Tips to Help Improve Battery Life on ThunderBolt

[scaner]

so right now is 11-29 pm..and my phone is 38 % left..from 12 pm today..almost nothing to do with him..2 text..10 min surf on inet..update apps..some uninstaling..tweaking..and nothing..seat next to me..and its going down,,,,,lets see..:reddroid:

 

[mkjellgren]

Tell me about it.

Something is definitely draining your battery. First things first, NEVER use auto brightness...set it to around 20-30% and that should help a ton. I can't really say what else is eating your battery without actually looking at your phone but I have a ton of widgets and have everything set to refresh once an hour and easily get 10-14 hours with VERY heavy use (a dozen phone calls, 50+ texts, taking photos, a little angry birds, and almost constant use of newsroom and the DF app...)

Battery life is still nowhere near what I got out of my d1 but if you have things set up the right way you should be getting much better than you claim.

 

[geoff5093]

Never use auto brightness? I'm sorry, but I don't stay in one location all day to be able to keep it at a manual setting.

Sent from my Thunderbolt

 

[mkjellgren]

Never use auto brightness? I'm sorry, but I don't stay in one location all day to be able to keep it at a manual setting.

Sent from my Thunderbolt

I should say, never use auto brightness if you care about battery life...its been a known battery drain since the beginning of Android...constantly polling the light sensors uses battery...plus with the inherent brightness of the slcd versus the regular lcd on my d1 I have yet to run into a situation where 20-30% brightness has been too dim.

 

[guitarchris123]

Does anyone think that turning off the sound features would help battery life? Go to settings ---> sounds ---> incoming calls the in pocket sensor, turning over sensor, etc???

Sent from my ADR6400L using DroidForums App

Turning off vibration would help you out far more than turning off sounds. How else are you supposed to get notifications without looking? Notification sounds do not really drain battery at all, as compared to vibration notifications.

 

[guitarchris123]

I leave Auto-Sync off, screen brightness on Automatic, and I am a “medium” user. I text a bit with my girlfriend, browse Facebook and twitter lightly (refresh every once in a while), and also check my email every once in a while.

Try taking screen brightness off automatic, and place a widget or shortcut on a screen to change it manually, keeping it between 20-30% most of the time. You don't really need more than that unless you are outside in the sun, and the screen is the biggest battery killer of them all. That should help out.

 

[mkjellgren]

Also, just thought of this, how many of you are actually letting your battery drain til your phone shuts itself down? I have yet to actually drain it completely dead but I'd be interested to hear some reports on actual 100%-0% times.

Sent from my ADR6400L

 

[guitarchris123]

Also, just thought of this, how many of you are actually letting your battery drain til your phone shuts itself down? I have yet to actually drain it completely dead but I'd be interested to hear some reports on actual 100%-0% times.

Sent from my ADR6400L

I have read somewhere that it is not good to do that on a regular basis, although it will not damage anything if it happens every once in a while. If you are trying to calibrate something such as a battery life widget/timer, that is one thing, but it would not be advisable to do on purpose otherwise. I hear it can degrade the long-term life of your battery. You might want to do a search online about that issue though to find out more.

 

[Snow02]

Doing it very rarely is ok, and recommended. But you're right, regularly doing it will decrease the number of charge cycles you get out of it.

 

[mkjellgren]

Also, just thought of this, how many of you are actually letting your battery drain til your phone shuts itself down? I have yet to actually drain it completely dead but I'd be interested to hear some reports on actual 100%-0% times.

Sent from my ADR6400L

I have read somewhere that it is not good to do that on a regular basis, although it will not damage anything if it happens every once in a while. If you are trying to calibrate something such as a battery life widget/timer, that is one thing, but it would not be advisable to do on purpose otherwise. I hear it can degrade the long-term life of your battery. You might want to do a search online about that issue though to find out more.

No, I get that, I completely understand that complete drains are bad on Li-ion batteries. I was just asking if anyone had tried running it completely dead just to get a sense of true maximum battery life.

Sent from my ADR6400L

 

[guitarchris123]

No, I get that, I completely understand that complete drains are bad on Li-ion batteries. I was just asking if anyone had tried running it completely dead just to get a sense of true maximum battery life.

Sent from my ADR6400L

Its kind of weird, the first day I got terrible battery life, but I never had enough time to charge it fully up, and was playing with it regularly throughout the day and had not adjusted settings yet, I had to try to get some short bump charges a few times that night. The second day/night was better, but still lacking from what I was hoping for. Today, after fully charging it last night, unplugging, rebooting, and charging some more until I was confident I had a full 100% charge this morning, as well as having time to adjust some crucial settings and place some toggle widgets, calibrating the battery and timer widget, I still have 60% after a not-quite full day (and it says I have about 6 hours of similar use left), surprisingly. However, I did not use it as much today as the past 2 days, and as I said I now have the settings limited. I think the battery will do allright with a little knowledge of how things work and controlling it, but if you have the screen set bright, and forget to shut it off when done using it, and allow useless data to constantly sync in the background when you don't really need it, that is where the problems will come from.

The first day of using Battery Left it gave me a reading of about a 9 hour till dead limit, today it was more like a 14 hour limit. You just gotta play with the device and tweak the settings until you find something that works for you. Not that much different from any other Android powerhouse.

 

[Z06_Mir]

It keeps getting worse! I'm down 12% in 11 minutes with moderate use. It seems like it eats the most at idle.

Ps my screen is always on the very lowest setting.

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[rjcapp]

from what I have heard car chargers charge more rapid and r harder on batteries since they use a higher charge current . this damages batteries . I keep an inverter in my car and always try to use wall chargers

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[guitarchris123]

from what I have heard car chargers charge more rapid and r harder on batteries since they use a higher charge current . this damages batteries . I keep an inverter in my car and always try to use wall chargers

Sent from my ADR6400L using DroidForums App

Interesting point. I have heard that wall chargers are better than car chargers, but we can't really escape the reality that we have to use them often. Can you provide links to any articles/sources to get some further info on that issue? What does the "inverter" supposedly do? Thanks!

 

[lckyforme]

I might keep this phone afterall!!

Well, I am happy to report my battery is better!! dancedroidI'm at 68% this morning. I calibrated as suggested in item 35, my screen is set at low (not sure of the percentage) and bt, gps, wifi are all off. I did download JuiceDefender I think it was. I'm not sure what I did to my email because it wasn't syncing, and I just found the option to manually sync this morning. I had one phonecall for about 15 minutes and checked and replied to some emails. Right now I can live with this. Let's see how it does today.

Lisa