Beautiful Widgets Problem

[vthokies1996]

Wife and I each have Beautiful widgets on our Motorola Droids.

I have absolutely no issues with it. However, it is severely draining the battery.

I checked her battery usage today in the menu under about phone, and both Beautiful Widgets and GPS are absolutely draining her battery. She has not used maps or navigation.

We use the large clock/weather widget (Beautiful Home) that also displays the city. Geolocation is checked on both of our phones. Neither of them have the Use GPS over Network option selected. Her refresh rate is set to 1 hour, mine is set to 15 minutes. The only other differences I can see between hers and mine is the skin being used, I use Carbon Fiber and have mine set to be "Naked". Hers is set to Naked Alloy. Can't see how that would make a difference. In fact I previously used that skin with no issues. The other difference is that mine is set to use 24 hr clock.

Looking at her battery usage now it says the following:

Beautiful Widgets - 40%
GPS 39%
Voice Calls: 9%
Display 7%
Phone Idle: 2%
Cell Standby: 2%
Android System: 2%
Live Wallpaper: 2%

When I check mine, GPS and Beautiful Widgets don't even appear on my battery usage.

I cannot figure out why Beautiful Widgets is killing her battery. I uninstalled it the other night when she mentioned it, and it did the same thing today.

She likes the look of the widget, but said if it persists, she's going to just uninstall it. I am completely at a loss, especially since the only difference in the ways ours are set up I cannot see having any effect on GPS (skin, 24 hr clock).

Sorry for the long post. Any one have any ideas?

 

[vonfink13]

In the configure menu it gives you the option use gps or geolocation. It tells you the gps will drain the battery. Uncheck gps and use only geolocation. It works for me and it does not drain my battery.

 

[vthokies1996]

Hers has always been set to geolocation. The GPS is not and has never been checked.

 

[OldguyMark]

In the configure menu it gives you the option use gps or geolocation. It tells you the gps will drain the battery. Uncheck gps and use only geolocation. It works for me and it does not drain my battery.

2X - I even have geolocation turned off for now, I just use my home zip code unless I'm traveling ... I have it set to update every 4 hours, because I can easily do a manual update if needed - BW doesn't even show up in my battery usage ....

 

[vonfink13]

Bw takes up 2% of my battery.

 

[vonfink13]

Would bw automatically access your gps if you have it turned on in settings but not on the bw configure menu. Seems odd to me. Maybe try turning off the gps and see what happens. Just a guess.

 

[akstyle450]

i would say just decrease the refresh rate (as in make it refresh less) mine was at 2 hours, but now i have it set at 4, and BW doesnt even show in my battery usage anymore

 

[vthokies1996]

In her phone settings GPS is checked, in the Configure settings for BW, GPS is not checked.

I have my refresh set to 15 min and BW does not even show up in my battery settings.

 

[OldguyMark]

i would say just decrease the refresh rate (as in make it refresh less) mine was at 2 hours, but now i have it set at 4, and BW doesnt even show in my battery usage anymore

2X again if you have a high refresh rate and are in a bad GPS location area, the GPS refresh will keep searching and burn your battery - again like I said, and akstyle said, BW doesn't even show in my batt usage ....

 

[OldguyMark]

Okay - for what it's worth, I just did the following -

The Droid was sitting here on the charger in sleep mode.
I woke it up, and it said it was fully charged.
I unlocked it to my home screen.
Since I have BW set on a four hour refresh, it still thought it was partly cloudy/sunny outside ... actually it's dark and raining.
I touched for the animated screen and did a refresh, and as always it sent me back to the home screen, I touched for the animated screen again an it showed it dark and raining. I touched back to the home screen.
I touched menu > settings > phone > batt use, and found that BW was using 23% of my batt.

I put the Droid back on the charger and into sleep mode.
Watched TV about five minutes, then woke the Droid again ... it now showed that BW was using 2% of the battery.

Put the Droid back into sleep mode, came back five minutes later, and BW no longer showed up ....the battery was still at full charge ....

Point is: I think we should be careful about battery usage .... something may show up as a big usage, but may be gone a couple minutes later and not use much battery at all ....

Whatever - I'm sure this idea has been posted many times before ....

 

[vthokies1996]

I've seen her battery percentage very high twice. Last night when it was at 42% and another a few days ago when she said that she noticed the GPS had been on for a good part of the day.

So after reading the suggestions I just decided to turn off Geolocation. She can manually refresh if we travel out of town. I think the issue could be a bad GPS signal at her work. I mentioned this to her and she said that could be the case but then said the day the GPS was on for a good part of the day, the GPS was on for entire commute home.

Thanks for everyone's help.

 

[Riley]

I can't even get my geolocation to work on my BW anymore. If i check that geolocation it stops updating my weather and won't put the temp in the status bar. If I use GPS it works fine, but runs my battery use up to the mid 40% range on 1 hour updates. So for now I just use my zipcode. But I have no idea why geolocation will not work, I've posted the problem before, but with no answers or others with the problem.

 

[DaRkL3AD3R]

I know this is an old thread and I'm sure a mod will hate me for doing this, but I just want to post my results since it is still particularly relevant.

I was having very odd behavior with battery life. Some days I can go all day and be at like 80% at the end of the day. Then some days, after 3 hours off the charger I'd be at 80% already. So I was asking myself well what the heck is doing this? I was retracing my steps on all the apps I installed and what settings I changed, and the one thing that I finally stepped on was BW - Geolocations. I had enabled it for whatever reason. Turned it off and all my battery usage problems went away. Turns out when you have Geolocations on it prevents the phone from sleeping too well.

After 3 hours off the charge, display was on 12 minutes, of the 3 hours it was off the charger approx 1h 31m of that time was spent "Running" per Spare Parts. So even though I only used my phone for 12 minutes, BW kept it awake for another hour and 20 minutes. I turned off Geolocations and sure enough, my Running time was almost point for point the same as my Display on time. I felt so relieved to know there was no chaotic malicious code running on my phone!

Just wanted to share this with people so they can be aware of this issue. Don't use Geolocations!!!!

 

[digsoreos]

How do you disable Geolocations?

 

[DaRkL3AD3R]

How do you disable Geolocations?

It's under your location setting, where you either pick Geolocation or search for your town etc.