Develop Bugs

Competition: Best Batter life ROM

any chance of mods running such a comp? with 3 way toggle for battery save, gprs and gps?

you can always add the HTC widgets to the home screen that allow you to toggle all the battery draining stuff. And in 2.1, there's a single integrated google widget that does all the same stuff.

It is so intermittent that it would be impossible to get reliable results. I found brilliant battery life with Villain and average on MCR and really terrible on stock HTC. I get three times as long out of my phone now i'm on Villain than I did on the stock firmware.
However, everywhere you hear so many stories of people having poor battery life on custom roms and such varied accounts even on the same rom's that it would be impossible (at the moment) to get some reliable comparrisons.

I dont know u though about 2.1 or 1.5 but the Kimera v.1.5 , which based on android 1.5, has an awesome battery life

yes tried kimera, will try it again when phones re-charged, might have to give villain 4 ago beofre tho. my normal one is ahero tho.
be nice if could be some sort of benchmark for battery usage like there is for speed tho

blueflash said:
yes tried kimera, will try it again when phones re-charged, might have to give villain 4 ago beofre tho. my normal one is ahero tho.
be nice if could be some sort of benchmark for battery usage like there is for speed tho
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use a program called battery graph to monitor mine. Currently running 24 hours without dropping from 100%

btdag said:
I use a program called battery graph to monitor mine. Currently running 24 hours without dropping from 100%
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
and that doesn't make you suspicious? there is obviously something wrong...

Easiest solution............
Turn it off! If your that bothered about the battery life buy an old school nokia 3310 put a paygo sim card in your HTC just to play with it.
Have you not noticed that as phones get smarter battery life gets lower?
On a side note i charge my battery whenever possible, carry a usb lead everywhere with me as i can plug it in at home,in the car,in the pub,at work etc

And remember - regardless of which ROM you use, if you use a lot of widgets, programs which run in the background or programs which sync often, you will find that your battery life will be significantly reduced nonetheless.
Often you can use a shortcut to an application instead of a widget and get on-demand functionality instead of an auto-updating and battery-draining widget.
Disabling wifi / mobile data / mail auto-syncing / GPS, as well as decreasing brightness and the time the screen is on while not using your phone, will help for any rom too.
Good luck.

kendong2 said:
and that doesn't make you suspicious? there is obviously something wrong...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're suggesting I should be suspicious because my battery is lasting like it should be? Currently:
71% left
Up Time: 2d 20h 47m 59s
66% Cell standby
34% phone idle
I've also been texting and internet & market but nothing heavy.
It just depends on what you do with your phone, I wonder sometimes why people think they should be able to have wifi, gps, bluetooth, and every other feature turned on and expect their phone to last more than a day? Does your laptop last a day? and look at the size of that battery. I know the hardware is stripped down but your phone is now essentially a miniature pc so stop complaining. If you get used to turning off all the features which drain the battery you'll see a marked improvement. If you can't turn them off for any reason then buy a larger capacity battery! There are loads around on ebay and other sites. hxxp://cgi.ebay.co.uk/EXTENDED-3000-MAH-BATTERY-REAR-COVER-FOR-HTC-HERO_W0QQitemZ380174233125QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_MobilePhones_MobilePhoneAccessories_MobilePhoneBatteries?hash=item5884266e25

btdag said:
You're suggesting I should be suspicious because my battery is lasting like it should be? Currently:
71% left
Up Time: 2d 20h 47m 59s
66% Cell standby
34% phone idle
I've also been texting and internet & market but nothing heavy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes because the battery should not work like that, its a smartphone not a bottom range nokia work phone.
like I have said before no smart-phones battery are meant to last longer than say 2 days max of normal use maybe 5 at a really really really basic/no use

Battery Life

Hi
Had my phone a little over 24 hours and I may have a very poor battery
I have a LIVE screen on the one with the water and the leaves plus, I haven't made or received any calls but I have used it a little for internet and a few text messages
The green bar was on full about 5 hours ago and if I had to guess how long my use has been I would say 30 mins in total of the 5 hours, now my battery is indicating less than half full
Imagine if I was out all day making and receiving calls?
Does this sound normal?

This is normal for the first week or two , the battery is adjusting itself to your needs
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

It's absolutely normal and you'll really notice a difference in about ten days, a couple of weeks the most.
That said, live wallpapers do use more battery. I much prefer a static dark one

adding to that make sure your phones nicely drained before recharging to ensure you get a nice full charge for next time... i took my desire's battery at least 5 days to start having a long term charge

bettery
same here took a week also what really helped me is having advanced task killer and setting it to kill unwanted apps after i lock the screen

i dont think you should use task killer, the apps will end them selves, i used task killer and got alot of force close after and errors etc
however force stopping unwanted applications is also good.

Android system 30%
cell standby 25%
phone idle 17%
android OS 15%
Display 11%
Internet 2%
5 H 55M 55S unplugged, hahaha no joke its all 5's
and now my battery is almost dead surely this cant be right
has anyone ever been given a replacement battery for their phone or do they ask for the phone to be returned if this is infact a fault

Battery sucks, phone is power hungry. Get used to it
I've had 2 desires since a week after it was released, i can count on one hand how many times I've got through a day without plugging my phone in.

I get about 2 days on my phone if I don't mess around with it a lot or get many calls. I normally plug it on overnight. Every night.
Nowadays that seems normal for a smartphone. Personally I think the battery life is slightly better than the iPhone 3GS.
Angry Birds means it lasts about 4-5 hours...
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

It's all down to how your using your phone. If you have a live wallpaper and many widgets and apps that run in the background like running in the notification bar, then yes, your phone will die pretty fast. Also it depends on how much CPU your burning. When I first got my Desire, I was like WTF. This is useless battery life and was starting to play hell. Now it's fine. I can leave it for 2 days easily if I just text or flick through settings. It just depends on what your running.
BTW, no one should have a task killer. It defeats the purpose of Android. You can get a lot of force closes and other things. Just leave them alone and let the OS handle the apps. Android does end the process if it's idle, eventually, but it's not using anything really other than a bit of memory just to keep it going a little.

As GoogleJelly pointed out, it really does depend on what you do with your phone and what's apps/processes are running on it while the device is using battery. Even I found the battery life pretty poor at the beginning...I found it quite annoying having to charge this thing nearly every day.
After some light tweaking, I managed to get the battery life to go over 3 days and I now have no reason to complain about my phone Mind you, I'm not a heavy user....As for background apps, I think i've got about 5/6 apps running at a time...
EDIT: I've attached a screenshot of my battery meter.....

What app are you using to view your battey history?

I also tested task killer when I got my phone. I thought it was fixing battery life, but after bedding the phone in a bit I took it off to see how much difference it would make and I didnt notice any difference at all...
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

GoogleJelly said:
What app are you using to view your battey history?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I configured Quick Battery app to go to battery history from my phone settings every time I tap on it. You can view your battery history through:
Settings > About phone > Battery use.
If you want the graph, just tap on the top layer which shows the length of time you've been on battery.
EDIT: This works for Gingerbread based ROMs (it's the standard feature lol)...can't remember this being on Froyo.

infinityharry said:
adding to that make sure your phones nicely drained before recharging to ensure you get a nice full charge for next time... i took my desire's battery at least 5 days to start having a long term charge
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is irrelevant with Li-ion as this is a myth from the ages of NiMh batteries. Your battery will not get ruined if you don't discharge it completely before first charging.
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

efcgenius said:
Android system 30%
cell standby 25%
phone idle 17%
android OS 15%
Display 11%
Internet 2%
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
great guideline, thx

Evil_Cid said:
I configured Quick Battery app to go to battery history from my phone settings every time I tap on it. You can view your battery history through:
Settings > About phone > Battery use.
If you want the graph, just tap on the top layer which shows the length of time you've been on battery.
EDIT: This works for GIngerbread based ROMs (it's the standard feature lol)...can't remember this being on Froyo.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ah right, cheers for that. Didn't know it was all built in

One of the main reasons why new smartphone owners experience fast battery drain lies in the simple fact that they fill up seven homescreens with widgets that sync over mobile internet every hour or even more often, which really kills the poor juice like a massive gas leak.
After about half a year of use I've reached a stage where I use just 2 screens on my Desire (CM 6.1.1), of which page no2 is a full 4x5 agenda and Page one has just one actively updated widget (home weather).
Combined with restricting network usage of random apps by means of DroidWall and underclocking the processor at certain parameters (eg. battery <50%) the phone lives for 2 days pretty easily, with moderate browsing, music etc included.
But TBH I've really decided that the battery usage is absolutely random because some days it just drains like there's no tomorrow with no apparent reason that I've been able to identify. Carry a spare microUSB wire tbh :/

I read so much myths in this thread concerning Li-Ion batteries.
First of all Li-Ion batteries do have instantly the capacity they are intended for. Even 5 charges won't change that. The only thing which can change over time and charge-cycles is your phone recognizing a new voltage level as "full" (read more: "calibrating htc desire battery") or you playing less with the phone or having power-consuming apps uninstalled.
Also a full first charge is not necessary. This "requirement" are from past days with NiCd or NiMH battery-types.
Read more: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_lithium_ion_batteries

System of a pWne!^ said:
I read so much myths in this thread concerning Li-Ion batteries.
First of all Li-Ion batteries do have instantly the capacity they are intended for. Even 5 charges won't change that. The only thing which can change over time and charge-cycles is your phone recognizing a new voltage level as "full" (read more: "calibrating htc desire battery") or you playing less with the phone or having power-consuming apps uninstalled.
Also a full first charge is not necessary. This "requirement" are from past days with NiCd or NiMH battery-types.
Read more: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_lithium_ion_batteries
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The calibration during the initial week or so of using the phone arises from phone-side calibration, not the battery itself, which is why deleting battery stats from recovery can at times resolve battery issues :V
Phone didn't last half a day after flashing CM 6.1.1; after a couple of days I charged it to 100%, deleted the stats and voila, it's about as perfect as a terrible smartphone battery can get.

[Q] Battery Issues . Please vote!!!

I think the most complained about issue with SGSII is the battery.
But is it such a big issue.
My situation : Inspite of heavy use I usually make an entire work day with atleast 10-20% battery left.
I always have a micro usb cable in my locker at work which is an emergency back up.
The reason for poll : To correct my ignorance as I think majority of people are unnecessarily complaining

I'm with you, OP.
Certainly, the battery life of the GS2 is unimpressive. I would even agree if someone said that the battery life is below average.
But it does seems like a lot of people who complain about the battery life just have unrealistic expectations. Using the phone will lower the battery level. That seems pretty natural to me. If you're going to keep the display on for over an hour, you can't expect the battery level to dip just 1% or 2%.
Then there are people who talk about the Android-OS bug. They show some impressive data on usage depending on scenarios. It's an interesting read and I understand what they're trying to say. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to me. Before I knew about the Android-OS bug, my usage patterns meant that my battery level drops to about 30% by the time I get home from work. After I read about the Android-OS bug, it didn't change my usage patterns and my battery performs same as before.
Sure, it would be great if the battery never dips below 90% but unless the day comes when we have tiny self-sustaining fission reactors built-in to your devices, it won't be happening. (I'm thinking about that thing that Doc Ock invented in Spiderman2, just smaller.)

ohyeahar said:
Sure, it would be great if the battery never dips below 90% but unless the day comes when we have tiny self-sustaining fission reactors built-in to your devices, it won't be happening. (I'm thinking about that thing that Doc Ock invented in Spiderman2, just smaller.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You got me all excited.
I dream of the day when we have batteries the size of a grain that will last for few years, like most watches

Missing selection
never happened rarely charge .
jje

JJEgan said:
Missing selection
never happened rarely charge .
jje
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
may be next time

Completely depends on usage. Generally have 30-40% remaining everyday - screen use of 3-4 hours. gmail, FB on 30 min syncs, EDGE always on. Ended up with 78% remaining on a day on which I had a lot of work to do (so less time on the phone)
Can't expect more from a smartphone at this point of time. (using Lite'ning ROM 1.5, Tegrak OC 1.4 Ghz)

Unfortunately My device battery life is poor too

I can make it most of the day through work without recharging, and that's considering having both bluetooth turned on and either music or podcasts playing most of the day, and that the building I work in being very good at blocking wireless signals, so my phone spends alot of time trying to find a connection.

Knock on wood, ive been really lucky
i have an optus ke2 that has been rooted and all ive done is remove the optus stock and other not need apps, and so far, still being at the stage where the phone gets turned on every 5 min, ive needed to charge every second day or so with brightness on full.
i love my SgsII

How many of you with bad battery life have also got an sd-card plugged in?
I've just taken mine out (class 10 16GB) and it seems to have improved battery life?

Without SD card, and with power saving mode on, I get 3 days but with only EDGE on and routine voice calls.
Facebook takes the most battery and also the browser, I feel.
BUT NO WIFI and NO 3G! Its bad, thinking of extended battery if I have to used all that stuff.

[Mango] battery drain

follow this steps for some reason if u experience battery drain in mango
1.- Turn off the phone and pulled out the sim card.
2.- Turn on the phone without the sim card. (Why?, eerr...i don't know!)
3.- Turn off the phone again and reinstalled the sim card.
4.- Finally, turn on the phone.
Please let us know if it worked for you

I've just done it.
I'm a bit skeptical if this method actually improves anything...
Let's see tomorrow how it goes...
I'll post the result here.

The best way to resolve battery drain issues is by resetting Mango after its flashed. I did that with mine and the battery stopped pouring out like a rain drain to just sipping a fine wine.

MartyLK said:
The best way to resolve battery drain issues is by resetting Mango after its flashed. I did that with mine and the battery stopped pouring out like a rain drain to just sipping a fine wine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes resetting works...but the prob is sometimes the drain comes back...
apparently it has to do with push email and connections..
especially yahoo mail.....maybe the telco is not playing friendly with this one

MartyLK said:
The best way to resolve battery drain issues is by resetting Mango after its flashed. I did that with mine and the battery stopped pouring out like a rain drain to just sipping a fine wine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
confirm, it works.
Data connection is the problem of battery drain if we've got data connection off, wifi off, location and bluetooth off battery drain is minimal, I can say 1-2% per 5/6 hours in sleep (during night) with data connection (during sllep) about 5-10% in the same time

MartyLK said:
The best way to resolve battery drain issues is by resetting Mango after its flashed. I did that with mine and the battery stopped pouring out like a rain drain to just sipping a fine wine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I did that anyways cause everything was amuck after the update. My HD7 gets like 4 hours battery life while browsing on a full 3G connection. And that's not a 4 hours of having the screen on/using it, either... Already tried a different battery, no change.
Yes, the data connection drains a colossal ton of battery, not helped by this phone's small battery size.
They need to add quick toggles for GPS, Bluetooth and stuff like that. 3rd party apps clutter up my app menu so I don't install those. Just need a quick toggle somewhere, or add the command to the voice recognition system ("GPS Off/On", "Bluetooth Off/On", etc.).
It's much easier for me to manage battery on the Vibrant because Turning off Superfluous features like WiFi, GPS, and Blue Tooth are only a swipe and a tap away. Not so much on WP7. I never turn off my data connection, so I'm confused why Microsoft added a Data Connections app, but nothing for GPS, WiFi, or BT. Just need to add in some toggles somewhere... that are easily accessible.

I don't understand how you get 4 hours when I play music/podcasts all day at work, text all day, use apps, and go online & my HD7 makes it through at least my 9 hour work day
Sent from my HD7 using Board Express

apparently sim issues in the OS cause battery drain problems
THis is a problem found , even in IOS and android
Wp7 should be no exception

I own a Focus and I started a thread exactly because I found a similar issue. However, the "drain" wasn't present in 7660 (Mango beta).
Indeed, data connections have a 10-20% negative impact on battery life compared to beta (at least on my Focus), but the heaviest drain I got from apps that run in the background. Once I disabled those, the boost is more than noticeable.
I will also try what OP described. Btw, how/where did you get to that?

EnderPsp said:
I own a Focus and I started a thread exactly because I found a similar issue. However, the "drain" wasn't present in 7660 (Mango beta).
Indeed, data connections have a 10-20% negative impact on battery life compared to beta (at least on my Focus), but the heaviest drain I got from apps that run in the background. Once I disabled those, the boost is more than noticeable.
I will also try what OP described. Btw, how/where did you get to that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well i did it works, i am not sure how but such a procedure , may reset something in the phone
maybe some issues with signal.

Well for me it did nothing...
@EnderPsp:
Last week I disable the apps that are running in the background and I noticed a small boost in battery perfomence.

HRQ.SLV said:
Well for me it did nothing...
@EnderPsp:
Last week I disable the apps that are running in the background and I noticed a small boost in battery perfomence.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i also did this at the same time
refer here
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1302541
running the taiwan SEA rom
flashed it a few weeks ago
Tried restoring in zune to nodo
it seems microsoft does not want u to go back to nodo
anyone can confirm?
the phone restarts with the black screen of the phone connected to computer picture . Says restoring , then throws up an error and restarts to normal
But something peculiar happened. My battery life improved after this error message. not sure why..
has it got something to do with zune "resetting" ot "modifying the phone??

FiyaFleye said:
I don't understand how you get 4 hours when I play music/podcasts all day at work, text all day, use apps, and go online & my HD7 makes it through at least my 9 hour work day
Sent from my HD7 using Board Express
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Either you are lying, or you are mistaken and are talking about another phone.
Because Mango won't last that long.

FiyaFleye said:
I don't understand how you get 4 hours when I play music/podcasts all day at work, text all day, use apps, and go online & my HD7 makes it through at least my 9 hour work day
Sent from my HD7 using Board Express
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I never said I understood. I just know that the battery drains ridiculously fast and I lost over well 10% an hour, easily. When it's at 67% the battery saver says 2 hours remaining, and it's not lying. It has worse battery life than a cheap laptop.
Unusable as a daily driver because it dies way too damn fast.

I wouldn't call it horrible on my Focus, but it is definitely more of an issue than it was with NoDo. Following the same usage patterns as before I am lucky to get 12 hours out of a charge, where on NoDo it would just barely last through a 16 hour day. So I either charge it midway through the day, or don't use it as much. Right now I'm not using it as much .

I found change the Brightness to low instead of Automatic saves a lot of battery usage, I am so surprised.

xflier said:
I found change the Brightness to low instead of Automatic saves a lot of battery usage, I am so surprised.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah but in daylight you can't really see it then. Which is too bad.
I actually would've thought that the Focus would have a better battery as they have the AMOLED going on.

xflier said:
I found change the Brightness to low instead of Automatic saves a lot of battery usage, I am so surprised.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I found that out many months ago. I don't know if it makes a difference on all phones, but it significant on the Focus. Unfortunately, my Mango battery drain observations are with the brightness already on Low.

The Focus has a Super AMOLED screen, which has 5x the outdoor visibility and 20x the viewing angles of the HD7. That may work for that phone, but it would make the HD7 unusable for me outdoors; and I'm assuming many other people. It only has an LCD screen. With automatic brightness I can already see my own reflection in the screen more clearly than the actual phone/OS images...

"The Focus has a Super AMOLED screen, which has 5x the outdoor visibility and 20x the viewing angles of the HD7. That may work for that phone, but it would make the HD7 unusable for me outdoors; and I'm assuming many other people. It only has an LCD screen. With automatic brightness I can already see my own reflection in the screen more clearly than the actual phone/OS images..."
this makes me feel better that I picked Samsung phone, I was regretting Samsung focus because It randomly reboot and also after 10-15 mins HD video recording, I suspect it is quality issue.

Battert Usage - Former iPhone User Surprised - 4G LTE? PowerAMP Wakelock?

With these larger screens and powerful processors, I can't say I'm totally surprised at the lower battery life compared to all the iPhones. They have smaller screens and the O/S is more tightly controlled and optimized for the hardware to maximize battery life.
With that said, I must admit, I'm somewhat disappointed with the battery life on this S3. I've now had it for two weeks so after lots of tweaking, rooting, apps installs and configs, battery and task monitoring, etc, I've kind of settled into my normal usage pattern which is typically pretty easy on the phone as more than 50% of the time I'm working from my home office with the phone plugged into USB so it is rare I have to leave in the morning and go the whole day without having to eventually sit back down at my computer and plug the phone back in.
However on the weekends, with kids sports and such, I'm now seeing the limitations on battery life on this phone. I have it set to:
Auto Display Brightness
No updating of apps unless on WiFi
GPS and Wifi turned off when I leave the houose (automatically via Llama - I turn them on only when I need them)
Power Saver Mode, all options except CPU power saving checked. (Kind of bought the phone for fast CPU although I'm not a gamer - just a multitasker and web browser)
Auto Screen Tone Turned On
Most other specific apps that have option to not download data except wifi I have that option turned on (aside from Taptu news feeds - 2 hour updates and Alerts from ESPN ScoreCenter - get maybe a couple alerts every few hours)
Haptic feedback turned off
Here's where I was shocked. First time I did some serious browsing was in a movie theater where I got there early and had about 20 min to burn so I did constant web browsing over the LTE connection. Watched batter plummet about 15% in 15 min. Whoa!
So is this just "how it is" with this phone that heavy LTE data usage eats battery like no tomorrow?
Other thing I noticed, is Using GSam, I see a task usually being in the top 3 or 4 most of the time with around 15-20% of the App Battery Usage total. It's called "System (*wakelock*)" and when I look at properties it shows around 6-8 wakelocks and Included Packages is just one "PowerAMP Full Version Unlocker" Included Processes: *wakelock* and com.maxmpx.audioplayer. But this is when I'm not using PowerAMP. In fact it happens after phone has been rebooted and I have never launched PowerAMP once!
I did notice something similar on the HTC One X+ I tried then exchanged for the S3 where I found a task associated with beats audio was eating up CPU/Battery when no music app was open as if it was periodically scanning my large MP3 library of 2,600 songs. Maybe PowerAmp is doing something similar?
I've found I'm not the only one noticing this:
http://forum.powerampapp.com/index.php?/topic/2662-battery-drain/

Well, first off, i think the main reason why the iPhone gets better battery life isn't because of the smaller screen or iOS being "optimized for the hardware". It's probably more due to the fact that it doesn't really run much of anything in the background. Very few apps actually continue to run when you leave them. It's kind of a pseudo-multitasking environment.
As for the S3's battery life.... it could be PowerAmp causing it. I also don't see why you'd want to keep power saving on the CPU off. It doesn't really seem to have that much of an impact on performance that i've seen while generally using the phone for web browsing and such. And no matter what phone you're on, LTE will kill the battery in no time flat.

I think you should give some time to settle your battery first...even after flashing a new rom its take couple of days for the battery to settle down. The first day i used my phone, the battery doed in 4 hours...now after 4 months it lasts for 15-16 hrs of normal to heavy use.
LTE does eat lots of battery, whenever i go in LTE area i have to switch my data off to keep my phone alive. That's why people like to have the ability to switch between LTE and HSPA+. Search to find that mod.
You can never compare iPhone with S3. As the above poster said, there is no multitasking in iPhones. The screen is small and not as good as S3. SAMLOED screen takes lots of battery.

viny2cool said:
I think you should give some time to settle your battery first...even after flashing a new rom its take couple of days for the battery to settle down. The first day i used my phone, the battery doed in 4 hours...now after 4 months it lasts for 15-16 hrs of normal to heavy use.
LTE does eat lots of battery, whenever i go in LTE area i have to switch my data off to keep my phone alive. That's why people like to have the ability to switch between LTE and HSPA+. Search to find that mod.
You can never compare iPhone with S3. As the above poster said, there is no multitasking in iPhones. The screen is small and not as good as S3. SAMLOED screen takes lots of battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I totally agree with you. You have to give it time to settle in. You can also run a battery calibration to try and help as well. I have LTE here in Omaha and I usually get at least 15 hours before I need to charge my battery. I have a QCell battery and it works awesome.
I will live with the battery life so I can actually see the screen without having to squint my eyes. I used to have an iPhone as well but that was years ago now and Android will always be the best.

Don't get me wrong, as a "Power User" coming from the iOS Jailbreak world, hardware and customization-wise, I love this phone a lot more than I like my iPhone - but mostly it's the big screen that I'm enjoying. Have had a couple crashes in the first two weeks which never happened in iOS but no biggie.
So I suspect its primarily the LTE, but combined with large screen, true multitasking O/S, etc, obviously battery life is a challenge. I would slightly criticize Samsung for maybe being a little too obsessed with keeping the phone thin. I know you can buy the bigger batteries with a replacement cover but that looks like it really adds major thickness to phone. They should have went for a 2500-2700 mah battery and increased the thickness slightly IMHO.
But hey, at least the battery is removable. So I can spend little money and get a QCell, charge it and keep it in my car or on my desk and if I know I'm not going to be able to charge the phone all day, just pop the extra battery in my jacket pocket.
The LTE usage is a bit of a mystery to me. You would figure, with LTE, you can download files faster so you spend less time actually using the phone. But obviously it appears the energy consumption is trumping the increased efficiency in data transfer! Too bad.
Why the battery 'breaks in' over time is even more of a mystery. This latest battery technology should not have any sort of break-in or memory issues. But I'm no battery expert. But my gut says there's something else at play. I've seen many threads over past couple of years that discuss an issue relating to Android doing some sort of "media scan" after boot and/or periodically. Maybe the battery break-in is more about the databases the O/S is creating and updating in the background "settling down" more than anything to do with the characteristics of the physical battery changing?
One thing is for certain though, battery life IS a common issue for most higher-end Android smartphone users. Not a deal breaker in the least for me, but will be interesting to see how the phone "seasons" over time regarding battery. I used Titanium Backup to freeze Power Amp and downloaded N7 instead just to rule Power Amp out. I just took a 1.5 hour shopping trip. Didn't use LTE data. But spent about 45 minutes at the grocery store using their wifi to access all my coupons and shopping lists. Battery was 97% when I left house, 77% when I got home. Ouch. Well, that was probably more like a 2 hour round trip. Still 20% in 2 hours is not good especially considering I had 0 talk time and wasn't using LTE data.
The crazy thing is, Gsam says 12% screen, 86% apps. Under apps it says 23.6% Kernel, 19.3% Media, 19.3% N7 Player!!! And I didn't play any music!!!! This is leading me more and more to believe this all has something to do with having an extremely large music collection (2600 songs) on the phone and the phone is building a database and it just takes time. Pure guess.

Get his app disable autostart of the applications that are not needed. Also, get betterbatterystats to get a more detailed idea of whats going on with your phone.

how bad is your battery life? fwiw my wife's iPhone 5 gets horrendous battery life. makes the s3 look like a miser.
16 - 20 hours would be reasonable IMHO, or a average drain of 4-5% per hour. assuming you're actually using the thing... I never understood people who cripple the thing and never touch it in order to get max life.

Russ77 said:
how bad is your battery life? fwiw my wife's iPhone 5 gets horrendous battery life. makes the s3 look like a miser.
16 - 20 hours would be reasonable IMHO, or a average drain of 4-5% per hour. assuming you're actually using the thing... I never understood people who cripple the thing and never touch it in order to get max life.
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Iphone5 has a bigger screen then previous apples and it's also Lte. It's multitask has been improved too. It's not a secret its battery life plummeted.
Sent from my SGH-I747M using xda app-developers app

You know when someone pushes away an iPhone groupy I'm pretty sympathetic but this post is just a noob rage idiotic post. I didn't even read through all your points but will just say you need to spend more time learning
-there is autobrightness on root (and non rooted) and in fact autobrightness doesn't necessarily save battery...as much utiltiy as having say a brightness notification in the app bar or something like lux that allows you to control brigntness by environment/app etc
-it says nothing of what you have running in the background, spam apps, wakelocks etc (bbs) The fact your apps and music is taking up more battery than say cell tower stanbdy and screen display is an obvious red flag
- says nothing of how you checked your connections and how reception is in your area
Another point is the iphone 4 and 5 are MUCH thicker than the galaxy s3...they hold relative to the backgroudn processes etc running, a much larger and thicker battery. The same physical thickness of the s3 battery you could buy a battery with nearly twice as much juice.
We dont' know how you optimized your phone for your uses or whether you cleaned up processes, apps etc, how cleanly you flashed. Go and learn then come back and cry

Wow.... you tell him to learn then come back and cry.... say it's a "noob rage idiotic post".... and yet:
jazee said:
Other thing I noticed, is Using GSam, I see a task usually being in the top 3 or 4 most of the time with around 15-20% of the App Battery Usage total. It's called "System (*wakelock*)" and when I look at properties it shows around 6-8 wakelocks and Included Packages is just one "PowerAMP Full Version Unlocker" Included Processes: *wakelock* and com.maxmpx.audioplayer. But this is when I'm not using PowerAMP. In fact it happens after phone has been rebooted and I have never launched PowerAMP once!
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I'm sorry... but exactly what did he not mention about wakelock's?

You obviously didn't read the first sentence of my second most before you posted this, which said:
Don't get me wrong, as a "Power User" coming from the iOS Jailbreak world, hardware and customization-wise, I love this phone a lot more than I like my iPhone
I know all about Better Battery Stats, bla bla bla. I'm no idiot. Just giving some initial impressions and asking for a little further guidance.
zetsui said:
You know when someone pushes away an iPhone groupy I'm pretty sympathetic but this post is just a noob rage idiotic post. I didn't even read through all your points but will just say you need to spend more time learning
-there is autobrightness on root (and non rooted) and in fact autobrightness doesn't necessarily save battery...as much utiltiy as having say a brightness notification in the app bar or something like lux that allows you to control brigntness by environment/app etc
-it says nothing of what you have running in the background, spam apps, wakelocks etc (bbs) The fact your apps and music is taking up more battery than say cell tower stanbdy and screen display is an obvious red flag
- says nothing of how you checked your connections and how reception is in your area
Another point is the iphone 4 and 5 are MUCH thicker than the galaxy s3...they hold relative to the backgroudn processes etc running, a much larger and thicker battery. The same physical thickness of the s3 battery you could buy a battery with nearly twice as much juice.
We dont' know how you optimized your phone for your uses or whether you cleaned up processes, apps etc, how cleanly you flashed. Go and learn then come back and cry
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Well here's an update. As I mentioned, I froze PowerAmp and installed N7 instead. I could have swore I reset the GSAM battery monitor, AFTER N7 scanned all my media files. Yet once again, like PowerAmp (via System *wakelock*) N7 was third highest battery eater over 2 hours of "normal" usage WITHOUT LTE Data Use, only Wifi and NO TALK TIME and WITHOUT USING N7!
So I dumped N7 and installed Player Pro. Just went out again for 2 hours to my son's basketball practice. Spent the 1.5 hour practice reading e-mail and doing some web surfing ALL ON LTE! Battery went down like no more than 10% !! At the beginning of the practice I played a song in Player Pro for a few seconds then backed out of the app. Checked GSAM 2 hours later, no significant PlayerPro battery usage!
It is more and more looking like something is going on with PowerAmp and N7 regarding cataloging of large music collections. So I'll stick with Player Pro and see how things go over the next few days.
Thanks to those with the constructive criticism. This has been one of the pluses of moving to Android. There's a lot larger population of "Power Users" than on iPhone that are willing to help someone relatively new to the platform.

yea... that's the one thing i had a feeling it might have been doing, but wasn't exactly sure as i've never really been that media-crazy with my phones. Good to see that you found the issue, though.

jazee said:
Why the battery 'breaks in' over time is even more of a mystery. This latest battery technology should not have any sort of break-in or memory issues. But I'm no battery expert. But my gut says there's something else at play.
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Yeah, "battery break-in" is a bit of a misnomer. What's actually happening is that the stats the OS keeps on the battery capacity and usage are being rebuilt. It takes a few charge cycles for your system to "learn" what it needs to accurately show you remaining capacity, etc.
jazee said:
So I dumped N7 and installed Player Pro. Just went out again for 2 hours to my son's basketball practice. Spent the 1.5 hour practice reading e-mail and doing some web surfing ALL ON LTE! Battery went down like no more than 10% !! At the beginning of the practice I played a song in Player Pro for a few seconds then backed out of the app. Checked GSAM 2 hours later, no significant PlayerPro battery usage!
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Good move! I use PlayerPro and I love it. It's one of my few "must haves", not least of which is its ability to sync ratings back to iTunes with iSyncr. None of the other major players have this. This is important for me as I'm also an iOS refugee and I still have all my music in iTunes.

jazee said:
Well here's an update. As I mentioned, I froze PowerAmp and installed N7 instead. I could have swore I reset the GSAM battery monitor, AFTER N7 scanned all my media files. Yet once again, like PowerAmp (via System *wakelock*) N7 was third highest battery eater over 2 hours of "normal" usage WITHOUT LTE Data Use, only Wifi and NO TALK TIME and WITHOUT USING N7!
So I dumped N7 and installed Player Pro. Just went out again for 2 hours to my son's basketball practice. Spent the 1.5 hour practice reading e-mail and doing some web surfing ALL ON LTE! Battery went down like no more than 10% !! At the beginning of the practice I played a song in Player Pro for a few seconds then backed out of the app. Checked GSAM 2 hours later, no significant PlayerPro battery usage!
It is more and more looking like something is going on with PowerAmp and N7 regarding cataloging of large music collections. So I'll stick with Player Pro and see how things go over the next few days.
Thanks to those with the constructive criticism. This has been one of the pluses of moving to Android. There's a lot larger population of "Power Users" than on iPhone that are willing to help someone relatively new to the platform.
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Click to collapse
power user here too coming from iphone 3g, 3gs, 4 to samsung skyrocket, note, nexus to the current at&t sgs3. all have been jailbroken and rooted for "customization" purposes and the first thing i noticed going to the android phones was how poor the battery life was when compared to any iOS device; even when the devices were stock. I can deal with it because of how much customization i can do with android that i can't do on iOS so for that reason alone i stick with android. and also nothing apple has done has impressed me with their iPhone series yet. might pick up an iPad mini retina one day :laugh:
anyways, back to your battery issue. have you tried going to stock rom or formatting just to make sure its not a hardware issue? i know for mine, one time my data partition that had my music had some corrupt file that had the media scanner always running and killing my battery. i had tried everything and there was no way that in 8 hrs i'd have < 30% left with no usage. i finally deleted and formatted everything, went to pure stock with no files except for my contacts and no email sync. then i got 15 to 20 hours... that's usual for the sgs3, a tad less than my old iphone 4. that told me my battery wasn't bad.
i ended up keeping an eye on wakelocks and re-installing all my apps and putting all my music back on and my battery issue dissapeared and i'm happy. still have poweramp installed, but moved to using google music for cloud and local music. what made me really happy was going to a hyperion battery and the slimmer extended sedio case for 2 to 3 days of battery life on this sucker for a decent price. :good: still have the stock batter for backup too!

I'm not on a Custom ROM. Just rooted.
I installed Better Battery Stats to see how it worked. Don't like it as much as GSAM. Seems you can get a bit lower-level process info upfront, but the graphing is barely readable and it doesn't show percent usage of battery for each process. Just number of s(econds) and blue and red line? Maybe I'm missing a setting? I think BBS may be popular as maybe it existed before GSAM (formerly Badass Battery Monitor I think) or maybe there is just something about BBS that I haven't realized yet is a major advantage over GSAM? They both do the job. Sorry for going off on a tangent.
The process hogging the battery the most now is Google Maps and I know from searching and reading this is VERY common. It can be related to ANY app wanting to poll your location. I'm not yet sure though if the usage is excessive. Looks like not. I turned off all of the Location settings in Maps (but left "Location and Google search" in main Location Setting ON as I read that really defeats a lot of functionality. Google Now wasn't happy I turned of Location History (in Maps) but I still get the current commute times and local weather on my Google Now so I have yet to discover any big disadvantage of turning off most (not all) of the Location settings in Maps if you don't want to share your location or see your location history.
Apparently Google Now and potentially other apps like Facebook, etc. want to use Google Maps to poll where you are. One user said turning off History helped on the battery - makes sense as now Google Now isn't constantly trying to see where you are even if the phone is just sitting on your nightstand! I hate that big brother feeling so anytime an app has an option to turn location awareness off, I usually use it. When I go to use Maps I just turn the GPS on. But I still need to learn what I'm missing out on, when turning off some of these settings. Now I'd like to figure out how to get GPS to turn on automatically any time Maps is manually launched and then turned off automatically anytime maps is closed! That would be nice. Surprised that function isn't built-in to Android as opposed to just prompting you to take you to settings. Guess I may have to break down and learn how to code in Tasker instead of using Llama for my automation needs.
I've left the phone unplugged for what, 8 hours now. Very light usage today. I'm at 80%. BBS is showing 3.5%/hour. That's 28 hours. But like I said, no talk time on the phone today, a half dozen texts, no web browsing and maybe 30 min of total app usage so I would expect 3.5%/hour.
Bottom line is it looks like I don't have any major issues like I had on the stupid HTC One X+ that was getting hot. Seems like the media player switch is what did the trick. I'm just curious why apps as popular as N7 and PowerAmp would be any different. It could have been just timing in that I switch to Pro Player about the time the O/S was done doing it cataloging of the media or whatever it does. I'm sure 2,600 high bitrate songs (14GB) of songs on the sdcard is pretty above average for your typical Android User. Wish there was more in-depth technical documentation on some of these processes though published by Google for us Power Users to read if so desired. Guess that's why we have XDA Forum.
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Duh, just saw the first condition in Llama is "Active Application" the problem is, I only want the GPS to turn on when I manually launch the app myself. I hope an app trying to use Maps in the background doesn't trigger the GPS on. Guess I'll find out.
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I forgot why this isn't possible. Google doesn't want to allow ANY apps to turn GPS on/off automatically due to privacy issues. Is there a setting to let the user decide this? Make me feel like they're treating me like an idiot!