I am confused in regard to two settings that I have noticed affects my idle battery drain significantly , even though my phone sleeps well with them on :
1- Google Wi-Fi & mobile location
2- and under advanced Wi-Fi settings: always allow scanning
I finally , after years of struggle with Android, have managed to achieve battery lives like people claim. My problem was Immense drain during idle time. My phone can never survive the say without the need for charging. Even when I am not touching.
After putting compulsion kernel and turning these two off, underclocking my cpu to 97 mhz and 2ghz on wheatley governor, my phone is sitting at 77 % 1 day and 3 hours idling . I left all services syncing on , including gvoice and whatsapp. I dont have facebook or twitter. It has also been on LTE this entire time and GPS on.
This is not really a battery stats thread.
My question is , Idle stats are really important to me, and i dont really understand the use for the above mentioned options and the difference between the two. Are they vital for anything at all ? can i leave them off al the time without any significant location deterioration ?
Thank you all !
<speculation>
#1 is only a grant of permission to collect location data from your handset - but not a power management control. It might mean that a small amount of additional data traffic occurs when either GPS or WiFi are already on - but doesn't affect *whether* those devices (WiFi and GPS) are powered up. So it applies at all times but is only meaningful when those devices are enabled by other means - either manually or automatically. Think of it as nothing other than a legal escape hatch for Google against privacy violation lawsuits.
#2 allows the *WiFi* hardware to be powered up for *reception* (probably with no indication that it is indeed dissipating power!) - but it won't try to associate and connect with any WiFi APs that you have set up. It is listening for beacons only*, and possibly band-hopping, if not channel hopping**. Think of it as "receive only WiFi"
It is my *guess* that #1 affects #2 - there shouldn't be any data collection if you have not allowed it so the #2 toggle state should not do anything if #1 is set to disable.
Having the WiFi radio in receive-only mode might not really use any noticeable amount of power for two reasons: 1st, because operating a radio in Rx mode only uses far less power than Tx mode, and 2nd because it is possible that when both #1 & #2 are enabled, the WiFi radio is only polled, rather than left on full-time. So, it's duty cycle might be extremely low.
</speculation>
None of the above speculation has been confirmed by me by looking at source code.
Whether or not this is important to you depends on your need for high precision location information. Parents that snoop on their kids' handset locations might want that WiFi listener stuff turned on - GPS does not work indoors in many locations.
HTH
* note that the geolocation databases (that map WiFi AP MAC addresses/SSIDs to lat/lon) are on Google servers, not on your phone - so this implies that there must be a way to get the data to Google even if the WiFi is "pseudo-off: receiving but not transmitting". Presumably this would then happen via the Mobile Data radio (LTE/CDMA/1xRTT)... which - perversely - would use even more power than a WiFi connection (for the same data).
**WiFi APs are supposed to broadcast their beacons on all channels (the beacon packet tells the STAs what the correct channel they should "talk" to the AP on). So it might be necessary to band-hop the receiver to account for single band APs, even if it is not strictly necessary to channel-hop within a band to observe available beacons. In any event, bear in mind that power usage by WiFi chips that are never transmitting is far lower than when transmission by the WiFi radio is also occuring.
Related
since I got my jasjar I I saw,sometimes, the battery was drained at 50% without using my jasjar in 3 or 4 hours. only one or two short phone calls. no msn running or any application. I have written a little C program that writes to a log file each 10 seconds the actual time(hour, minute and second) . ok, if there isn't 3g connection (of course, no programs running), and I turned off the device and when I turn on the device 5 minutes later I could see the CPU hasn't been running, so minimal battery drain. But if I do the same test but connected to UMTS (again no programs running, only the test program) I could see that my test program many times continues working many minutes, so cpu is working (i turned off the device), then it stops few seconfs, again It continues working....(the screen was turned off). so......be carefull if you turn off your jasjar with the umts connection active. while you think that your device is turned off and you are saving battery......its possible the cpu is running eating the battery.
and how do you disable UMTS and just leave GPRS on????
mmm, i simply disconnect the umts connection if i am going to turn off the device....
I have seen that my JASJAR is sporadically sending/receiving data in the background even if the applications are apparently inactive. This is causing the radio connection to stay up for a long time. Especially on Vodafone Spain UMTS network radio connections are kept for ~20seconds after the user data is sent.
The only application I had running was ActiveSync, with an update period of 5 minutes. However, within the 5 minutes I can see activity in the channel every 40 seconds approximately, even when ActiveSync has finished synching.
Anyone knows of any good packet sniffer for WM5.0 to identify exactly what that traffic is for?
As a consequence of what I think is background ActiveSync traffic, radio transmission is performed for a considerable amount of time (radio channel is active 33% of the time in my case), which drains battery extremely quickly.
This is related to this specific network implementation (all data sent on CELL_DCH mode, for those who understand UMTS RRM, though this is very likely to change in the near future), while other operators are using CELL_FACH, more similar to GPRS behaviour and more efficient in terms of battery usage. What network operator are you using?
If you want to avoid the UMTS network in order to maximise battery you can force the phone into GPRS only mode in Settings-->Phone-->Band and changing from Automatic to GSM... at the cost of not having video-calls, simultaneous voice+data or high download speeds.
Thank you y gracias !!!
If you want to avoid the UMTS network in order to maximise battery you can force the phone into GPRS only mode in Settings-->Phone-->Band and changing from Automatic to GSM... at the cost of not having video-calls, simultaneous voice+data or high download speeds.
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I have done this and ive noticed i have alot better signal strength now,
really, before i could never get over 1 bar and often saw it was scanning to try and find a network, now im nearlly allways all bars,
I dont use UMTS so im well happy with this setup
Dear all,
I'm wondering about Wifi telephony on the QTEK 9100.
It works fairly well with various software soutions. However, the phone has to stay "fully on" (except backlight) in order for th Wifi connection to remain up. This alters battery life severely.
I'm wondering if it is possible to have the Wifi connection stay up during power save mode, with some kind of "Wake on WLAN" event that would wake up the phone so that IP phone software can process incoming data.
Some of it already happens for GSM. I'm wondering whether the GSM part is "fully independant" (like on a different processor), or if it's handled by the main processor. In the later case, it may be possible to achieve something similar with Wifi telephony.
Thanks in advance for any hint.
so there is no way having WIFI enabled and lettign the pda go to sleep mode / power save mode ??
is there an APP that leaves power save mode off if the WIFI is enabled, so only the screen goes of light, and the pda stays on ?
P.
nbougues said:
Some of it already happens for GSM. I'm wondering whether the GSM part is "fully independant" (like on a different processor), or if it's handled by the main processor. In the later case, it may be possible to achieve something similar with Wifi telephony.
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It's fully independent. It's very cleverly written; this is why, for example, listening to incoming IMAP IDLE or Push Mail callbacks don't require the CPU at all.
yes i got that part on my own, thats why the GPRS connection stays on... but still there should be a registry somewhere to prevent device to go to sleep if WIFI conneciton is made..
tried all the powermode stuff in regisrty, nothn worked... out of clue...
papizdono said:
yes i got that part on my own, thats why the GPRS connection stays on... but still there should be a registry somewhere to prevent device to go to sleep if WIFI conneciton is made..
tried all the powermode stuff in regisrty, nothn worked... out of clue...
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I don't think you can do this - the WI-Fi module is completely independent of the radio module. Furthermore, you'll constantly need a LOT of power to keep the Wi-Fi connection up, as opposed to GSM/GPRS, where handshaking is only done during roaming to another cell and/or every (AFAIK) 10-20 minutes. Otherwise, the PDA doesn't trasmit anything, a sopposed to the Wi-Fi case.
That is, it seem sit's impossible to do any long-term Wi-Fi "listening" in the current Wi-Fi / PPC architecture.
papizdono said:
yes i got that part on my own, thats why the GPRS connection stays on... but still there should be a registry somewhere to prevent device to go to sleep if WIFI conneciton is made..
tried all the powermode stuff in regisrty, nothn worked... out of clue...
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Click to collapse
I don't think you can do this - the WI-Fi module is completely independent of the radio module. Furthermore, you'll constantly need a LOT of power to keep the Wi-Fi connection up, as opposed to GSM/GPRS, where handshaking is only done during roaming to another cell and/or every (AFAIK) 10-20 minutes. Otherwise, the PDA doesn't trasmit anything, a sopposed to the Wi-Fi case.
That is, it seem sit's impossible to do any long-term Wi-Fi "listening" in the current Wi-Fi / PPC architecture.
all i need is a tool that disables POWERSAVE mode if WIFI connections is made, or even if WIFI is enabled...
that would do all the work....
anyone ?
i think the closest thing is in phm powertoys (http://www.phm.lu/products/PocketPC/PowerToys/)
the screensaver option... what it does is turn off your touchscreen like in "sleep" mode but if u use this you might want to disable the power save option cause while u have screensaver on its still gonna count down n shut off ur ppc hope this helps!
Something strange since my upgrade to 1.66 - when the phone's in standby it appears to be establishing an active 3G connection, and when i wake (unlock) the phone, you can watch as it reconnects to the current wifi connection again. Is this some sort of energy saving strategy, which could theoretically run your 3G bill up? (dont matter to me as mine is unlimited, but not all are).
Anyone else notice/know about this?
By default, Wifi is disabled during standby to save power. So if a program requests an internet connection, for example outlook if you configured it to check mail automatically, the phone will connect the data connection.
You can search for "wifinostandby" to find a fix that disables auto wifi power off.
But beware that current consumption with wifi on is substantially higher than when it's off, by 10 times (current draw is about 50mA vs 5 for "true" standby), meaning you get at best 30h standby life if doing nothing else.
Also, dont forget that the top bar shows you the connetion being offered by your network, it doesn't necessarily mean it's doing anything. If you disable the wifif you see the same 3g icon regardless of what data is doing. So as said above, you go to standby, wifi is disabled so the wifi icon vanishes, then if you have your phone in 3g mode (personally mine stays in gsm mode, so i see an E not a H) when you wake it up it will display the H before the wifi kicks in and the icon changes back to wifi again.
It's my understanding that the radio will go into low power mode when the screen is off, unless some program is doing something over the network in the background.
I assume that when something happens in the background, the radio will wait for a period of inactivity before it goes into low power mode. Does anyone know how long this is?
I set up openvpn, and it kills my battery when I leave it connected. The default keepalive messages are sent every 10 seconds, but are adjustable. I have a home automation/security device that needs to be able to send data back to my phone for alerts, which is why I'd like to keep the VPN up all the time. I'm trying to figure out if I can increase the keepalive time enough to give the radio time to sleep, but not enough to allow my NAT session through TMO's proxy/NAT devices to timeout, which will break the VPN and require a reconnect.
Too bad IPV6 isn't widely supported yet, since it provides encryption at Layer-3, and would negate the need for NAT.
I haven't looked into IPv6 from the T-Mo side of things (are there even any v6 apps on the phone? anybody tried to access a v6 site yet?) but you can get a free v6 tunnel endpoint for your home from places like SixXS.
I'm fully IPV6 enabled inside my home network (including Android), running dual stack. And I have a 6to4 tunnel with tunnelbroker.net.
Apparently Android does not support IPV6 natively on the 3g/4g interface yet. Once that happens, it will be possible to get on the IPV6 beta with TMO. Right now, you need a Symbian or Maemo phone.
How change Wifi Power Level to save battery ? For example at my home, my Wifi acces is at 2 meters...
I don't think it works like that - a wifi receiver as in the A500 consumes as much power as it need to get the signal. It's the transmitter (on your router) that can be changed to save power.
Can the A500 be used ans a wifi repeater-type thing, to extrend wifi range (if so, then it would use more power to do that)?
The WiFi is an transceiver full-duplex
So, sure in receiver you can't change anything in consumption, but in transmit if you change the power in transmitting, your decrease the power in consumption of energie
Hard to imagine wanting to reduce your WiFi signal. Most hardware and software if made to optimize the signal. If you're trying to reduce power consumption try something like "CPU Tuner" which adjusts many factors both automatically (or fine tuned by you) to improve battery life.
The other option of course is to turn off WiFi if you don't need it constantly. Put a switch on your home page to allow quick on/off capability to make it a snap to do this on the fly.
LePocketPc said:
How change Wifi Power Level to save battery ? For example at my home, my Wifi acces is at 2 meters...
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I had the same issue with my first a500-16gb, I called acer support, described the issue and they directed me to exchange the unit. The second one worked normally and could get a good signal throughout the entire house.
On closing the case they indicated that there were a batch of units identified with defective wifi chips on-board.....