Psychlone
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- Dec 8, 2009
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You're welcome. I would like to point out that I'm no expert on Android devices, I'm an IT with 27 years experience, and I pay attention - nothing more. That certainly doesn't make me an authority on the subject though.
As for leaving GPS on, I found (through trial and error with different ROMs), that the internal GPS radio wasn't actually being used like we think it would be - it's only actually activated when a program polls it, so that means that when I pull up Nav or Car Home, that my GPS doesn't waste time trying to locate me (and running down the battery). With this new Standalone GPS in the Bionic, I haven't really noticed much of a difference in battery life in and of itself, but I've noticed the same decrease in the time it takes to locate my current position, which would definitely equate to less battery used in the long run... just nothing noticeable right then and there.
What is your "light" usage?? This is the one variable that only a filled-in template would show and we could compare oranges to oranges.
See, for ME, "light" usage is roughly an hour of calls, roughly 60 texts and roughly two hours of WiFi use in a 24 hour period.
The bolded text is the main difference in all of our phones - yes, it's the same device, but even with the same exact settings and all other things being equal, it's the user that differs.
However, I find your "very little use" kind of vague as well. If you really only had 2-3 texts and "some time" with words w/friends, you just used your phone quite a bit less than I do. But then at the end you said that you spend all day on 4G... does that mean you're using 4G all day long or ?? (just confused)
Again, I'm not the authority on battery life. I've been playing with Droid since it's inception and have noticed many, many things. It's my job to note discrepancies in computers and software, so it's easy for me to make a single setting change and then log and note the differences between a day without that setting and a day with it. Follow that up with many settings and many different ROMs on several different Android phones, and you've just grasped exactly what I've done here.
It all comes down to how much you actually need that device in your pocket vs. how much you need it in your hands, AS WELL AS how long you can wait for an email to arrive, etc. For instance, how many people on this planet absolutely HAVE to have an email the second it's sent? I can't say I've ever missed anything of importance in a 10-minute period, so it doesn't make sense to have my Bionic's email set to "push", constantly polling the 3G stream waiting for that elusive email that's going to save someone's life... that doesn't happen for me, so my Bionic's settings reflect that. Same with WiFi - it's on when I'm at home, but I'm on my computer when I'm at home - I really only have it on for convenience because if I actually need to download some app to my phone while I'm at home, I can use my 30MB/s speed rather than the crap 3G speeds I'm stuck with.
GPS, again, is a different beast altogether. I have found ROMs that hate having GPS on at all and will deplete the battery very quickly because the ROM isn't intelligent enough to turn it off when it's not needed. But most of the newer ROMs, including all the stock 2.2 and higher Gingerbread on most of the phones I've tested, it *is* smart enough to only poll GPS data when it needs to, shutting down it's standalone internal radio when it's not needed.
Anyway, I'm glad some of you are finally getting some use out of the template! I made it with the vision that more people would post their settings in it along with their actual usage and their "time to discharge" so we all have a standardized "benchmark" that we all could tear apart and understand. Maybe now it will catch on.
Again, the end-user is the biggest difference here - the hardware is identical, it's only about how you use your phone and what settings you can have turned to OFF - even if that means you have to turn it on when you need it... sure, it's a bit of a pain to have to turn things on and off instead of having it fully-automagic, but hey, even 20 hours is better than 10, right?
