Any apps that are known battery killers?

[mjs31]

Something is killing my battery life and I cant figure out what. My status says it is still the screen, but it has to be something else as well. Today, it went dead on me after 7 hours. During this time I sent 2 emails, looked up one web page, made no calls at all. It was basically in sleep mode the entire time. I don't have wifi or gps on and am at a loss on this one.

 

[qoncept]

Settings -> About phone -> Battery use
I've used it enough to realize the most important thing is to keep the screen of when I'm not using it.

 

[cereal killer]

mjs post up all your apps..............

 

[mjs31]

I know about battery use which is why I said it was still showing screen. What I am saying I that the phone is not being used and the screen is off. Ck, I pulled the battery and am going to do a full recharge. If it still does the strange kill I will post everything installed. It almost acts like it is constantly searching for a signal.

 

[cereal killer]

ok....post up what you find out. Hopefully you will get it resolved.

Very strange to say the least.

 

[jigsawkilr]

I have noticed that when i'm in an area that has poor signal or poor 3g signal my battery doesn't last as long. If the phone is trying to constantly find signal it will kill the battery faster. Example, when im home my phone will last all day on a full charge. When I go to the hunting camp I have no signal so just leaving my phone on and not using it at all it will be dead by noon. HTH

 

[suzukimethod]

apps that send lots of update requests can do a number (RSS readers, twitter apps, weather, etc) if they are set to update frequently. I scaled back the update frequency on most of these (1x/day to keep them close, then i manually refresh on load to update)...

Also - my gmail sync was wonky for 4-6 hours yesterday (lots of looking) and that hit my battery pretty good.


I would suggest installing "Spare Parts" and looking at the "partial wake usage" and "other usage" under "battery usage"

That should show which apps are really getting after the battery...

 

[Anonymouse]

Hmmm... What's your brightness at? And do you have auto brightness on? From what I've heard, those are major battery killers.

 

[Jer]

Should 'Android Core Apps' be using 23% of the battery? That seems awfully high to me. Bottom line is my Droid gets awful battery life. In battery usage it shows it was last unplugged 2hrs and 1min ago and I'm now at 50% battery life. I charged it until it was full and this is just unacceptable. I've even disabled GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and whatever else I can think to disable. I'm VERY frustrated that I have to disable all the functionality of my fancy new phone and even then I still have to charge it several times a day. This is annoying and I'm strongly considering returning our phones and taking a step 'back' to phones that would last all day even with all the radios activated.

 

[dezymond]

Should 'Android Core Apps' be using 23% of the battery? That seems awfully high to me. Bottom line is my Droid gets awful battery life. In battery usage it shows it was last unplugged 2hrs and 1min ago and I'm now at 50% battery life. I charged it until it was full and this is just unacceptable. I've even disabled GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and whatever else I can think to disable. I'm VERY frustrated that I have to disable all the functionality of my fancy new phone and even then I still have to charge it several times a day. This is annoying and I'm strongly considering returning our phones and taking a step 'back' to phones that would last all day even with all the radios activated.

yes that's normal

i do get better battery life than you however, much better in fact

11h 7m since last unplugged and i'm at 90%, didn't really use it today much. sent out a couple of texts, 3g for a bit, and a 10 minute phone call:icon_ banana:

edit: 29% battery use on phone standby compared to 28% display

I killed all apps with taskiller so i'm back to 3% core apps. but my usual was 20%

 

[cereal killer]

Should 'Android Core Apps' be using 23% of the battery? That seems awfully high to me. .

Thats very high....mine ranges from 3-6%.

Are you running a home replacement app on your device?

 

[Jer]

Should 'Android Core Apps' be using 23% of the battery? That seems awfully high to me. Bottom line is my Droid gets awful battery life. In battery usage it shows it was last unplugged 2hrs and 1min ago and I'm now at 50% battery life. I charged it until it was full and this is just unacceptable. I've even disabled GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and whatever else I can think to disable. I'm VERY frustrated that I have to disable all the functionality of my fancy new phone and even then I still have to charge it several times a day. This is annoying and I'm strongly considering returning our phones and taking a step 'back' to phones that would last all day even with all the radios activated.

yes that's normal

i do get better battery life than you however, much better in fact

11h 7m since last unplugged and i'm at 90%, didn't really use it today much. sent out a couple of texts, 3g for a bit, and a 10 minute phone call:icon_ banana:

edit: 29% battery use on phone standby compared to 28% display

I killed all apps with taskiller so i'm back to 3% core apps. but my usual was 20%

Must be nice, my battery life dropped to 40% after posting that last reply. :sad face

The scary part is that I'm not even using my phone for phone calls much right now. It will last an hour tops once I start actually using it for the purposes intended.

 

[Jer]

Should 'Android Core Apps' be using 23% of the battery? That seems awfully high to me. .

Thats very high....mine ranges from 3-6%.

Are you running a home replacement app on your device?

Yes, I am actually. Panda Home and I have four home pages (one extra) total. I also use it to hide lots of app tray icons to clean things up visually. My phone seems to have grown increasingly unstable since I installed it and have been tweaking it. I debated an unstall and a fresh install but odds are good that if I do that I won't install it once again. The primary benefit to me is the icon hiding feature. Additional home pages are not required and over 4 the phone gets noticeably more unstable. Panda Home needs lots of work still. I realize it's being worked on and I update regularly but still seems to be the source of more struggle than joy.

 

[Jer]

So I turned my display from auto to manual brightness and then lowered it to the lowest setting which to my surprise wasn't all that dim actually. Seems to be completely workable so this appears to be one place I can cut back on power consumption and not notice it. I also uninstalled a few apps that I wasn't really using all that much that appears to be running in the background even though I rebooted the phone and hadn't opened them at all. I did all this along with a couple other minor adjustments and after a reboot my phone battery life went from 30% to 50% so I hope that's a good sign.

Here's my list of battery usage for reference:
(notes on the number in parenthesis below)
Display 42% (45%) (still seems pretty high but since I lowered my other battery drains it would make sense that this one didn't move much since it's a measurement taken off of overall usage, right? Edit: see notes below)
Android Core Apps 16% (15%)
Android System 16% (15%)
91PandaHome 9% (8%) (other times it was more like 5-6%)
Market 5% (5%)
Google 4% (3%)
Cell Standby 3% (3%)
Android OS 3% (3%)
Phone Idle 2% (2%)
Weather Bug 2% (2%)

The first number was the number listed when I first opened the battery usage monitor. After a theory I did a quick research to find that it seemed to support the theory and that was that a high number for display wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Keeping in mind that the total has to equal 100% so if you could theoretically kill everything else n the phone and still have it work (not possible) the display usage would be 100% but even though this number seems high your phone would still use less power overall. Once I did the refresh you see that most of the numbers went down except for the display which actually went up. All this means is that w/o the auto dim set the display is set to a static amount and if the other battery drains are lowered the number has to increase as it's the reflection of the overall percentage. Sorry for the rambling... I'm new to this phone and still learning (out loud I guess lol)

With my new tweaks I will try again tomorrow to see how the battery life performs. I will then enable my GPS and BT again to see how it handles these two and if it drops to level unacceptable I will uninstall Panda Home and try again.

 

[machineheadg2r]

I was surprised at how bright the minimum brightness was as well. I could easily see the screen in a completely dark room. I downloaded some apps to adjust brightness and turn off things like BT, GPS, WiFi, and 3g. I should see some good numbers.