your battery to full, 2) unplug, 3) reboot into Clockwork Recovery and 4) Wipe battery stats.
7. There is No Such Thing as "battery reconditioning" (for all intents and purposes). The above procedure only RECALIBRATES you battery METER to read on a more linear scale between full and empty. It DOES NOT make your battery last longer, period. Whoever tells you that is a moron. If your battery is dying in 6 hours, doing any amount of calibration will not make it last longer (I've tried).
8. I wouldn't be too worried about undervolting, overclocking, kernel tricks and superawesomefast ROMS. The CPU drain at idle is so minuscule (as long as you don't have rogue apps) that those things make precious little difference. Like I said, the biggest drain is 3G and other radios. Having said that, I run Bionix 1.9 with the JAC kernel. It drained my battery in half a day at idle until I flashed the JI2 modem. With JI2 it suddenly started lasting over 24 hours, and once I turned off 3G, over 40 hours. I like this ROM and see no need to switch, it's very smooth. But you should be able to get similar battery life on a stock Vibrant.
9. I have GPS on, WiFi never sleep, auto-brightness, and a few widgets on like Weather and friend updates. I have no fancy settings, literally just turning off 3G (or wifi on, which is the same) got me 2-3 days. So I wouldn't waste time fooling around with magic settings (other than wifi never sleep), battery saver apps, etc.
10. If your screen is on all the time and you're playing games nonstop, you're draining your battery quicker than any of the things I mentioned above, so you probably don't care. In that case an optimized ROM/kernel is probably your best bet, especially JIT in Froyo. You can probably save on screen brightness as well.
If you guys have any other tips I'd be glad to add them to the list, but I hope this gives you an understanding of where your battery life is going. Basically: bad modem, 3G, or rogue apps.
Also, I hope this will put an end to trolls calling people whiners for complaining about battery life and saying unproductive **** like "you're a whiner" or "the Galaxy S is just a battery hog, live with it". It's not, you don't have to live with it, nobody should have to, here are your solutions.
Good luck.

A few things I do to help with battery life is:
Disable Audible touch tones
Disable Audible selection
Disable Haptic feedback
Disable SD card notifications
Set animations to NO animations
Uninstall media hub if you dont use it
Disable auto brightness adjustment
Disable power saving mode
I disable the last 2 and just swipe the notification bar to adjust brightness. Granted these items really only work when using the phone but I can go about 2 days of normal use without a charge believe it or not.

yeah disabling 3g has always been the best option for people really, really concerned with battery life.
But it's kinda hard to tell people not to use 3g on their brand new 3g capable devices.

You may want to add how to test if you battery is bad. If you use you phone repeatedly while it its plugged in you risk overheating and damaging your battery. Signs that unitas is the case are very quick drain and long (7 hours) charge times. You can easily test and see if your battery its damaged. Remove it from your phone and place on flat surface (e.g. Counter top) try spinning the battery. If it rotates easily and quickly you battery is bulging, this is a sign of damage. Time for a new battery.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

Answer to #2-
Use APNDroid. Comes with a widget.

Thanks to the OP and other contributors in this thread.
I flashed a ROM with the ji6 modem and battery life has been noticeably ****ty since. Example - this morning I unplugged my phone at 7:30 am. 100% charged. It's 10:21 am and my phone is at 75%
In the last 3 hours I browsed the web for 10 minutes while having my coffee and a smoke before heading out to work. Blue tooth was on for my drive, and I've sent 2 text messages. Aside from that my phone has been on stand-by since I unplugged it 3 hours ago.
I'm going to try to flash back to ji2 tonight as the battery usage was definitely better. Will also look into the 3G thing.
Thanks again.

You forgot to mention the two DRM and one downloader services that run resident on JI6.
These were the cause of my reduced battery life after I upgraded. Killing & removing these processes restored my battery life back to normal

blink55184 said:
Answer to #2-
Use APNDroid. Comes with a widget.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just tried this - switching 3G off works fine, but switching 3G back on didn't work for me. I had to re-boot to get 3G back so this is a no-go in my case.

I know how to kill the processes for the DRM and downloader but how do I remove them?

OP thank you for putting together the list. But I've never seen the point of doing all this. Its like getting a lamborghini and only driving 40mph because it you don't want to waste gas, whats the point? Either get a second wall charger to charge at work or a car charger. Heck even get a second battery if you are out for a long period of time.

speoples20 said:
Its like getting a lamborghini and only driving 40mph because it you don't want to waste gas, whats the point?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You don't need to disable 3g.
The point of my post is to avoid people wasting their time with tweaks that have little to no effect on battery life. I'm telling people that they're wasting time killing apps and optimizing cpu usage and twiddling their settings when the radio drains most of their battery on standby anyway.
Meaning no matter what changes you make, you can only hope to improve your battery life by a tiny amount, because any other effect is overshadowed by 3G.
Put another way, you will NEVER get battery life much longer than a day if you're on 3g, so you're wasting your energy trying all kinds of tricks.

blink55184 said:
Answer to #2-
Use APNDroid. Comes with a widget.
smutek said:
I just tried this - switching 3G off works fine, but switching 3G back on didn't work for me. I had to re-boot to get 3G back so this is a no-go in my case.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
For me the widget did nothing. But it seems like it's not even supposed to turn the 3G radio off, but ALL APN network traffic. Did I miss something? It won't save battery power as long as the 3G radio is on.
I went back to the 2G-3G OnOff widget by Curvefish. It's not one-click, it's just a shortcut to Mobile Network Settings, but it works. Note that sometimes it takes a while for the data connection to re-establish after you see the 3G or E icon.

Back to my Moto Startac
While i understand the idea behind this thread, your conclusion is simple.
If you use the phone as a smartphone, it will eat up your battery no matter what.
I personally go through two batteries and some a day. (they cost about 12 bucks in ebay, and they work just fine)
The price for saving battery is not using the phone, and having a 400 bucks phone just for show off is just silly at least.
If you have a phone like this is to use it. At least you can change the battery not like some other devices......

I understand that task killer is useless, but do any of you use Autokiller (memory manager) ?

That's kind of a redundant question because even if you do not use the app, your phone is still performing the functions. The app just adjusts the settings. But to answer your question, using a memory optimization tool such as AutoKiller is 1000% more efficient than using a Task Killer. I don't think it effects battery much, but works wonders on performance.

There's no 3g-off widget because apparently in Android there's no way to do that through a direct command. I also use the Curvefish widget, and you are absolutely right about turning off 3g to save battery. I normally do so when I'm asleep or if I'm sitting at my desk next to a computer (why do I need fast data on my phone when I have my computer right here?).
The other thing I would recommend is AutoStarts. There are way too many apps that open themselves up at bizarre and inappropriate times. Autostarts is an easy and painless way to see which apps do this and keep them from opening.

gagb1967 said:
While i understand the idea behind this thread, your conclusion is simple.
If you use the phone as a smartphone, it will eat up your battery no matter what.
I personally go through two batteries and some a day. (they cost about 12 bucks in ebay, and they work just fine)
The price for saving battery is not using the phone, and having a 400 bucks phone just for show off is just silly at least.
If you have a phone like this is to use it. At least you can change the battery not like some other devices......
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1000
Great battery life comes to people who hardly use their phones. Guess I need to get a netbook. Will prolly get a netbook or 3g laptop + skype and ETF my phone soon. These battery woes are show-stopping.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

Losing 4% an hour on standby when you're not using the phone is unacceptable. Samsung screwed something up with the JI6 update. Most people think it's because of the stupid Media Hub. I think they are right.
People are not complaining about the poor battery life from using the phone. They are complaining about the slow battery drain even when they are not using it. ~4% an hour adds up fast. Vibrant is supposed to have 450 hour (18 days) stand-by time. That's what is rated. But people are getting 24 hour (1 day) stand-by time after JI6.

Yellow C6 said:
Losing 4% an hour on standby when you're not using the phone is unacceptable. Samsung screwed something up with the JI6 update. Most people think it's because of the stupid Media Hub. I think they are right.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not ready to sign off on this idea. For me simply flashing JI2 over JI6 fixed it. For some people flashing JI6 back over still left the problem fixed. I still have those processes running on JI2 and my battery life is fine.
The other reason I'm not ready to recommend wiping out those DRM processes is that apparently it stops the bundled Avatar movie from playing, and might affect other things that users may get pissed about. I've read that killing the downloader process people are talking about kills the market. So I really wish those people advocating that solution would figure their **** out and provide exact steps for the fix (right now their posts are really vague like "kill the processes that are named something like this" and not well tested; in all my research I didn't find the exact name of the "downloader" process).

Is it possible to flash the ji2 modem without root? Wishful thinking, I suppose..

[Q] Battery life makes me cry

(I'll preface this by saying that I am well aware there have been a million threads about this, I'm sure, and I'm even more sure that there will be a million more. And I have searched, and searched, and searched some more, and I still feel the need to post this question. Flame me if you want. I'll use the flames to heat up some tea, or something.)
I bought my phone last Thursday, it got lit with service Friday. I went over the weekend and into Sunday with stock ROM/kernel, and decided to mix things up by rooting my phone and using the MixUp kernel to see if I could get better battery life.. and it didn't work too well. I mean, life went up a bit, but not noticeably so (maybe twenty or thirty minutes?)
After that, I flashed Syndicate, which had Xtreme Kernel. I calibrated the battery as instructed inside of Clockwork and went with it for Tuesday.. took it off the charger at 8:00 and it died around 4:00. Kept the same kernel and flashed Epic Experience and the attached JuicePlotter shot is where I am at right now.
My usage today has been light browsing and that's basically it. I've got the processor underclocked to 600 with SetCPU, and JuiceDefender and Superpower have been preventing any data from going on when my screen is off, and for the last two hours I've been listening to MP3s using the in-built music player.
This makes me cry considering there are people on here saying they're able to get much more life out of their battery, even with BT and WiFi etc. I'm aware that each phone is different and all that, but still.
All that said, is there a problem with my phone/battery, is this par for the course with the Epic, or should I just stop whining?
Thanks in advance for any help/insight.

A couple of things...get a task killer app so that you can kill the drm process which eats up a ton of battery, calibraing your battery takes 2 or 3 times going from full charge to zero and also, since its a new phone it takes charging to full and letting it get down to complete zero a few times before you will see better battery life no matter what else you do
Edit: oh and also definitely do the airplane mode toggle as well
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App

storytobetold said:
(I'll preface this by saying that I am well aware there have been a million threads about this, I'm sure, and I'm even more sure that there will be a million more. And I have searched, and searched, and searched some more, and I still feel the need to post this question. Flame me if you want. I'll use the flames to heat up some tea, or something.)
I bought my phone last Thursday, it got lit with service Friday. I went over the weekend and into Sunday with stock ROM/kernel, and decided to mix things up by rooting my phone and using the MixUp kernel to see if I could get better battery life.. and it didn't work too well. I mean, life went up a bit, but not noticeably so (maybe twenty or thirty minutes?)
After that, I flashed Syndicate, which had Xtreme Kernel. I calibrated the battery as instructed inside of Clockwork and went with it for Tuesday.. took it off the charger at 8:00 and it died around 4:00. Kept the same kernel and flashed Epic Experience and the attached JuicePlotter shot is where I am at right now.
My usage today has been light browsing and that's basically it. I've got the processor underclocked to 600 with SetCPU, and JuiceDefender and Superpower have been preventing any data from going on when my screen is off, and for the last two hours I've been listening to MP3s using the in-built music player.
This makes me cry considering there are people on here saying they're able to get much more life out of their battery, even with BT and WiFi etc. I'm aware that each phone is different and all that, but still.
All that said, is there a problem with my phone/battery, is this par for the course with the Epic, or should I just stop whining?
Thanks in advance for any help/insight.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Also, for each new Kernel you flash, you have to calibrate the battery.
Charge it to full, boot off, boot up in Clockwork, go to Advanced and Clear Battery stats. Reboot the phone, use it until it runs dead and shuts off, than plug it back in and charge it to full with the phone on.
Every time you flash a new kernel, you have to do that process so the battery calibrates to that certain kernel.
Also, try Baked Snack, it gets the best battery life for 2.1 ROMs.
http://www.bakedsnackshack.com/source/
Download Bakedsnack1.6 and Step 2.
Make a backup.
Wipe data/cache
Install 1.6
Boot the phone up
Reboot into clockwork
Install Step 2
Boot the phone up.

I have to have a car charger if I go anywhere. This phone dies so fast with normal usage. Do anything crazy like turn features on, surf the web, or increase brightness, and I am lucky to get 2 hours. I have multiple batteries, both have the same result.

Muckrak3r said:
I have to have a car charger if I go anywhere. This phone dies so fast with normal usage. Do anything crazy like turn features on, surf the web, or increase brightness, and I am lucky to get 2 hours. I have multiple batteries, both have the same result.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
2 Hours..? Whaaaaa? Lol.
When I calibrate my battery, I turn EVERYTHING on, screen brightness all the way up, Pandora running, every widget I can fit on my screens set to update at their quickest setting, screen set to 30min (Though I never let it shut off). Bluetooth, GPS, 4G running (I don't have 4G here, so it just keeps searching, which drains it more than if it was connected). And running the Maps Live wall paper to use GPS.
When I do all that, I can't get it to even die under 4 hours.
Hopefully you were exaggerating with saying 2 hours lol.

Thank you guys for replying!
Sh0wNuF: I killed the DRM service today and used ATK to kill errant processes throughout the day today to no avail. I also used the airplane mode toggle to try to limit my time without a signal.
SemiGamer: Thank you! I did do the clockwork step as I said in my first post, but I will try to install BakedSnack and get back to you guys as to the battery life.

From the looks of that juiceplotter graph, your data is constantly on and destroying your battery. What is the point of having juicedefender if the data is constantly on?
If you set up the phone properly, and there are a MILLION threads on this which state a MILLION times to disable DRM and toggle airplane mode as a mere baseline beginning, you should lose at most 1% an hour when the phone is idle without a data connection and the screen off.
Now it looks like you probably have the data on constantly with emails rolling in, facebook auto updating every 5 minutes, weather checking every half hour and other things that are just destroying your battery life. If you need your phone to do all that nonsense, then you will be crying for the rest of the time you have it.

muyoso said:
From the looks of that juiceplotter graph, your data is constantly on and destroying your battery. What is the point of having juicedefender if the data is constantly on?
If you set up the phone properly, and there are a MILLION threads on this which state a MILLION times to disable DRM and toggle airplane mode as a mere baseline beginning, you should lose at most 1% an hour when the phone is idle without a data connection and the screen off.
Now it looks like you probably have the data on constantly with emails rolling in, facebook auto updating every 5 minutes, weather checking every half hour and other things that are just destroying your battery life. If you need your phone to do all that nonsense, then you will be crying for the rest of the time you have it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your reply, but as I said in my first post, I was using both JuiceDefender and Superpower to make sure data was off in the background, and as I said in my most recent post, I did disable the OmaDrm service as well as enable/disable Airplane Mode to lower my TWS.

storytobetold said:
Thank you for your reply, but as I said in my first post, I was using both JuiceDefender and Superpower to make sure data was off in the background, and as I said in my most recent post, I did disable the OmaDrm service as well as enable/disable Airplane Mode to lower my TWS.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thats fine, but your data aint off. Look at that graph you posted. Every little blip is either data being accessed or the screen turning on. The line should be smooth if there is no data and no screen on.
So there are two options, either you are constantly using the phone and its the screen killing the battery, or you have juicedefender set up all wrong and its the data killing the battery.
If I remember correctly, any spike below the line is data, either wifi or 3g and any spike above the line is the screen turned on. So from the looks of it your data is literally never turning off and you are checking the phone and turning the screen on and off pretty frequently.
What are your settings in juicedefender?

muyoso said:
Thats fine, but your data aint off. Look at that graph you posted. Every little blip is either data being accessed or the screen turning on. The line should be smooth if there is no data and no screen on.
So there are two options, either you are constantly using the phone and its the screen killing the battery, or you have juicedefender set up all wrong and its the data killing the battery.
If I remember correctly, any spike below the line is data, either wifi or 3g and any spike above the line is the screen turned on. So from the looks of it your data is literally never turning off and you are checking the phone and turning the screen on and off pretty frequently.
What are your settings in juicedefender?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Timeout: Do nothing
Schedule: Enable Data for 1m every 15m
Night: Keep Data/Wifi disabled 2am>5am
Battery: Keep Data/WiFi disabled while below 15%
Traffic: Leave Data/Wifi enabled while >50KB/15s
Peak: Do nothing
Apps: Do nothing
Screen: Leave Data enabled while screen unlocked
Location: Do nothing

I have almost identical batter results as you. I do use the phone fairly often to send messages but the screen brightness is all the way down and I use set cpu on the froyo beta leak. I reset battery stats and also (perhaps you could look into this too) checked spare parts for any rogue programs. Does yours say the screen takes up most of your battery even if you barely use it?
Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

storytobetold said:
Timeout: Do nothing
Schedule: Enable Data for 1m every 15m
Night: Keep Data/Wifi disabled 2am>5am
Battery: Keep Data/WiFi disabled while below 15%
Traffic: Leave Data/Wifi enabled while >50KB/15s
Peak: Do nothing
Apps: Do nothing
Screen: Leave Data enabled while screen unlocked
Location: Do nothing
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would up the Schedule to less often and turn off the traffic toggle. Also, I wouldn't doubt that your phone is never going to sleep. If you have spare parts check the Battery History. If you listen to music with the phone, the service started by the music player, CorePlayerService, keeps the phone awake constantly for me. I ended up making a simple kill music widget using tasker to fix this issue.

I bought a wildly overpriced Samsung stand/battery charger from Amazon. My wife & I each start the day with a charged Epic and a spare battery. No worries
Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

Used BS 1.6 w/ step2 kernel today. MUCH better battery life but my phone was acting just a bit wacky (locked up and required batt. pull twice or three times)
Not the biggest fan of the aesthetics of the ROM.. but I'll live.

storytobetold said:
Used BS 1.6 w/ step2 kernel today. MUCH better battery life but my phone was acting just a bit wacky (locked up and required batt. pull twice or three times)
Not the biggest fan of the aesthetics of the ROM.. but I'll live.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When you say much better battery life exactly how much? My battery dropped 20% today while not being used and Display was still at 60% (I turned the alarm off twice). I'm running the Quantum ROM which could have something to do with it but the battery is horrible for me. I can't get more than 8 hours and that's if i barely use it. I have spare parts and no apps are partially waking it. Just Wifi and sync. No GPS, brightness all the way down. The main thing that bothers me is that display is always #1 even if i don't use the phone at all. Any thoughts?

I've ran both Quantum and Viper Froyo roms and aside from making my phone hot enough to fry eggs, the battery life was not good.
As far as battery life goes, I'll start with the obvious stuff.
1. Turn off GPS, Bluetooth and 4G. 4G is a complete power whore.
2. As for wifi, turn it off unless you are in a bad coverage area for cell data. If you are connect to wifi and set Spare Parts to never let wifi sleep.
3. For DRM there are 3 files you need to remove that will prevent it from running / reinstalling and they are DrmProvider.apk, DrmUA.apk, and SisoDrmProvider.apk.
4. Toggle airplane mode every single time you reboot without fail.
For a true test of whether your phone simply needs to be returned as "defective" you should wipe the device, dont setup a google account and let it run for a day after executing steps 1-4 above. It would be best to an apk for Spare Parts and SDX Stock App Remover on your microSD that could be installed using My Files. If you still have problems take the phone back to sprint (after restoring it to factory of course) and tell them it is defective.

storytobetold said:
This makes me cry considering there are people on here saying they're able to get much more life out of their battery,
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Camera on the EVO made me cry, so bad i switched to the Epic, I deal with the battery buy purchasing 2 batteries and a charger on ebay for $9. now I have three batteries. I had like 4 batteries for the EVO

MLHickey said:
When you say much better battery life exactly how much? My battery dropped 20% today while not being used and Display was still at 60% (I turned the alarm off twice). I'm running the Quantum ROM which could have something to do with it but the battery is horrible for me. I can't get more than 8 hours and that's if i barely use it. I have spare parts and no apps are partially waking it. Just Wifi and sync. No GPS, brightness all the way down. The main thing that bothers me is that display is always #1 even if i don't use the phone at all. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here's a JuicePlotter graph from today for comparison from my original one yesterday.
I still wonder if it wasn't going to sleep because of PowerAMP and I didn't underclock today like I did yesterday.
There are a few other physical issues with my phone (slider seems a bit loose compared to my other phones: if I swipe with slider closed with a bit more pressure than usual, I can feel the screen move up and down; screen seems to slightly come up a bit when phone's tilted a bit, taps make you feel the screen go back down) that also made me want to consider exchanging it on top of the battery issue but if I'm getting good battery life I don't think I'll mess with what works, unless anything gets worse.

Unexplainable battery drain

For a month or more I'm facing totally unexplainable battery drain.
As seen on the screens below, the phone is awake, but it is not detected anywhere - not by android nor by GSam. In any case the battery draws faster.
I have one observation tho - this happens after I make phone calls. Not every time, but once per 2,3 days.
Any ideas?

Spo0f said:
For a month or more I'm facing totally unexplainable battery drain.
As seen on the screens below, the phone is awake, but it is not detected anywhere - not by android nor by GSam. In any case the battery draws faster.
I have one observation tho - this happens after I make phone calls. Not every time, but once per 2,3 days.
Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You have this problem
http://forum.xda-developers.com/note-4/general/explanation-horrible-note-4-battery-t3004274

I'm pretty sure that I don't have this issue. Yes, the percentage in GSam maybe high, but I don't believe this reflects what is happening.
First of all - I don't have bad battery life. Usually my over night drain is less than 1%/1h.
Second - the issue appears sporadically.
Third - in the provided thread I don't see the issue appearing in stock battery monitor, while mine appear.
At last - my battery drains faster only while the issue is present and before I restart. After that it is back to normal ...

@Spo0f
Just some suggestions maybe you're using 3g I always have that turned off and switch it on when I use it my guess is that some apps are causing your drain after a call maybe like you said if you're not fimiliar with greenify I suggest you use it to stop all those apps and system apps also uninstall all those bloatware you don't need or at least freeze them if you don't mind lower the resolution to 1080p with nomone app use power save or disable dvfs and use an app to lower and raise the CPU to save juice when not needed....

Thanks for the suggestions, but as I said - this problem appear sporadically - home when using WiFi as well as outside when using 3G.
All of the rest is done - I'm no newby

Spo0f said:
Thanks for the suggestions, but as I said - this problem appear sporadically - home when using WiFi as well as outside when using 3G.
All of the rest is done - I'm no newby
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh sorry mate well I don't use much 3g so I can't help you there but if you're having drainage when you're using WiFi in general then maybe you should reconsider investigating the post above with the link I don't have so much drainage on connectivity with 3g or WiFi....viewing the pics you uploaded it seems suspicious.... Maybe an app? I don't know...

Use wakelock detector

Spo0f said:
I'm pretty sure that I don't have this issue. Yes, the percentage in GSam maybe high, but I don't believe this reflects what is happening.
First of all - I don't have bad battery life. Usually my over night drain is less than 1%/1h.
Second - the issue appears sporadically.
Third - in the provided thread I don't see the issue appearing in stock battery monitor, while mine appear.
At last - my battery drains faster only while the issue is present and before I restart. After that it is back to normal ...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My overnight drain was also very low, but that was because the faulty device on the network was asleep at night too (my desktop).
If you're not rooted, use the PC version of Wakelock Detector at the end of your day and post screenshots of your highest drainers for the various categories. In my case, the device was being woken up by something on the network and it showed.
Bear in mind that actively downloading something in the time period will also raise wifi power used but more stats will help.
The fact that you're still experiencing a lot of drain even when outside suggests it might be a rogue app

One phone call today and after it the phone stayed awake.
Because I had issue with the PC WLD the screen shots are from 11 minutes after one of the disconnects. The device was awake all of them.

Spo0f said:
One phone call today and after it the phone stayed awake.
Because I had issue with the PC WLD the screen shots are from 11 minutes after one of the disconnects. The device was awake all of them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I also checked out my battery behaviour this night and was very disappointed. Although my phone was in flight mode and every peripherals and services shut down, today morning my phone was crying for energy. So I made a quick investigation in my power diagram and found out, that "Android OS" requested a wakelock during the whole power-on time. So I installed "CPU Spy" to check in which states the phone was really over the whole charging period. I couldn't believe my eyes. Although the kernel should do it's job good, cause most of the CPU times are in lower freqeuncy states, the deep sleep mode was never activated.
Therefore I installed an app called "Wakelock Detector" to check out which apps could cause that. I found out, that S Health had a big amount of wakelocks and also active-time, so the first thing was to disable S Health. After some minutes I checked back, but nevertheless still no deep sleep time in "CPU Spy".
So I searched around and found another one arguing about the wakelocks and that they could be the products of some programming issues concerning WiFi. The should be gone, after turning off WiFi and rebooting yout phone. And it seems that he was right. I waited some time and hooray, "CPU Spy" listed the phone state "Deep Sleep" the first time as an active state and also with the major active-time. So at least that was some step ahead. (I have to remark, that S Health was already unfrozen at this time, so S Health should not be responsible in any way.)
The next step was to reactivate WiFi, leave it on and set the phone on standby. After some time I checked back again the phone showed even more deep sleep time. So that was an improvement. I reactivated everything and waited some time... Deep Sleep all over the time. Can't figure out for now, if it was S Health, WiFi, or anything else that caused the wakelock for sure. At least the reboot helped. I'll check that out on a long-term test, maybe I get some further conclusions.