New Droid X battery usage issue?

[NJxManic]

Hey guys, I'm new the the forums here. But lemme get into the problem. I got my Droid X I believe 4 days ago. Ever since then I've talked to some buddies who have this phone and they all told me to change the display settings to minimal and lowest brightness to help battery. But the thing is, and I'm not sure why but my battery would last from 6am when I turn it on, I won't really use it until 8 and then I'll use it for maybe 15-20 minutes before I go to school and turn it off and it will be at 80%. I'll turn it back on around 230-3 and use it a fair amount but not excessive and by around 9-10 it'll be at 15%. I'm not sure if its just that the battery isn't in a charging rhythm and just getting used to the charge or what but its just weird since my buddies who hve this phone will last like a day and a half when mine only lasts a few hours. Another thing is, I would check the battery usage. And the one I mostly see on the top is Display, which hovers between 40-50% most of the time. So I don't know if that's normal or what since its such a big screen. Thanks.

 

[webb34]

I think I can help

This could be due to a few things. I'm not an expert but I hope I can at least give you a little insight.

The display is a huge leech on the battery(for my phone its 50% of the usage). Changing the brightness can be a real ease on the battery, but there are still several factors you should consider as well.

Cell phones are silly little things. When they don't have service they tend to go crazy. Their antennas cry out for signal. If they don't get a response from a tower they scream for a signal. No response? they get louder.(I like to think my phone is having a temper tantrum) Kind of a nonsense response seeing as how if they did get service, it would be crap and ultimately useless. My point being that as you don't have service you actually use more battery trying to get service.

Another thing to consider is that if nothing happens to your phone for a while it tends to limit its functions to just the essential ones so it saves battery life. It just waits for its queue to start working again. This queue could be an incoming phone call, an email, or you wanting to play angry birds. But once your phone is alerted again it performs normally using more battery life until it thinks that the amount of time that has gone by is feasible to consider going back to sleep sort of. So it may have been because you just get a lot of facebook notifications that keep your phone going. I actually turned notifications off so I don't have this issue.

You also could have a crap battery, this is totally possible and the fix is super easy. You can get a new one. Don't buy one because the company you bought it from is the one that screwed up and should therefore give you a new batter free of charge so long as you give them the crap battery back.

Something you can do to help elongate your battery life is to "underclock" your device. You've probably heard of overclocking where you speed up your processor, with underclocking you simply slow it down. This will use less battery life. You can also get a ROM on your Droid that might have better battery life capabilities.

I hope this helps

 

[radroni]

on my x i noticed that i had a lot of extfa stuff running in background.....i dowloaded a task killer and have it to kill those programs ..stuff like voice searsh...google search...a lot of these will just restart...but this program can stop that...also make sure ur phone is updated to most current version...my batty life increased alot when i upgraded to 2.2.1 firmware....also anything that uses gps..wireless and bluetooth are batt hogs in my book and need to be off unlees u need them....

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[NJxManic]

My Droid's battery has changed dramatically in the past day or so. Its gone from lasting 4 hours to lasting pretty much a whole day with a decent amount of use. I think the battery just had to get used to the charge. I had all my display settings set to the lowest. And I have pretty good service where I'm at, it doesn't usually go out at all.But everything is working pretty normal now. I removed Advanced Task Killer and got Juice Defender and after I got that the battery life just drastically changed. But radroni.. I had the task killer but the programs would still restart after about 5 minutes even though I "killed" them. I just go into Manage applications and force stop the ones that shouldn't be running like AmazonMP3, Skype, CityID, and stuff like that. I wish I could just remove them. But thanks guys, my display isn't as crazy it hovers around 30-40% now. Maybe I'm just not browsing as much as I was, who knows.. as long as my battery lasts I'm happy.

 

[BayouFlyFisher]

My Droid's battery has changed dramatically in the past day or so. Its gone from lasting 4 hours to lasting pretty much a whole day with a decent amount of use. I think the battery just had to get used to the charge. I had all my display settings set to the lowest. And I have pretty good service where I'm at, it doesn't usually go out at all.But everything is working pretty normal now. I removed Advanced Task Killer and got Juice Defender and after I got that the battery life just drastically changed. But radroni.. I had the task killer but the programs would still restart after about 5 minutes even though I "killed" them. I just go into Manage applications and force stop the ones that shouldn't be running like AmazonMP3, Skype, CityID, and stuff like that. I wish I could just remove them. But thanks guys, my display isn't as crazy it hovers around 30-40% now. Maybe I'm just not browsing as much as I was, who knows.. as long as my battery lasts I'm happy.

The article below was written about the evils of task killers, but inside it is a good explanation of how Android manages applications/memory. It will help you understand how your droid is working:

Task Killers Per Lifehacker:

Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn't Use Them
How Android Manages Processes

In Android, processes and Applications are two different things. An app can stay "running" in the background without any processes eating up your phone's resources. Android keeps the app in its memory so it launches more quickly and returns to its prior state. When your phone runs out of memory, Android will automatically start killing tasks on its own, starting with ones that you haven't used in awhile.
The problem is that Android uses RAM differently than, say, Windows. On Android, having your RAM nearly full is a good thing. It means that when you relaunch an app you've previously opened, the app launches quickly and returns to its previous state. So while Android actually uses RAM efficiently, most users see that their RAM is full and assume that's what's slowing down their phone. In reality, your CPU—which is only used by apps that are actually active—is almost always the bottleneck.

Why Task Killers Are (Usually) Bad News

Apps like Advanced Task Killer, the most popular task killer in the Market, act on the incorrect assumption that freeing up memory on an Android device is a good thing. When launched, it presents you with a list of "running" apps and the option to kill as many as you want. You can also hit the Menu button to access a more detailed "Services" view, that lists exactly which parts of each application are "running", how much memory they take up, and how much free memory is available on your phone. This set-up implies that the goal of killing these apps is to free up memory. Nowhere on the list does it mention the number of CPU cycles each app is consuming, only the memory you'll free by killing it. As we've learned, full memory is not a bad thing—we want to watch out for the CPU, the resource that actually slows down your phone and drains your battery life.
Thus, killing all but the essential apps (or telling Android to kill apps more aggressively with the "autokill" feature) is generally unnecessary. Furthermore, it's actually possible that this will worsen your phone's performance and battery life. Whether you're manually killing apps all the time or telling the task killer to aggressively remove apps from your memory, you're actually using CPU cycles when you otherwise wouldn't—killing apps that aren't doing anything in the first place.
In fact, some of the processes related to those apps will actually start right back up, further draining your CPU. If they don't, killing those processes can cause other sorts of problems—alarms don't go off, you don't receive text messages, or other related apps may force close without warning. All in all, you're usually better off letting your phone work as intended—especially if you're more of a casual user. In these instances, a task killer causes more problems than it solves.
What You Should Do Instead

That said, not all apps are created equal. Many of you have used task killers in the past and actually found that after freeing up memory, your phone works a bit better. It's more likely that this is because you've killed a bad app—one that was poorly coded, and (for example) keeps trying to connect to the internet even when it shouldn't. Any performance increase you experience is more likely because you killed the right app, not because you freed up loads of memory (or, in many cases, it's just placebo). Instead of killing all those apps, find out which ones are actually causing the problems. If you really know what you're doing, you may benefit from using a task killer to stop the one or two inefficient-but-loved apps on your phone.
Note, however, that this is still a contested notion. A lot of developers (including ROM builder extraordinaire, Cyanogen) will not even look at your bug reports if you're using a task killer. In this humble blogger's opinion, your best bet is to stay away from regular task killer usage entirely. If you absolutely have to have that one battery-killing app on your phone, though, kill away—just be aware that when you experience a recurring Android bug later on, the task killer may be at fault. Of course, you can just stop using it to determine whether that is or isn't the case.

 

[joshuacalebsimon]

I have a task killer and I underclocked it to run under stock voltage. Since then my battery last over a day. Close to a day and a half. I use my phone a good bit and I think it's the underclock that did it.
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[radroni]

thanks for the info about task killers...

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