[Q] Network reception and battery drain - Desire HD Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hi
I have some battery drain issues with my phone that I think are somehow related to my network data reception.
I am on possibly the ****tiest network that exists in Australia (Three) with an unmodified stock Desire HD. Coupled with the fact that the building I work in seems to be made of kryptonite I find that if I move more than a few metres from a window I get no reception.
Anyway the toilets are in the centre of the building (with no reception whatsoever).
I have recently been in the habit of playing Angry Birds when on a toilet-break. Afterwards I have experienced rapid battery drain for the rest of the day - even though Angry Birds is not running (yes I checked thoroughly). My battery would likely be in the red before 6pm, with no other significant usage. This has been happening for weeks inconsistently.
A bit of experimentation has led me to discover that if I open Angry Birds again when in an area with data reception the battery drain afterwards does not occur. With light use my battery will last well into the evening before going yellow.
I have a theory that Angry Birds is trying and failing to make a data connection (for ads presumably). This must result in some kind of process or thread sitting in the background invisibly sucking the life from my battery.
Some non-rigourous testing indicates that this problem maybe also occur when using the Dolphin Browser.
So I have the following questions:
Has anyone else experienced a similar problem?
Is it Angry Birds? Dolphin? Sense? Android?
What can I do about it?

I have noticed that battery drain is proportional to network signal strength. If you spend most of your time in an area with no/weak/fluctuating signal strength, the phone will go on hyperdrive trying to make a connection. The only reasonable solution I would recommend is to switch to airplane mode during those situations/scenarios.
Try it out and play Angry Birds while on the can while Airplane mode is active. You should notice a huge improvement.

Thanks junta for your suggestion.
The behaviour that I am describing, though, is different.
The reception is the same between having long and short battery life.
My experience is that if I use an application when there is no reception it seems to trigger the short battery life scenario.

maniak_001 said:
Thanks junta for your suggestion.
The behaviour that I am describing, though, is different.
The reception is the same between having long and short battery life.
My experience is that if I use an application when there is no reception it seems to trigger the short battery life scenario.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It may also be due to the fact that some application does seek for Google Ads Support, hence is always searching for data connection to download the ads.?

Related

Sudden increase in power usage; TP2 gets hot but no obvious reason

My T-Mobile USA (standard ROM) Tp2 behaved very strangely earlier today, but seems to have recovered. Anyone had any similar experience?
a) Battery level decreased rapidly, and unit getting very warm
b) Battery Status today plugin showed > 900ma (and sometimes > 1300ma!!) current draw
c) Unit would not charge from my USB port (message that it wasn't providing enough current)
d) I put flight mode on, no appreciable change in behavior with all radios off.
e) Soft reset - no change
f) Task manager didn't show anything using undue amounts of CPU
In the end, I turned it off (completely), and it would then charge normally. Left it like that for two or three hours, and when I turned it back on everything seems to be ok.
I have a lot of software on there, but nothing installed new in the last few days. It's worked perfectly today - best cell phone or PDA I've had since my trusty Phillips Velo...
While this was happening it seemed slightly sluggish, but certainly not locked up. Only 'unusual' thing - yesterday I let the battery get real very low for the first time (left it with the screen on, and an app running). I almost wonder if somehow there's a power management issue recovering from this. Note - it was never completely dead, just very low.
Anyone had anything similar happen? I assume the problem is in the phone, not the battery (otherwise I wouldn't have seen the current draw)
-Steve
you can try to hard reset and put everything back in...
what i usually do is turn off 3g because it consumes a lot of battery..i'd use wifi as much as possible or edge.
you can try using cleanRam to clean up some excess space on the phone.
not sure about the charge, you might need to restart your PC or reinstall active sync so it can detect the phone.
judicious said:
you can try to hard reset and put everything back in...
what i usually do is turn off 3g because it consumes a lot of battery..i'd use wifi as much as possible or edge.
you can try using cleanRam to clean up some excess space on the phone.
not sure about the charge, you might need to restart your PC or reinstall active sync so it can detect the phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
He's not talking about ActiveSync or not detecting his phone.
However, I notice this behaviour almost all the time (device runs out of battery within one night) but only see those large power consumptions sometimes.
My device cannot be seen by any PC I tried (after first installing Mobile Center) so maybe there's a flaw in some devices?
Bright.Light said:
He's not talking about ActiveSync or not detecting his phone.
However, I notice this behaviour almost all the time (device runs out of battery within one night) but only see those large power consumptions sometimes.
My device cannot be seen by any PC I tried (after first installing Mobile Center) so maybe there's a flaw in some devices?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes -sorry I didn't make that clear. Phone was working ok (including activesync) - it's just that it was trying to take too much current from the USB port.
This has only happened once (fingers crossed!). I'm sure it's software (rather than a hardware fault), but I'm puzzled given that the task manager showed minimal CPU usage, and the power drain continued in airplane mode
-Steve
Your reception is probably bad. The TP2 will basically go insane if the reception is bad enough, I've seen it drain a fully charged battery in under 3 hours if you have push data turned on and there's 0-1 bars of reception. The battery life is quite good when reception is at least a few bars but once it goes below a certain point I've definitely noticed that the phone goes insane and will get noticeably warm in the pocket and basically die within a few hours.
Turning off push data will get you slightly better battery life in this scenario but unfortunately I still found that the battery would still be dead by the time I needed to use it. And it's not a network issue either since I tested it on different networks and compared it to other smartphones dealing with the same terrible reception-this phone definitely uses an insane amount of power when reception is bad, which isn't a problem if you're just transiently going through a bad reception area (probably helps keep the signal from dropping) but if you're spending a few hours in a place with poor reception it will drain insanely quickly.
Thankfully I'm spending my time in places with better reception now-I basically ended up having to turn off the phone if I wanted it to still have power by the end of the day but now it's still nearly full at the end of the day with just moderate reception.
HTC should really change the phone's behavior when there's 0-1 bars-it's nice that it tries to find a network aggressively when it loses a signal but there should be a timeout on it where it should start checking at longer intervals if there's a long period of no signals unless someone's trying to make a call or something. Really useless when you put your phone down for 2 hours in some overly shielded building and when you pick it up to make a call and it's dead. Not to mention uncomfortable when it starts heating up like crazy.
I'm not sure why you still got battery drainage even in airplane mode though but maybe the phone had already gone into whatever insane mode it goes into when the reception gets bad. Maybe it's one of the apps running the background that freaked out as well? I think my battery life was still kinda bad in airplane mode as well, for some reason I had to literally turn the phone off to get it to stop killing the battery.
i get zero bars at work and no reception. i've noticed that at work, my phone gets destroyed and lags like crazy and barely usable. it gets no reception for 8 hrs so its nice to know that other ppl are experiencing this problem and its not just me.
my tilt did this today, was warm to the touch, idled' didn't use it all day 6 hrs idle with signal, battery drained to 50% made a phone call 13 min duration, put the phone down watched a 2 hr show, phone dead.
not from signal/data.
My Tilt2 stock rom appears to have done the exact same thing today. Yesterday it had low battery for the first time ever... then today, it completely died in my pocket while at work (usually I have about 80% battery left at the end of the day). I noticed early this morning that the phone dropped from 100% to 60% about 2 hrs after it was off the charger. The phone felt hot. No programs were running in the background either. When i saw this, i ran cleanram and it still died a few hours later. Reset the phone and charging it now, hopefully this was a one time thing?
tekdemon said:
Your reception is probably bad. The TP2 will basically go insane if the reception is bad enough, I've seen it drain a fully charged battery in under 3 hours if you have push data turned on and there's 0-1 bars of reception. T....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think this might be it. Reception at work is normally really good (there's a tower in our parking lot!) - but I noticed today they are working on it.
The strange thing is that putting it in flight mode did not stop the power drain - to me that just doesn't make sense. However, I'm thinking that when I first did a soft reset, it probably wasn't in flight mode. So, the complete manual power down, followed by the resulting soft-reset into airplane mode) might be what fixed it.
My phone is often in areas of poor coverage (NW CT) - pretty much every day to/from work, and I've not seen this behavior with the TP2 before. Other GSM phones I've had do noticeably use more phone in areas of poor/non existent coverage, but this was a relative melt-down - I did wonder whether I had an internal short.
It's been ok since, and I'll report any future incidents or findings...
Happened to me two times, I figgured the problem was the GPS connection, improper exit from GPS app (AmazeGPS). Can be related to GoogleMaps or other app too. After restart, everything went back to normal.
slimslim said:
Happened to me two times, I figgured the problem was the GPS connection, improper exit from GPS app (AmazeGPS). Can be related to GoogleMaps or other app too. After restart, everything went back to normal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If that is so, how can we check if the GPS is still running?
I do a reset often, but that won't change a thing...
Besides, when I look, the power consumption often is 'slightly above normal' - 150maH-250maH.
btw: what is considered as normal consumption?
Battery Status plugin
I hate to sound like a fool, but I'm running the stock ATT Rom on my Tilt 2, and I cant find the "Battery Status today plugin" you mentioned. Is that a T-Mobile only thing?
Is there a .cab for it?
To reply to the primary topic though, I've experienced the heat increase/battery drain level thing, but it just started yesterday after I installed a whole bunch of stuff. This weekend I'm planning to hard-reset and load stuff slowly so maybe I can isolate the cause.
I'll post an update if I figure anything out.
FWIW - I've recently been trying to track down a battery drain, too.
For me, though, the drain has correlated with trying out SPB Mobile Shell 3, so that is clearly a likely candidate. However, the drain does seem to be mainly limited to night time.
For example, on Sunday the phone dropped to only around 80% after a full day out and about. However, by Monday morning it was down to 10%.
Similar results on Tuesday night - almost complete drain by the morning.
To see if I could work out what was going on, I installed acbTaskMan yesterday, and set it to log CPU overnight (it periodically logs CPU usage, power drain and the top three CPU users).
Unfortunately, there isn't any *obvious* candidate:
Microsoft "My Phone" kicked in for a couple of minutes and used quite a lot of power (max of 493ma). However, this dropped off once "My Phone" had done its stuff.
A lot of the time, its actually acbTaskMan which is the top user of CPU (probably unsurprising, given it is monitoring and logging).
There does seem to be a bit of residual network traffic - every five minutes (or so) there are a few UDP and TCP packets being sent.
Overall, the average reported power usage was about 113ma (with the max being 493 and the min being 5!). However, the reporting period seems a little odd - most of the time it reports every 5 seconds, but there are a few periods earlier in the night where there are gaps of up to 5 minutes.
What would people generally expect the average power usage to be when on standby?
FWIW The comments in this thread about low signal could certainly be relevant. I do have pretty low signal at home and I did leave the phone in a slightly different place last night (where it could have had a better signal than the two nights before).
My current hypothesis is that
Something in Mobile Shell is causing the network connection to keep alive all night (or is at least turning it on every five minutes).
This coupled with poor coverage in my house is hosing the battery. During the day, with good coverage, the network traffic isn't causing as much of a problem.
Ed
eepyaich said:
FWIW - I've recently been trying to track down a battery drain, too.
For me, though, the drain has correlated with trying out SPB Mobile Shell 3, so that is clearly a likely candidate. However, the drain does seem to be mainly limited to night time.
For example, on Sunday the phone dropped to only around 80% after a full day out and about. However, by Monday morning it was down to 10%.
Similar results on Tuesday night - almost complete drain by the morning.
To see if I could work out what was going on, I installed acbTaskMan yesterday, and set it to log CPU overnight (it periodically logs CPU usage, power drain and the top three CPU users).
Unfortunately, there isn't any *obvious* candidate:
Microsoft "My Phone" kicked in for a couple of minutes and used quite a lot of power (max of 493ma). However, this dropped off once "My Phone" had done its stuff.
A lot of the time, its actually acbTaskMan which is the top user of CPU (probably unsurprising, given it is monitoring and logging).
There does seem to be a bit of residual network traffic - every five minutes (or so) there are a few UDP and TCP packets being sent.
Overall, the average reported power usage was about 113ma (with the max being 493 and the min being 5!). However, the reporting period seems a little odd - most of the time it reports every 5 seconds, but there are a few periods earlier in the night where there are gaps of up to 5 minutes.
What would people generally expect the average power usage to be when on standby?
FWIW The comments in this thread about low signal could certainly be relevant. I do have pretty low signal at home and I did leave the phone in a slightly different place last night (where it could have had a better signal than the two nights before).
My current hypothesis is that
Something in Mobile Shell is causing the network connection to keep alive all night (or is at least turning it on every five minutes).
This coupled with poor coverage in my house is hosing the battery. During the day, with good coverage, the network traffic isn't causing as much of a problem.
Ed
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you might want to try this.
Under MyPhone, disable the Current Location.
Under HTC Settings->Location, disable all the location information.
See whether this helps?
Thanks - this is a good idea.
However, I think I may have uncovered a more fundamental (and dumb) cause. Somehow (probably user error, but I'd like to think some nefarious impact of installing the SPb stuff), my "peak" times for Activesync had been changed from 8am to 6:30pm, to 8pm to 6:30pm. This completely explains why my connection kicked in every 5 minutes overnight (as this is what my "peak" exchange sync is set to).
Having fixed that (!) I'll see whether my power usage is miraculously better tonight! If not, I'll give the location stuff a go too!
Ed
Checking mail all night is not a good idea!
Ahh yes - much better now. I went to bed at 80% battery and woke up at 70%.
The task manager log has logged far fewer points (only 300 logs over 7.5 hours, as opposed to the 5400 that I'd expect if it were logging every 5s), which I guess indicates that most of the night my phone was in "deep standby", or whatever one might call it.
FWIW I certainly recommend acbTaskMan as the logs it produces are very handy to spot what is going on for this kind of thing. For example, even in a low battery drain night I can spot exactly when various services are using the network (e.g. checking mail, Google Maps updating its latitude stuff, etc.)
Ed
I noticed somethin strange last night.
The battery was still for 63% full when I turned the device off (Yes, really turned it off!) and still next morning the battery was completely empty!
Now how is that possible? I do have two batteries, which do exactly the same, so I could test this with the other one, but this seems to be seriously wrong!
I had a similar problem with Sprint. after several trial errors, I traced the problem to the Verizon radio (2.23) I used after SIM unlocking. I went back to sprint 1.96 and voila. Since then now I have moved to Sprint 2.32WU and it works even better.
Another battery saver is this trick "disconnect network when idle for 1 min timeout":
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=69185
Had same thing happen...new tilt (1 month old) got hot and drained battery in 3 hrs with no use! I believe its a GPS program such as googlemaps or Trapster that caused it. A soft reset and im golden. Hate having to soft reset all the time
see this often, almost always because gps is running and did not shutdown when the program using the gps was closed. Chartcross GPS test will show you if the gps is running or not and usually will allow you to exit, and stop the gps induced battery drain. I have gotten in the habit of doing soft reset after using tomtom or google maps, to ensure that GPS is off.
At least for at&t devices, gps is the culprit for huge battery drain, hot to the touch. I will add that little or no signal to the phone will do the same thing. When I am in marginal coverage area, I turn off 3G and that seems to stop the excessive drain and heat build up due to low signal strength.
Not straightforward, for sure and one has to pay attention to the device, or when you need it most, the battery is done.

My battery problem - poor signal

When I'm at home and getting -80 to -70 signal, I lose like 10% battery in 4 hours. When I'm at work and getting -120 to -100 signal, I lose like 50% battery in 4 hours.
Sucks....
Neither ROM nor CPU speed or scheduler or running apps or anything makes that big of a difference. The only single factor I know that can kill the battery faster is the screen.
I keep a charger at my desk, but I'm wondering if I can do anything to improve this situation. I tried JuiceDefender for a while. In theory it would help a lot, but it seemed to cause some problem where Grooveshark and some other apps kept trying to hit the internet and couldn't which seemed to kill my battery just as badly. Maybe if I get the pay version it would allow enough tweaking to help.
Any advice?
I'm noticing the same thing. Was at a bar the other night with really poor reception. I was only there for about 2-3 hours. Without really using my phone at all the battery dropped from about 75% to 15%. Meanwhile, at home where I get good reception I can routinely get 15-20 hours.
I definitely think signal quality substantially impacts the life.
My signals been crap since I updated my PRI. Don't know it its related just been doing it since then.
I moved recently and am in a little 'deadzone' area where I don't get very good 3G or 2G signal (thankfully its a short stay). When I leave my phone on, I found that I lose a tremendous amount of my battery (phone indicates that I am without signal 95-97% of the time typically) -- I had a blackberry curve before my evo and even that phone and its otherwise kickass (only good feature...) battery life would go down significantly or die from sitting over night.
What I have found that I can do to minimize the damage is turning off data and connecting to my local wifi and running some setCPU profiles locking the processor at 245mhz. Last night my battery decreased about 12% doing this.
Its funny because last week I was on vacation in south florida where I had awesome signal and if I turned my data off and connected the wifi, my battery literally would stay the same for 10 hour or so before ticking off a percent.
I'm running a stock rooted odexed ROM with Herver's #2 Kernel. I do not use a task killer or juice defender.
liamaa said:
I'm noticing the same thing. Was at a bar the other night with really poor reception. I was only there for about 2-3 hours. Without really using my phone at all the battery dropped from about 75% to 15%. Meanwhile, at home where I get good reception I can routinely get 15-20 hours.
I definitely think signal quality substantially impacts the life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well yes, because you phone is continuously searching for a better quality signal.

[Q] Desire Z : Really Inconsistent Speeds + Battery Issues

Friend has a new Desire Z (bell, unlocked). Using it on AT&T network.
When at a house, and we use WiFI (30Mbps DL, 25Mbps UL), the speeds are VERY inconsistent. With my iPhone 4 using speedtest.net, it shows up as 20/15 each time. (WiFi is a little slower than the modem).
With the Desire Z, we get 15/10 (which is fine/acceptable). Then 3 minutes later we do it, we get 5/2. Without even moving the phone or touching the modem connection (not downloading anything on the computer), the connection just gets slower. Then it might be fast or slow, basically it's a toss-up.
The first time we noticed the issue is because when we are outside, we get HSPA speeds of 2.5/1.0, then randomly decreases to 0.1/0.05. HUGE difference. And VERY inconsistent. He is using a microSIM from iPhone 4, with an adapter, so we figured maybe the SIM card is getting loose at certain points? However, the WiFi is also inconsistent in addition to the HSPA, so it's probably not that.
What should I do? Is this the situation where I have to flash a new radio or something? (Please suggest others if I am wrong).
Thanks!
---
Also, his battery is kinda weak. The battery health is apparently clean/healthy. He came from an iPhone 4, where he would have 3G, WiFi, and GPS on at night but not actually using them. Wake up, and 3% battery loss, maybe 5. WITHOUT using them, just having them on.
Now, with the Desire Z, we have the WiFi + 3G on, but NOT the GPS. He is losing 20%-25% in 8 hours without even using the phone.
Information about battery shows a high Cell standby (25%) and Phone idle (25%) percentage. When going into Spare Parts > Partial Wake usage, we didn't find anything really fishy. BUT we had rebooted so perhaps some info may have been lossed. Should he just go to sleep tonight and report the Partial Wake Usage statistics again?
We have a feeling it may be some apps refreshing at night.. But he clears all the apps with Advanced Task Manager except for like Facebook (2 hour interval refresh), GMail, and Google Voice.
I highly doubt a 20% battery decrease overnight is normal.. My mom's Atrix only loses about 5% overnight, with the same parameters I gave before.
I thought it may be a bad battery, BUT the phone idle + cell standby are abnormally high.
Thanks!
Does anyone have an answer? I was wondering this
I have been running CM 6 since November and just recently flashed CM 7. On both ROMs, Cell Standby and Phone Idle have been very high on my list of things that are 'draining' the battery.
For example, today Cell Standby shows as 37% and Phone Idle as 30% for me.
In fact, its very rare that these two things aren't at the top of the list of things that are using the battery for me.... I've seen cell standby as high as 47% before.
I can't speak for the drainage overnight. Definitely doesn't sound normal to me, but my phone is usually on the charger overnight (have enough trouble making it through the day with the stock battery).
Have you tried using Watchdog to monitor CPU usage of apps that run in the background? You could set the notification threshold very low and see what it spits out... Good luck!
gbarayah, thanks for the post, that was helpful.
If anyone can help with the inconsistent data speeds, that'd be very helpful.
And any additional info on the battery would be great too. I recently calibrated it, and will post any additional stats.
Damn it, I forgot to try Watchdog. However, I re-calibrated the battery, let it die, charged it up, let it die, charged it up. I followed the instructions to the letter and all that.
It was at 100% when I went to sleep. Woke up 8 hours later, 74%.
Settings > Battery shows nothing high 40% for cell standby and phone idle. Everything else (Facebook, etc.) REALLY low.
Then I went to Spare Parts > Battery Usage, Partial wake usage, everything incredibly low as well..
I will try Watchdog, but could it just be a bad battery? Or maybe should I try a different ROM?
Thanks!
Not sure if 26% drain over 8 hours is normal or not... Maybe someone else can shed some light on that. My phone is usually on the charger overnight.
The only other thing I can think of that would drain the battery is if you have a bad/weak cell signal in your area. I've experienced that with some job sites where my cell signal is very bad and my battery suffers excessive drain from trying to get a better signal or connect to 3G coming from Edge.
On my week old desire Z running virtuous unity sense3.0 rom and streamlined kernal i very rarely see phone idle and radio burning battery lik you say. Radio occasionaly gets high but only wen in bad coverage areas other than thats its ok.
Battery is still rubbish though due to fact even on 2nd lowest brightness setting screen seems to burn 80%-90% battery
Just checked: phone idle:2%
Cell stanby:8%
Screen (lowest setting):70%
Not this isnt a great example as its taken over a short period of havy use but it still reflects the relative proportion of the battery draining elements in question.
Also a question, if you have a live wallpaper set where is its battery drain shown? Screen, or launcher?
Not sure what to say about the high variable speeds.
Sticking to just GSM(2G) rather than AUTO will in some cases increase the signal and battery life at the expense of slower connection speeds. As mentioned when the phone struggles to get signal the battery gets drained alot faster.
Lower the refresh intervals of all the apps to the maximum period of time or a reasonable amount like 12 hours for FB for Sense, HTC Sense and Weather and 4 hours or Never (to make it on-demand) for Facebook.
Setting the Wi-fi sleep policy to "Never when connected" may make it on-demand too - when an app needs to update Wi-fi gets turned on again
If they have "Use wireless networks" checked to allow the clock-weathers mini-widget to update then they should try removing said clock and re-adding it, but search for the city when doing so. It'll provide them with a general outlook for their entire city and not force it to download and update the information for wherever they are whilst out and about. E.g if you were in London and went from Westminster to Peckham, it may update as you pass through each borough.
Live wallpapers and masses of widgets that need to constantly update are nice and everything but they can also drain the battery.
Think of these suggestions as ways to cycle the battery as well as save it.
I can't think of anything else to add.
I'm using Cyanogenmod 7 and it's pretty damn good. What do you think is the best ROM with Gingerbread if it's more lightweight and easier on the battery? (I honestly don't think the ROM accounts for the 25% battery loss but we'll see)
MIUI or mexiDroid for me?
By the way, could it just be a bad battery? I was thinking about picking one of these up:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=940263
$8 and people said it's okay.. What do you think?
Thanks, and I JUST calibrated recently, so once again I will leave phone off overnight and report.
-----------------------
As for the network issues, I FIGURED IT OUT!!!
I believe it was the Speedtest app itself that was messed up. Like I said earlier, I don't have live wallpapers (just info) on, and also NO GPS unless using Navigation.
Well, Speedtest was connecting to WICHITA, KANSAS. I AM IN NEW JERSEY. WTH??!!
Anyway, so I'm going to keep GPS (satellites) on, it connects to NJ, and Voila, GREAT SPEEDS!
HSPA about 3.5/1.0 DL/UL
HOORAY! Network problem fixed!!!
Only issue is battery still D:
Honestly, I think it may be a bad battery. Partial wake usage doesn't show any app going nuts.. Every refresh interval is like 4 hours. And I use Advanced Task Killer to kill all apps before going to bed. I downloaded "Watchdog," let's see
gyromanx55 said:
Friend has a new Desire Z (bell, unlocked). Using it on AT&T network.
When at a house, and we use WiFI (30Mbps DL, 25Mbps UL), the speeds are VERY inconsistent. With my iPhone 4 using speedtest.net, it shows up as 20/15 each time. (WiFi is a little slower than the modem).
With the Desire Z, we get 15/10 (which is fine/acceptable). Then 3 minutes later we do it, we get 5/2. Without even moving the phone or touching the modem connection (not downloading anything on the computer), the connection just gets slower. Then it might be fast or slow, basically it's a toss-up.
The first time we noticed the issue is because when we are outside, we get HSPA speeds of 2.5/1.0, then randomly decreases to 0.1/0.05. HUGE difference. And VERY inconsistent. He is using a microSIM from iPhone 4, with an adapter, so we figured maybe the SIM card is getting loose at certain points? However, the WiFi is also inconsistent in addition to the HSPA, so it's probably not that.
What should I do? Is this the situation where I have to flash a new radio or something? (Please suggest others if I am wrong).
Thanks!
---
Also, his battery is kinda weak. The battery health is apparently clean/healthy. He came from an iPhone 4, where he would have 3G, WiFi, and GPS on at night but not actually using them. Wake up, and 3% battery loss, maybe 5. WITHOUT using them, just having them on.
Now, with the Desire Z, we have the WiFi + 3G on, but NOT the GPS. He is losing 20%-25% in 8 hours without even using the phone.
Information about battery shows a high Cell standby (25%) and Phone idle (25%) percentage. When going into Spare Parts > Partial Wake usage, we didn't find anything really fishy. BUT we had rebooted so perhaps some info may have been lossed. Should he just go to sleep tonight and report the Partial Wake Usage statistics again?
We have a feeling it may be some apps refreshing at night.. But he clears all the apps with Advanced Task Manager except for like Facebook (2 hour interval refresh), GMail, and Google Voice.
I highly doubt a 20% battery decrease overnight is normal.. My mom's Atrix only loses about 5% overnight, with the same parameters I gave before.
I thought it may be a bad battery, BUT the phone idle + cell standby are abnormally high.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well... can't be that odd. Mine are
cell standby: 8%
Phone idle 6%
display 51% (highest)
dialer 11%
wifi 10%
....
about conn. speed. I haven't used speedtest yet but downloading speed on the phone is slower than on PC remarkably using the same internet connection
barclays said:
well... can't be that odd. Mine are
cell standby: 8%
Phone idle 6%
display 51% (highest)
dialer 11%
wifi 10%
....
about conn. speed. I haven't used speedtest yet but downloading speed on the phone is slower than on PC remarkably using the same internet connection
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
WiFi will always be slower than wired connection, probably about 50% if not more.
Also, what setting do you have your display on and how much would you say you use your phone/have the screen on and how often do you talk (hrs/day)
noneabove said:
WiFi will always be slower than wired connection, probably about 50% if not more.
Also, what setting do you have your display on and how much would you say you use your phone/have the screen on and how often do you talk (hrs/day)
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Click to collapse
I have auto brightness but I stay in office and not turn it on much (have to work though ) so the display isn't on much (when i said HIGHEST, it means highest in the list )
I have to phone connected to wifi all day but rarely use it
Mainly use the phone to text and talk less and 1/hr/day
Just try left the phone unused (stand by - airplane mode) for one day, drop about 20% or so
Its seems like its getting a little better.. only lost 10% overnight. Guess its calibrating
Sent from my HTC Desire Z using XDA Premium App

[Q] Utterly HORRIBLE battery life across batteries and ROMs

Hey XDA
I'm having absolutely HORRIBLE battery life with my GIO. I've gone through extensive testing to find the root of the problem but nothing seems to be the cause. So far i've had to charge twice, maybe three times a day.
So here's the story. A couple of months ago I noticed my Gio's battery was dying quicker so I flashed another rom [Particle Mod] over it. I was happy, until I found out the problem persisted. Then I flashed a 2.3.7 Cyanogen mod, the battery still wasn't lasting and the battery life was only slightly worse owing to CYMOD.
I then flashed the GALAXYICS beta, and it's getting even worse. I've even bought new 1600mAh batteries to see if it was the battery's fault. Apparently not, so I went back to stock for a day or too to see what it was like, and I was still lucky to get 12hrs out of it with featherweight usage.
I simply do not know what to do, I've tried numerous battery mods [flashable zips etc] and they've only done a tiny bit. Lately I've been playing with clockspeeds but it seems to only make a difference if I raise the minimum speed, the extra top end performance is nice though.
So, what I'm saying is this normal for a Gio? Is it a hardware fault? software? 4th dimensional? I'm at a loss, and I think the infamous Samsung cell standby drain is to blame.
Attached is screenshots of general battery screen, Cell standby and the Graph. I've been switching between 2G and 3G, Airplane mode on and off, and listening to music for an hour or so and It seems to have utterly crippled the device doing simple tasks, and I've done EVERYTHING to minimize the drain by lowering screen brightness to %0, turning off vibration, animations, wifi, GPS, BT, radio, everything except google contacts sync and a couple of root things in between like deleting the batt stats.
The new batteries help somewhat, but I still can't last long enough for a single school day... FFUUUUU!
I really don't want to have to buy a new phone, I'm only 14 so I can't work to get one, and I can't just ask my parents because then I'm just being a spoilt brat. I want to make this phone last as long as possible [Until I can work for a Google Nexus or something] and the battery isn't helping.
Thanks for reading.
Yeah you're a spoiled brat. This is not great but not extraordinarily bad. My epic 4g touch spends the day on the charger.
Sent from my SPH-D710 using xda app-developers app
Well, it seems to be all right with your battery. And your '1600 mAh' battery was just a fake. A lot of people get scores like this
What I am worried about is not so much the capacity, it's the RATE at which it drains. I see a lot of "stair steps" on my graphs so I'm not so sure, especially when checking the other phones in the house "a Galaxy Ace and 2 HTC Incredible S's] they seem to have a more consistent curve, I notice my batteries will drain by as much as %5 in half a minute, which is either a reporting bug or inconsistent strain.
Have you tried to do a wipe and test it with no installed apps?
Do not trust the "stairs", it is just bad reporting (as you said).
In my case when I switch on 3G or WiFi, it happens that the battery drops by 10% instantly.
The only value that is relevant is the total duration between a full charge (100% charge + several hours still plugged) and the "low battery" indicator.
According to my own experience, the things that drains the most are :
- 3G network : this is the main factor, by far.
If you can, try to stay in 2G mode most of the time, switch to 3G when needed, and as soon as not needed anymore go back to 2G.
- WiFi / BT
If you switch On/Off very often, or is always On and you moves very often (changing hotspot), then WiFi / BT will be a very important battery drain factor.
- Multimedia
Videos / MP3 drains battery a lot.
If you can, switch to "airplane mode" or switch off the phone during night.
Finally, with 3G / WiFi / Multimedia usage mix, a "One Day" autonomy is good.
I'm sorry but you will not find any smartphone that can pass "One Day" with that usage type.
With my own usage (very few calls, sms, wifi) and with above tricks, my Gio lasts 4-5 days.
PS : As you mentioned, available ROMs are very unequal as far as battery drain is concerned.
Stock ROMs (and moded ones like Adrenaline) are the champions of battery life, while ICS ROMs are the worst.
CM7.2 ROMs are in between.
I agree with Vilo76. When you don`t have wireless or 3g, or play any music/games, you can actually get a few days of life from your phone, but if you do some of the stuff i just said, the battery life is going down like crazy...
The only think you can do to get some bit of juice out of your phone is if you format your battery, but actually that is just for a better battery reading, not actually extending your battery life...
By the way, I can't figure out why phone manufacturers don't use more long lasting batteries ...
There are many many examples of batteries that are about the same size as a phone one, but deliver way more mAh.
Among others :
- House wireless alarms keypad batteries are the same size but can be as much as 3000mAh ...
- Classic cylindrical AA or AAA accu can be as much as 4000mAh ...
While a typical phone battery hardly ever exceed 1500mAh.
Okay, I'm back and I have some results for today
3G Is DEFINITELY using more in Australia on idle, while 2G is a bit less brutal
There is something cause my phone to wake intermittently, I've turned sync and location services, and killed any apps that may be checking the net etc, but it's still waking up with screen off.
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Today I decided to do something bit extreme, I ran the phone an airplane mode all day with the original "dead" battery, I only lost %20 all day with 1hr or so music usage, phone standby is up but Cell standby isn't there at all [Obviously].
Something's telling me that's it the cell radio and whatever is waking my phone up is causing the suck. I'm upgrading to GalaxyICS CM9 beta10 today with a full dalvik, battery and cache wipe, so we'll see how that goes
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MORE NEWS
Good news this time! I've installed a Cyanogen Mod 7.2 on their [The one that's updates through Goomanager] and the battery is holding steady at 100 idling for 1hr on 2G.... Not sure if I have to calibrate but I think I've fixed it, it's working better than stock!

[Q] Fast battery drain

My battery was doing well, had about 70+% remaining after about 5-6 hours on battery, then in a one-hour stretch it dropped 30%. I'm running battery doctor, but it really isn't telling me what could have caused that. Even after a half-hour con-call this morning, the battery was still at 80% or so until noon.
It seemed to fall off the cliff when I left the house for about an hour to run some errands. But 30% when you're not doing a lot with it in an hour's time frame seems like an issue.
Anyone have any ideas on how to debug this?
mikecico said:
My battery was doing well, had about 70+% remaining after about 5-6 hours on battery, then in a one-hour stretch it dropped 30%. I'm running battery doctor, but it really isn't telling me what could have caused that. Even after a half-hour con-call this morning, the battery was still at 80% or so until noon.
It seemed to fall off the cliff when I left the house for about an hour to run some errands. But 30% when you're not doing a lot with it in an hour's time frame seems like an issue.
Anyone have any ideas on how to debug this?
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I'd like to know as well. I'm at 33% at 7 hours usage.
Sent from my VS986 using Tapatalk
Were you using GPS? That's killer on the battery when you combine it with other drains
Also perhaps you ventured into a low signal area, so the phone was straining the battery to connect to a poor signal?
Samething here ... even after a factory reset & disabling a bunch of bloats.
It idles fine @home but really sucks @work ... I lost 30% (last 3hr idling) with the screen off (wifi off too, location is off, greenify running).
Phone barely lasts 2 days (with ~1hr scrren on, 1-call/2-TxtM a day, no emailing ... minimal usage).
One thing I notice... data signal @work is pretty bad (3G) while better @home (LTE).
This is a Verizon phone. My G2 was much much better, same exact setup.
This might sound like the opposite of what is intuitive, but your battery life at work may *increase* if you turn *ON* the wifi.
The reason is that you have poor 3G signal strength. So every time your phone updates anything data related, even just checking that you have an email, the phone burns a lot of battery trying to squeeze data over the poor signal from the cell tower.
But, if you turn on wifi, the phone can check all the data stuff using the wifi, which is far less battery intensive compared to trying to talk to the cell phone tower far away.
So try that, just turn on wifi *particularly* when you are in a poor cell phone reception area. Even though you now have an *extra* radio turned on in the phone, it should greatly help while at work or in any low signal area that has wifi available.
when did you get the phone? you have to do a few full charges and disable some Google bloat for the battery to last. and remove batter doctor. don't use apps like those task killers that keep themselves in the background like avast security. i just use lookout since it doesn't overly do it's job like avast.
What carrier are you on? If its T-Mobile, then its probably the My T-Mobile app. Drained my phone like crazy, T-Mobile also knows its an issue, but haven't said anything on fixing it.
Just uncheck all the boxes in the settings and it should stop, if not try the debloater tool.
Sent from my LG-H811 using Tapatalk
KingFatty said:
This might sound like the opposite of what is intuitive, but your battery life at work may *increase* if you turn *ON* the wifi.
The reason is that you have poor 3G signal strength. So every time your phone updates anything data related, even just checking that you have an email, the phone burns a lot of battery trying to squeeze data over the poor signal from the cell tower.
But, if you turn on wifi, the phone can check all the data stuff using the wifi, which is far less battery intensive compared to trying to talk to the cell phone tower far away.
So try that, just turn on wifi *particularly* when you are in a poor cell phone reception area. Even though you now have an *extra* radio turned on in the phone, it should greatly help while at work or in any low signal area that has wifi available.
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This will still drain it heavily even on wifi. It will continue to struggle to get good bars and will do what it takes in order to achieve good reception.
At work I always have wifi on and my drain is very high.
A weekend at home and I easily got SOT of 4 hrs+.
Work day, I struggle to get SOT of 2 hrs+
Very interesting approach, and it seems to work. I tried this overnight, and the falloff didn't seem nearly as great as when the wi-fi setting is off.
Many thanks.
I'm on verizon and when my phone switches to 3G it gets super hot upper middle area of the screen and the battery drain is outrageous. I have to disable data otherwise it would probably burst into flames. My previous unit did not have these problems. Wish I would have kept it.

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