Database Users

Battery Life

In the interest of branching out of the main thread, I thought I'd start a thread regarding battery life- how many hours are you guys getting? For those who have somewhat decent battery life, what tweaks/settings are you using?
I went and disabled background data syncing hoping this would at least help improve battery life only to find that even idle (with no real use at all), this thing eats battery like there is no tomorrow.
I think with super light usage the most I've gotten is about 4-5 hours. There HAS to be a way to improve on this. I can never walk around without my charger in my bag- that is just crazy.
So any ideas or suggestions would be great! (By the way, I'm running Dexter's latest rom on top of eLocity's official firmware update).

I'm posting 4 hours 54 minute uptime right now with a quick 10 minute game of fruit slice, light to moderate web browsing, and moderate to heavy instant messaging. I have 29% battery left.
I generally set my apps to sync no more frequently than 30 minutes at the least. I turn the screen off when I walk away to do something. Other than that the tablet stays running on my couch side all day.
I have also seen it go for days on standby mode without going dead. I'm happy with the battery life. My Archos isn't much better, and is much less powerful of a device.
I'm also on ElociMod (which is based off the newest firmware... )

cant get more than 4 hours no matter what i do. running dexter's modc

We might be able to help the battery life using some clever tricks with SetCPU. I know it helped on my Pandigital Novel, and 2/3 on that device was used to power the screen, as opposed to ~1/3 for the processor. I'm gonna guess it might be the complete opposite of that on the A7.

rspray said:
We might be able to help the battery life using some clever tricks with SetCPU. I know it helped on my Pandigital Novel, and 2/3 on that device was used to power the screen, as opposed to ~1/3 for the processor. I'm gonna guess it might be the complete opposite of that on the A7.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't think SetCPU works on the A7 or any other Tegra2 at least not yet.

djyellowperil said:
I don't think SetCPU works on the A7 or any other Tegra2 at least not yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It doesn't... it will FC.
CPU Tuner installs and runs. It shows a min of 260 MHz and a max of 1000 MHz, and it has profiles based on battery charge. I just installed it, so I don't know what to expect.

I wanted to resurrect this thread and post my experience with A7 battery life.
I am running Dexter 1.2, brightness at 35%, WiFi always on, Bluetooth mostly off, screen timeout at 2 minutes. Syncing three mail accounts, weather and Google calendar. Limited or no background syncing of other apps.
My typical day with the device consists of;
a full charge in the morning
3 to 4 hours of standby time
30-45 minutes of web use
another 3 to 4 hours of standby
3 to 4 hours of heavy web, texting, reading, and games
I place the A7 back on the charger at night and it usually has about 20%-25% charge left.
I figure I am getting about 4-5 hours of use and close to 8 hours of standby each day fairly easily.
This battery life is very comparable to my Droid 2 Global.

The ipad battery has more than 4 times the capacity of the A7, but only twice the run time.

Is this battery stat considered good?

I'm no battery stat guy, but could someone tell me if this is considered good battery life.

How long was your display on? You can check by tapping "Display" on that screen.
What level brightness was the screen? Did you use 4g? How long were you on the phone for? You can check by tapping "Voice Calls". Were you doing anything particularly battery intensive?

Looks good to me. Like the user above said see what your screen on time was.
Sent From My Evo Killer!

musclehead84 said:
Looks good to me. Like the user above said see what your screen on time was.
Sent From My Evo Killer!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sreen time was 2 hours!!

Looks alright to me.

shook187 said:
Sreen time was 2 hours!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its not absurdly short, but you could probably be getting a little better battery life. Now let me just clarify that I have ABSOLUTELY no idea what you were using your phone for or how you have it setup so you may be getting spectacular battery life for your specific setup.

Yeah it seems just a little short to me too. I usually average about 3 hours of screen on time with 12 hours of usage throughout the day. About 30% brightness.
A lot of the battery depends on background data, auto-sync, fetching widgets, coverage area, gps usage, gaming, etc etc. So much to account for that the image doesn't tell us.

I'm just trying to have an idea where I'm at compared to most. I just brought juice defender ultimate, so I'm starting to tweak things.

on Bonsai, I can get 3 and half hours screen on before it goes dead playing games.
With 2 hours on, minimal games, regular stuff, on Bonsai I could pull 24 hours probably.

If you are rooted get a voltage and cpu control. for normal web browsing use and talking on phone etc 600mhz at 1150mv is perfectly fine maybe even lower (even tethering). you should also have the cpu throttler tweaked to stay as low as possible.
when you need flash video running or something intensive you should be able to run the phone at 1200 25mv below factory ^^ (does not apply to games)
My downfall was overheating issues so I spent the last day testing things to do with power so I can use it plugged in without getting to hot
*edit
I am going to find the min usage and see whats possible at what speeds/ power without having bad performance

That's about what I average on stock Gingerbread. I've gotten up to 40 hours (weekend, hardly any use at all) on this phone but also have gotten as little as 3 hours (probably a stuck app I couldn't find).
No juice defenders, task killers, etc.

GS2 bug VERY slow charging and hot phone

i did not see a topic about VERY slow charging and hot phone issue
first of all, typically for 10% it takes me 3 hours to fully charge my GS2, and it is warm but not hot
randomly it seems to get a bug that makes the phone charge VERY slow like 15% an hour or total 6 hours, and at the same time the phone is much hotter than normal charging
i had Android Assistant running and here is what is normal idle system spec:
CPU
system 2%
user 5%
idle 93%
ram
used 329MB
free 507MB
battery temp 97F
when the bug occurs i go to the stock task manager, close all apps, and clear ram memory, and here are the system specs after:
CPU
system 20%
user 40%
idle 40%
ram
used 460MB
free 377MB
battery temp 114F
i have not been able to isolate the process/app/bug anyone else?

I use Watchover (freely available on the market), which can give you a list of processes and the percentage of CPU they use. You can then identify the processes that eat the most of your CPU.

It's not a bug but a feature
The phone takes about 3 hours to charge when no apps are running.
More, if apps are running and even more if you are using the phone.
Totally normal for this type of phone/battery.
So if you want it to charge as quickly as possible make sure as little as possible is taking power....

David Roosendaal said:
It's not a bug but a feature
The phone takes about 3 hours to charge when no apps are running.
More, if apps are running and even more if you are using the phone.
Totally normal for this type of phone/battery.
So if you want it to charge as quickly as possible make sure as little as possible is taking power....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
but i stop all APPs in task manager and even clear my ram cache, so technically it should be like idle with nothing running
and yet it shows 60% CPU usage and 100MB or ram used somewhere, no idea where

colonels said:
but i stop all APPs in task manager and even clear my ram cache, so technically it should be like idle with nothing running
and yet it shows 60% CPU usage and 100MB or ram used somewhere, no idea where
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OS Monitor from market to check what is eating the cpu.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

Doesn't clicking on battery usage show the same thing.
Do the other apps do something different.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

zoro25 said:
Doesn't clicking on battery usage show the same thing.
Do the other apps do something different.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this shows total usage between 100% charges of battery, so what might be the highest CPU % usage might not be what is currently stuck in a feedback loop
i want to see what process or app is "stuck" in a loop or on cycle that is causing the slow charging and hot phone bug
when i stop all apps in task manager and clear ram (which usually kills 19 processes in the background) i should be at 90%+ idle
i need an app that can show me a snapshot of what is running on demand and doesn't show what was running before but was stopped

What does the battery usage screen tell you? After trying to charge, unplug the phone and leave it for 30 minutes. Then open up the battery usage page and check which item is consuming battery power.

my phone was getting hot when i was using custom kernel and had overclocked
check your kernel first

colonels said:
i want to see what process or app is "stuck" in a loop or on cycle that is causing the slow charging and hot phone bug
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OS Monitor will tell you in real time which process is using up CPU cycles. However, battery usage shows you which app/process is using up the battery, which is what is happening to your phone. It is using up battery charge as fast as the charger is able to charge it. So check out which app has the highest percentage battery usage. If it is Android OS, then you will have to use OS monitor to dig deeper to pin point which Android OS process (there are many) is causing this.

so i identified the problem!
it is HANDCENT SMS (MEDIUM) WIDGET even though i do not have that widget loaded on any of my home screens
this gets somehow bugged and starts to use 30-40% CPU real time, and even after i force-close the process it comes right back in a few seconds
i have uninstalled HANDCENT SMS and my idle is back to 90%
i bet if you have the SLOW CHARGING HOT PHONE bug it is because of this widely popular SMS app, i am going to try GO SMS instead

Hi. I searched the forum for this problem. Just got an GSII three days ago. Experienced this a problem few minutes ago. Started charging my phone when I got home. It was at 36% at 46deg c. Then I talked to my friend on the phone. Checked back 30 mins later and it was at 33% at 53 deg c. It was the hottest the phone was ever. I panicked and unplugged it and shut the phone down. Turned it on 5 mins later and I just plugged it now.
Is my unit faulty?
Log when I plugged my phone into the charger until it reached 53 deg c:
2011/08/22|21:57:26|-678mA|35%|3810mV|41.0ºC|2|2
(must be when I plugged)
2011/08/22|22:02:26|58mA|36%|3762mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|22:07:26|-20mA|35%|3757mV|48.0ºC|0|1
2011/08/22|22:12:26|-165mA|35%|3703mV|50.0ºC|0|1
2011/08/22|22:17:26|-165mA|35%|3752mV|53.0ºC|0|1
2011/08/22|22:22:26|-165mA|35%|3752mV|53.0ºC|0|1
2011/08/22|22:27:26|-55mA|34%|3753mV|53.0ºC|0|1
2011/08/22|22:32:26|-55mA|34%|3768mV|53.0ºC|0|1
(unplugged, I shut phone down)
(booted up phone when it cooled and plugged charger again)
2011/08/22|22:46:18|-1mA|33%|3682mV|34.0ºC|1|0
2011/08/22|22:47:07|-1mA|33%|3726mV|34.0ºC|1|0
2011/08/22|22:52:07|-1mA|33%|3891mV|42.0ºC|2|2
2011/08/22|22:55:07|372mA|35%|3882mV|44.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:00:07|758mA|37%|3897mV|44.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:05:07|494mA|40%|3888mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:10:07|428mA|42%|3893mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:13:07|439mA|42%|3842mV|46.0ºC|1|1
2011/08/22|23:18:07|610mA|45%|3925mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:21:07|824mA|46%|3893mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:26:07|428mA|48%|3923mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:31:07|328mA|50%|3908mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:36:07|627mA|53%|3954mV|46.0ºC|2|1
2011/08/22|23:41:07|494mA|55%|3946mV|46.0ºC|2|1
EDIT: It's back to charging normally now. Temp at a stable 46deg c.

When I didn't rooted my phone, I also was experiencing overheating. Once I´ve rooted the phone and undervolted the phone and used kernel from Solarflare. Since then my phone didn´t overheat.

I wish we had a cpu temp reading as well as the battery temp one, I suppose the cpu usage will have to do, I think most overheating and slow charging is caused by power being used my the cpu as you charge the battery, some fault apps in conjunction with the heat of the battery produces when charging, really starts to heat things up.

Tinderbox (UK) said:
I wish we had a cpu temp reading as well as the battery temp one, I suppose the cpu usage will have to do, I think most overheating and slow charging is caused by power being used my the cpu as you charge the battery, some fault apps in conjunction with the heat of the battery produces when charging, really starts to heat things up.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was just going to point this out as well. The same is true for a laptop. Recharging the laptop with the laptop power off will still generate some heat near the battery, but the moment you turn it on and start checking email, watching youtube, and doing all kinds of other stuff, core temps are going to be higher than usual as the battery charging heat adds on to it. So, I wouldn't be overly concerned with the overheating part just as long as it on a open surface like your desk and not wrapped up in a blanket on your bed.
With regards to the slow charging, that will directly be related to how much you use the phone, number of currently running apps, and number of background apps running (syncing, etc). I strongly suggest putting the display brightness level to lowest setting when at home while charging since this is the single largest consumer (50%) of battery power compared to anything else for me. If you do find that there are some less responsive apps stealing cpu cycles when it shouldn't, then I would consider uninstalling it altogether as it probably is also reducing your battery life during the day.

Thanks for the replies. I know the SII has a tendency to work up some heat and I'm just worried about damaging the internals. Does anyone know though what the maximum operating temperature is? So I could monitor my phone or turn it off when it reaches a certain temperature. I tried contacting Samsung about this but they didn't reply (their CS is bad in my country).

prinzhernan said:
Thanks for the replies. I know the SII has a tendency to work up some heat and I'm just worried about damaging the internals. Does anyone know though what the maximum operating temperature is? So I could monitor my phone or turn it off when it reaches a certain temperature. I tried contacting Samsung about this but they didn't reply (their CS is bad in my country).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
same thing, i kinda worried with the internal parts, if it going too hot every time. Even only using wifi for browsing, it made a heat that really annoying

endoaja said:
same thing, i kinda worried with the internal parts, if it going too hot every time. Even only using wifi for browsing, it made a heat that really annoying
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah. I'd really like to know if it's okay that it gets hot a lot and at what temperature the internals get toasted. The manual says nothing about it.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA Premium App

I would say 46c when charging is way too hot, Im even finding 41c already above the expected charging temperatures.

I have noticed Kernels having a lot to do with strange battery drain and overheating. I flashed back to a stock Australian Carrier Firmware and as soon as my phone restarted it was getting hot. I could feel it burning through the back and front of the phone. I flashed another kernel and the problem went away.

Insane Battery Drainage

Hey, I got my nexus 4 a couple days ago and have been messing around with it. I recently went back to stock and flashed franco kernel. I just played about ten minutes of Modern Combat 4 and my battery fell more than 10%!!! I think it was fine when I first got it so I hope I didnt damage my battery somehow. I did run like 3 mins of stresstest but I did not let my battery temp get higher than 40 degrees Celsius. My CPU temp did hit 70 though and throttled. Im really baffled as what to do... When playing MC4 my phone did not feel overly hot and when I checked my battery temps were around 35 degrees.

Addsome said:
Hey, I got my nexus 4 a couple days ago and have been messing around with it. I recently went back to stock and flashed franco kernel. I just played about ten minutes of Modern Combat 4 and my battery fell more than 10%!!! I think it was fine when I first got it so I hope I didnt damage my battery somehow. I did run like 3 mins of stresstest but I did not let my battery temp get higher than 40 degrees Celsius. My CPU temp did hit 70 though and throttled. Im really baffled as what to do... When playing MC4 my phone did not feel overly hot and when I checked my battery temps were around 35 degrees.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gaming on a cellular device does eat up a lot of juice. Especially a game with great graphics like modern combat. I see you have red lines in your battery status. You must have bad signal or no signal from where you are. That drains battery power as well as it tends to draw more power to try to connect to the cell tower/antenna. (Just in case you didn't know)
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

scream4cheese said:
Gaming on a cellular device does eat up a lot of juice. Especially a game with great graphics like modern combat. I see you have red lines in your battery status. You must have bad signal or no signal from where you are. That drains battery power as well as it tends to draw more power to try to connect to the cell tower/antenna. (Just in case you didn't know)
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I actually dont have a sim card in yet, since I just got the phone.

I've found the phone goes longer between charges since I've broken it in a bit - a few months' charge / recharge cycles (plus expecting to need to recharge after a heavy gaming sesh) have helped
Sent from my Oric-1 microcomputer using Tapatalk 2

Addsome said:
I actually dont have a sim card in yet, since I just got the phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Even without the SIM card it still scans and connects to the wireless network (or attempts to when there is no signal), any cell phone with or without an active plan legally must be allowed to complete a 911 call.
Just one app's performance is not sufficient to determine the state of the battery. Run the phone for a couple of days (without the game) and get a better idea of the overall performance. I'm not sure what franco's kernel gets for battery life overall, but I'm sure other user's have posted in the thread, compare your use vs life to theirs.
In the future, don't stress test your phone. And don't double post threads please.

But my main question is, should it fall so steeply during a 10 min gaming session? If it kept falling like that I doubt il even be able to get an hour gaming time...

Addsome said:
But my main question is, should it fall so steeply during a 10 min gaming session? If it kept falling like that I doubt il even be able to get an hour gaming time...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's normal for MC4. I can completely drain my phone in about two hours playing that game.

USSENTERNCC1701E said:
Even without the SIM card it still scans and connects to the wireless network (or attempts to when there is no signal), any cell phone with or without an active plan legally must be allowed to complete a 911 call.
Just one app's performance is not sufficient to determine the state of the battery. Run the phone for a couple of days (without the game) and get a better idea of the overall performance. I'm not sure what franco's kernel gets for battery life overall, but I'm sure other user's have posted in the thread, compare your use vs life to theirs.
In the future, don't stress test your phone. And don't double post threads please.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Alright thanks. The first day I got it I was able to get 4 hours screen time since I was just installing stuff and readying it up. I just got worried that from my stresstesting for 3 mins I might of damaged the battery somehow. I wont be stresstesting again lol.

Addsome said:
The first day I got it I was able to get 4 hours screen time
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's pretty damn good. Game's tend to use up quite a bit of battery, even games that aren't that intense, I get about 4% drop in ten minutes of playing Plague Inc. I don't imagine that game is nearly as CPU/GPU heavy as MC4. Of course I tend to have screen brightness higher, so that burns juice too.

OnePlus 2. CPU Governor & little / big 810 CPU (6 Cores always ON!)

Hello,
I had the phone for almost 2 weeks, the battery life is horrible!! I had a MI4 and i would charge it once in 3 days.
Now i have this, i`m excited with the phone but noticed this:
During 100% - 20% battery range, by default the OS uses 4 CORES (of the little cpu) on minimum freq. + 2 cores (of the big CPU) on minimum NO MATHER WHAT!
Watch a video, boom, 5% of your battery drops down.
And then, it happens this:
When you reach 20% battery or lower, the BIG cpu gets disabled, that means that you have only 4 cores (of the little CPU) always on, starting from the min. frequency...and guess what.
From 20 percent you freakin' try hard to deplete the phone, for example, when i had hit the 20% mark of the battery i had 1 hour 49 minutes of display time. I have now, 5% and 3h 20m screen on time!
What i am trying to say, is it possible to have 4 cores of the little CPU always on, and when the load on the little cpus goes over 40-50% toggle the BIG CPU for 5 seconds, and keep it on if needed ?
If the rule for the battery percent exists, and this happens, it can be made in another way for sure!
Did anyone saw this behaviour?

Killer2k8 said:
Hello,
I had the phone for almost 2 weeks, the battery life is horrible!! I had a MI4 and i would charge it once in 3 days.
Now i have this, i`m excited with the phone but noticed this:
During 100% - 20% battery range, by default the OS uses 4 CORES (of the little cpu) on minimum freq. + 2 cores (of the big CPU) on minimum NO MATHER WHAT!
Watch a video, boom, 5% of your battery drops down.
And then, it happens this:
When you reach 20% battery or lower, the BIG cpu gets disabled, that means that you have only 4 cores (of the little CPU) always on, starting from the min. frequency...and guess what.
From 20 percent you freakin' try hard to deplete the phone, for example, when i had hit the 20% mark of the battery i had 1 hour 49 minutes of display time. I have now, 5% and 3h 20m screen on time!
What i am trying to say, is it possible to have 4 cores of the little CPU always on, and when the load on the little cpus goes over 40-50% toggle the BIG CPU for 5 seconds, and keep it on if needed ?
If the rule for the battery percent exists, and this happens, it can be made in another way for sure!
Did anyone saw this behaviour?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is normal. The 810 uses GTS (global task scheduling) as its form of core management. 6 cores are always on and the tasks are allocated to the right core. Samsung exynos uses the same system

Well, if others search for this issue, the culprit was that i had adblock installed and some google service in the background hammered the connection trying to send some analytics/location data or something, the connection would fail and the service would then retry again and again.
This made the WIFI always ON even if i had it set Keep wifi when display is off - NEVER + Scaning always available disabled!!
Now the cpu's are still the same 6 on - 2 sleep, but after disabling adblock my wifi turns off on screen off, and all analytics/location data/gsm connections are not hammering the cpu anymore.. and i have ~0.6/hour battery discharge in standby.

My former phone is Mi4 as well. I just dont like its UI style so I just held it for 4 month. But I charged my mi4 twice a day. My op2 is also twice a day. I dont think the battery life of mi4 is much stronger than my op2. 810 chipset does cost more battery especially under LTE mode.