Database Users

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.
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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?
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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.
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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......
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+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.
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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..

Possible solution to the battery drain prob (WiFi only)

This is for the WiFi only A500.
Just noticed that if you install the power control widget (the free one) from the market, and configure one of the buttons as a 2G/3G switch, on pressing it you get to a menu that's not available through Settings (is missing from the WiFi and connections menu). There you have the option to unselect the Data enabled checkbox. I'm not sure yet, but I seem to be getting better battery life (although Cell standby will still show up in Battery use; still, that value is a percent of the total drainage, which seems to be smaller).
Please try it out and let the others know of your results.

Noted Before - Did Not Seem To Resolve Much
Actually many widgets have the property of opening up "hidden" settings, e.g.,
docfreed said:
Wow! I just went into my Beautiful Weather settings and under the "Advanced Panel" you can specify an action for clicking on the time (or weather). When this is done, it provides a large list of action - this list, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't show up anywhere.
Anyway, Mobile Data was checked (yes or on) so I cleared the list (resulting in mobile data being UNCHECKED) and rebooted. Mobile data remained unchecked so I'll watch for a while and report results later.
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Could be placebo, I agree. Well, no harm done in any way

sure fire fix
Although it has been said that by renaming the phone.apk and telephony.apk you may risk bricking the device during a factory reset, I have renamed both and have seen an incredible increase in battery life.
Currently at six and a half hours of moderate use for music and web with some standby time and have 88% battery left. No cell standby being shown in battery stats either.
Reboots are fine, just don't factory reset without renaming the apk files back.

Installed Free Power Widget from the Market, says its installed but doesnt show in my widget list, strange.

Cell standby is simply terminology for when the tablet is asleep meaning screen off. So I wouldn't start changing it. In all likelihood you have an application that tries to access those two apps and when it doesn't find them it can't run its background process. I bet finding the culprit app would equally fix battery life.
cbotd said:
Although it has been said that by renaming the phone.apk and telephony.apk you may risk bricking the device during a factory reset, I have renamed both and have seen an incredible increase in battery life.
Currently at six and a half hours of moderate use for music and web with some standby time and have 88% battery left. No cell standby being shown in battery stats either.
Reboots are fine, just don't factory reset without renaming the apk files back.
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Sent from my A500 using Tapatalk

peejayw said:
Installed Free Power Widget from the Market, says its installed but doesnt show in my widget list, strange.
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I had the same, switch off and reboot made it appear in the list.
In much the same way photos I copied from a portable hdd onto the micro SD didn't show until I had powered off and on again.

Thanks, that did the trick.

@Canadoc: "Cell standby is simply terminology for when the tablet is asleep meaning screen off. So I wouldn't start changing it."
I do not believe this is correct. If this were true, removing Phone.apk and Telephony.apk would not affect battery usage, because the tablet would still use just as much power when the screen is off and it would still list "Cell standby" on the battery usage screen. In actuality, removing these two apps causes Cell Standby to disappear from the battery usage list and decreases actual battery usage. Plus, my "Cell Standby" % on the battery usage screen is highest when I have my tablet awake all day, and lowest on days when I let it go to sleep much of the time. So it must be doing something else in Cell Standby that uses power, probably trying to contact cell towers (in vain) even though it is a wi-fi only device.
A few minutes of Googling reveals that many Android wi-fi only models have the same problem (they try to access cell service even though they have no cell capability) and removing Phone.apk and TelephonyProvider.apk seems to fix the problem for everyone who's tried it. I have rooted my own A500 and removed them and it has given it an extra hour of battery time per full charge. YMMV, and it may someday brick when there's an update or something, but for now it works great. Cell standby was definitely doing something that it is now no longer doing.

I'm not 100% sure if android respects them(more experience on Linux than Android), but couldn't we just remove the exec flag off of the apk and not worry about bricking?
Or possibly set it's owner to system and deny rights to everyone but owner? Would that still allow updates?

I thought anything PRIOR to Honeycomb was made for phone ? ( froyo, gingerbread ...etc )
That info was actually made in press by Google !
So in essence, HC is for tablet ONLY ! why are we still seeing cell standby and phone apk ?
even if you argue because some tablets are 3G models ... 3G is about DATA ... not making a phone call !!! ( imagine bringing a 10" device up to the side of your ears )
there are some 7" tablets that are GSM capable... so, they CAN make GSM calls, and they DON'T use Honeycomb either.
anyone care to enlighten me why here we are with Honeycomb and still have the cellstandby and phone APK ??

UnicornKaz said:
anyone care to enlighten me why here we are with Honeycomb and still have the cellstandby and phone APK ??
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Click to collapse
Because Google are a bloody idiots?

Because hc was built on gingerbread. It wasn't built from nothing.
Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk

Question about sleep in Iconia Tab

Hello all,
Trying to find some info about some behaviour my Iconia has.
I love my device. Way more capable than my wife's Ipad and all that. There's only one thing that irks me: battery drain while the device is idle.
I also have a B&N Nook 1st gen (for books) and an EVO 4G. I leave and use the Iconia mostly at home, close to the WiFi. I'll take it out for long trips and such, but it stays close. I have it set up so that the WiFi antenna turns off when the screen does. Low brightness on the screen, will only charge the battery when it's low enough to charge, etc. It stills drains close to 6-8% if I leave it alone a couple of hours.
Earlier today I rooted the device and use Bloatware Freeze to freeze some stuff. Eventually I'll get rid of some of the gunk the tablet has installed. I want to figure out how to shorten that gap. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me that the tablet left alone consumes 8% of battery charge! I mean, if nothing can be done then so be it, I'll learn to live with it.
For my money I would bet that there is something hidden in the Iconia's OS build that thinks it is a 3G/4G device. Now, I'm wondering what would happen if I were to take the next (logical) step and put another ROM in it. Would this make a difference? If I can make the battery drain stop at 5% or less, that would make this perfect.
Thx!

citizenklaw said:
Hello all,
Trying to find some info about some behaviour my Iconia has.
I love my device. Way more capable than my wife's Ipad and all that. There's only one thing that irks me: battery drain while the device is idle.
I also have a B&N Nook 1st gen (for books) and an EVO 4G. I leave and use the Iconia mostly at home, close to the WiFi. I'll take it out for long trips and such, but it stays close. I have it set up so that the WiFi antenna turns off when the screen does. Low brightness on the screen, will only charge the battery when it's low enough to charge, etc. It stills drains close to 6-8% if I leave it alone a couple of hours.
Earlier today I rooted the device and use Bloatware Freeze to freeze some stuff. Eventually I'll get rid of some of the gunk the tablet has installed. I want to figure out how to shorten that gap. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me that the tablet left alone consumes 8% of battery charge! I mean, if nothing can be done then so be it, I'll learn to live with it.
For my money I would bet that there is something hidden in the Iconia's OS build that thinks it is a 3G/4G device. Now, I'm wondering what would happen if I were to take the next (logical) step and put another ROM in it. Would this make a difference? If I can make the battery drain stop at 5% or less, that would make this perfect.
Thx!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I leave my device with airplane mode checked, and then re-check wifi (as airplane mode will initially turn off your wifi). I get no strange programs showing up in battery usage now.

Will certainly try...
I'll try this next time I head out. Will leave her in Airplane Mode and will check the battery level when I come back.
I did disable the GPS and all location settings. I do not need it to know where I am, since I have the EVO for that.

citizenklaw said:
I'll try this next time I head out. Will leave her in Airplane Mode and will check the battery level when I come back.
I did disable the GPS and all location settings. I do not need it to know where I am, since I have the EVO for that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Right on, let us know if that helps ya out

Well I'm glad I came across this. I didn't even think about leaving the GPS on and consuming battery. Also, where did you adjust for your wifi to turn off when the screen goes off?
EDIT: Nevermind, I found it.

I am developing an app that uses bluetooth and I noticed that if I leave bt on my tab will go dead in 2 days, if I turn it off it can stay idle for several days before needing a charge. I leave the wifi on all the time.

citizenklaw said:
Hello all,
Trying to find some info about some behaviour my Iconia has.
I love my device. Way more capable than my wife's Ipad and all that. There's only one thing that irks me: battery drain while the device is idle.
I also have a B&N Nook 1st gen (for books) and an EVO 4G. I leave and use the Iconia mostly at home, close to the WiFi. I'll take it out for long trips and such, but it stays close. I have it set up so that the WiFi antenna turns off when the screen does. Low brightness on the screen, will only charge the battery when it's low enough to charge, etc. It stills drains close to 6-8% if I leave it alone a couple of hours.
Earlier today I rooted the device and use Bloatware Freeze to freeze some stuff. Eventually I'll get rid of some of the gunk the tablet has installed. I want to figure out how to shorten that gap. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me that the tablet left alone consumes 8% of battery charge! I mean, if nothing can be done then so be it, I'll learn to live with it.
For my money I would bet that there is something hidden in the Iconia's OS build that thinks it is a 3G/4G device. Now, I'm wondering what would happen if I were to take the next (logical) step and put another ROM in it. Would this make a difference? If I can make the battery drain stop at 5% or less, that would make this perfect.
Thx!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow I don't even have 8% drain with Wifi on all the time. There maybe something else in the mix. Most of my drain is the screen as I set it to auto and in my home it ramps up brightness most of the time. Is it possible you have a rogue app? Have you tested the tablet 'fresh', ie: after a factory reset with 1 google profile set up?

Neoprimal said:
Wow I don't even have 8% drain with Wifi on all the time. There maybe something else in the mix. Most of my drain is the screen as I set it to auto and in my home it ramps up brightness most of the time. Is it possible you have a rogue app? Have you tested the tablet 'fresh', ie: after a factory reset with 1 google profile set up?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is interesting, on 3.01 & 3.1 I've had zero drain with screen off w/up to 16 hrs. Settings : Wi-Fi disconnect policy never when plugged in, location & security use wireless networks on & gps on. Airplane mode , always off. I can't understand why you folks are having these problems. Hope we find out. Oh & by the way that's not charging.
Forgot to mention I use Juice Defender.

Update
Well, after much tweaking I think I'm somewhere where I feel comfortable. As a disclaimer I don't take the Iconia with me on my daily commute. Again I take my EVO and my Nook with me. The tablet spends the entire time I'm out in the office at home, unused.
I disabled all screen animations and I'm using the tablet on the lowest brightness setting.
I disabled the GPS and all location-related settings.
I rooted the tablet and am using Bloat Freeze to freeze/disable some of the Acer 'junk'.
I put the table in Airplane mode before heading out.
Last night when I went to bed I didn't use it (I was reading a very good book and I did not use the tablet to watch any of my shows). So I put it in airplane mode after I played with the new Google Music app (Impressive!). I went to bed around 11:00 and woke up at 5:00. In this span of time, battery went down by 1%.
Used it this morning to tweet, check a couple of websites, email. Was @ 71% at 7:00AM. Came back close to 7:00PM. Battery was at 67%. Right now (8:50 EDT) it's at 1d 19h 55m on battery @ 59% charge. Heavy usage of TweetCaster, TuneIn Radio, Browser, Market, &c.
Mind you, it was not used for close to 8-9 hours or more. If I were to take it with me the consumption would be more, but then I would probably use Airplane mode when it was not in use. Besides, I can't use it at work b/c the wireless is not compatible.
I'll keep doing some research, but I'm comfortable. I accept the fact that it will drain regardless, since the OS is up. The previous consumption was too much, and I think I can live within the 2% - 4% consumption rate. If it can go down to 1%, though, that would be even better.
Any other ideas welcome.

beautiful Widgets comes with a widget to disable/enable wifi like we're all used to on our phones.
I loaded prime 9.3 today because I wanted to try a 3.2 rom (for GPS and sd-card reasons). On that rom I noticed the 3g settings were visible until I added the line "ro.carrier=wifi-only" to build prop. I was able to see cell standby show up in batt usage.
Not sure if you guys knew it or not but under battery usage you can click on the graph to see a graphical depiction of what hardware used the battery when. If GPS was active when it shouldn't have been you'll see it there.

Interesting...
Are you suggesting that the 3g apk is active on the 3.1 image? I posted this question to a developer in Market that has an app that kills this on the Iconia. Maybe that's the other 2% - 4% I can kill.

Prime is a 3.2 rom. You could try adding that line and rebooting though.

To the stock 3.1 image? Interesting. Any instructions?

You'll need an app like root explorer that will let you mount the /system partition as read/writeable. In the /system directory there will be a build.prop file that you can open with a text editor (root explorer has this feature built in). You'll see many "ro.xxx" lines. At the end of the first group you'll just need to add the line "ro.carrier=wifi-only" without the quotes. Save and exit the file. Reboot tablet. On reboot, it will read the values in build.prop.
On the prime 3.2 rom, the settings for mobile networks are visible without that line added to build prop. I was actually seeing cell standby in the battery usage list. I never saw that on the stock rom. I use a toggle button for the wifi to quickly turn it on/off from the home screen and that keeps wifi from using any battery while sleeping..
I really doubt that GPS is the culprit in your case. Did you click on the battery usage graph to see what hardware was using the battery during the period of sleep?

Also remember
The % charge that the system reports is not always a very accurate indication of how much charge your system actually has - what matters is up time and how long you can go between charges.
Airplane mode is your friend - no real need to disable animation (has nothing to do with idle charge) - the only thing I do is enable airplane mode when away from charger and not using my tab - some of the drain you are reporting could be due to your system scanning for open hotspots.
Also remember all it takes is one poorly coded app to totally screw your battery over - as you are rooted, quite easy to check for apps that relaunch themselves even after closed, apps that want to phone home every 60 seconds - etc.
Would highly recommend you take a close look at any non-stock apps that you have installed.

[Q] battery life difference b/w a500 and a501?

Just wondering, I have the 501 with honeyvillain (and have tried lightspeed and taboonay roms), and while I can't say that there are noticeable differences in battery life between the roms, using that weird iconia battery saver app DOES increase battery life, in what I've seen, by as much as 40%.
I might be crazy, it might just be me, I haven't actually done any proper tests, but with full backlight and relatively light internet use (email, pulse news, app updates from the market and stuff like that for maybe 2 hours a day at max), I see the battery draining faster while on 3g than on wireless. Am I right?
Granted, what the app does is restart the tablet with phone.apk and telephonyprovider.apk disabled, so it's basically turning it into a glorified a500, but I would like to know what your thoughts are on the matter. on idle, i've had my iconia stay up for up to 4 days, with wireless and 3g off. But with 3g on, it drains a whole lot faster than on wireless. Is there a fix for that, am I nuts, is there a setting like that enable always on mobile data that needs to be unchecked? what's the solution?
thanks

Interesting. Usually I run 2 or more days using the internal 3g. The only thing different I did, was checked "use 3g only" in my network settings so it wouldn't constantly be looking for the stronger network signal. That may increase your power savings.
After getting Wifi at home last week, I noticed for a little bit higher amount of usage, the battery reaches half charge at the end of the day, which is about normal for it. Of course I did a lot more with it using wifi.
Am running Taboonay 2.2 with thors kernel 3.9. Overclocked to 1.4gtz normally, unless I watch an HD film where I run it at 1.68Gtz.

interesting, thanks for the input. I did manage to squeeze more out of it with a number of small software tweaks, basically auto-lighting, disabled the always on mobile data and have a widget where i control pretty much any aspect of connectivity. power consumption has gone down. i wonder if ICS does any better in terms of power management.

[Q] How does rooting affect the battery life

As the title says, does rooting the NST affect the battery life at all?
What about using another e-reader app, say the kindle app, in comparison to the battery usage of the default reader?
And also that crazy NoRefresh app that I saw. What is the affect of the battery life with it enabled?

I can say it running like crazy
The battery went down to 40% for one day uses.
I have many email accounts on the sync though.

GoldenStake said:
As the title says, does rooting the NST affect the battery life at all?
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I've been running rooted for a few weeks now. I don't think rooting, per se, affects battery life so much as what you do with it.
Out of the box, the NST uses very little power. If you leave wifi off, it will last quite a long time. The minute you start loading up anything that wakes the unit up, or that turns on and uses wifi, battery life drops. Since it normally uses so little power, the drop seems quite dramatic.
Here are some rough and very unscientific numbers based on my usage:
Unit off with wifi off: 2% battery consumption per 6 hours.
Unit off with wifi on: 2% battery consumption per hour.
Unit on and in use with wifi on: 4-6% battery consumption per hour.
I haven't really let it sit long enough to really validate these, but they give you an idea. I'd expect to get a week to 10 days out of it with "typical" usage, and probably much more. Part of the problem of bench-marking this thing is how quickly it charges up, even when I only connect for a few minutes to side-load some books.
I use Tasker to turn wifi off unless a very small group of apps are running, and shut it off when they exit.
If you keep anything from polling, don't use active widgets and turn wifi off when not needed, you should get more out of it than most any other device you own. Watch out for things that hang in the background. I was once downloading some files from the Market and it hung, so I lost a lot of power overnight. If you load up with active wallpapers, widgets and/or apps that poll in the background, expect to see it using the battery quickly.

I charge every 4 days, but that's because I use it without wifi unless I am getting an app or something. But that's just me.

In my experience the battery life got worse after initial rooting. It is noticeable. Rooting itself has nothing to do with it.
The biggest offenders are apps installed in the process. I removed most of apps that either worthless for me or attempt using internet frequently. I don't think I need google on a book reader. The reader does not provide any privacy, even password protection. I removed everything related to google. Apps can be sideloaded if necessary.
Free SuperManager is a very good apps for managing the reader but free version tends to use internet too much.
Now the battery life is back to what it supposed to be. Rooting is only useful for me for gaining control and access to the web browser if there are no alternatives. NT is just a reader and a nice one.

My Nook died afer 3 days of intense exploring (wifi on non-stop).
I've spent approx. 6h/day on it.
But it's a pretty nice result IMO.
I think rooting does't really effect battery life by itself. I've checked battery life log on NookTouchTools (an app) and it says 77% was drained by display, but i cant compare it to non rooted version.

I've seen battery drain vary enormously from not dropping at all to dropping precipitously with normal off (not completely powered down) and WiFi shut off. I think that the only really way to get a handle on this is to put a milliampmeter in the battery circuit and measure in real time the current drain.
I do know that if you have the WiFi on you can still ADB to the Nook even when it is "off". You can even start apps!