keiichi25
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- Nov 6, 2009
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Lately, I have noticed many posts of people reporting poorer performance of Battery Life since the 2.0.1 Update. What is not posted is some of the Apps that some of these users have installed and, for the most part, it is under the belief their phone is doing nothing.
The problem here is a lack of understanding some of the apps in question. For example, there is a lack of understanding the definition of 'standby' for many people here. Just because the screen is off on your phone, does not necessarily mean 'standby' for a Smartphone. A smartphone, like the Droid, will have the ability to do other things. Just like many techs telling users turning off the monitor does not mean it turns off the computer, the same is true for the Droid. Even if you are not doing something on the Droid, it does not mean the Droid is not doing something while the screen is off.
The following Apps are example of things going on in the background:
Locale
Beautiful Widgets
Weatherbug
Weather Channel Widget
Alarm Clock
Calendar
Corporate Calendar
Talk
Meebo
Note, I just listed several apps, someo f which I have, some of which I do not. However, if you were like me, paying attention to minute details with regards to what is going on, you will find these are things running on the phone at a given time.
Now, as Cereal Killer mentioned, some of these apps, you don't want to kill, because they will come back up and slow down the phone because part of their innate design is to keep running. Things like Calendar, Corporate Calendar and similar.
However, things like:
It is important to understand that Widgets that do 'up to the minute updating' such as Weatherbug or Weather updating widgets use power. They use it by constantly chatting to some weather service server to get up to the minute data to display. This counts as Talk or Airtime to a phone as it requires power to send a message and receive a message versus just 'receiving' a message. A few of these data apps are not using push based data transfers, they are pull based data transfers.
I would hazard to guess the weather module for Beautiful Widgets does the same thing.
The other thing that people seriously need to understand is the IM clients... IM clients are notoriously chatty. They have to keep telling the IM server that the user is 'online' so it can tattle tale that to your friends or people who want to find you online. This is a known problem for ALL smartphones. While you may not be doing anything on Meebo or any other IMing client, the important thing is, if you are not doing anything with it, you should really sign off the IM client.
Failing to do so, means you are burning your battery's "talk time" (This being how long the phone can function while talking on the phone) because you have an app just constantly going, "I'm online... I'm online... I'm online." This is how IM is designed. It will need a 'poke' from your IM client to be sure to say, "Hey, you are on, so here is where the message goes."
I highly recommend people who have short battery life issues with the 2.0.1 Update, to stop for a moment... And post the following:
Just to give you a fair example of a situation - My phone...
I had it unplugged on December 10th, around 6:30 AM PST time
Did not plug it in until around Decmber 12:th, around 8:30 PM PST time with about 30% power left.
On that phone, I have the following Apps:
Meebo
*Locale
Auto-Pilot (Locale Airplane Mode Plugin)
GPS Plugin for Locale
*Battery Status
*Battery Widget
*Automatic Task Killer
*TasKiller
*Flexis' Lookout
Barcode Scanner
Corporate Directory
DroidLight
GPS Status
IPCalc
Movies
OneManga
Opensudoku
Pente
Reversi
Ringdroid
Rockon
Shazam
ShopSavvy
Solitaire
Timeriffic
Word Search
The ones with the * are the ones that running at all times on my Droid that I don't have ATK killing or manually killing myself.
My Battery Usage shows as:
Phone Idle---------43%
Cell Standby-------25%
Display------------13%
Browser-----------5%
Android System---5%
Android OS-------5%
Locale-------------3%
Voice Calls--------2%
Email--------------2%
I want you to note that as you can tell from here, I am sitting at roughly 52 hours of Uptime on my phone with that setup as it is now. I do not have ATK killing Mail and Gmail either, and I do receive mail. I did some web browsing. The fact that I am a fairly light user and managed to eek out 52 hours or so of battery life this way, should point out the fact that 2.0.1 isn't necessarily the culprit of battery issues, but definitely something else is for other people.
I will further add that I also have Background Sync enabled, GPS enabled, Auto-Brightness disabled, WiFi disabled, and Bluetooth disabled by default. Auto-brightness is at the lowest setting for brightness. Haptic (Vibration) feedback enabled. I use Locale to enable Airplane Mode for time windows, like between 11:00 PM to 6:20 AM on Weekdays, 8:20 AM on Weekends if I am at home. So whether or not this behavior helps in lengthening the battery life is hard to say, but it is a habit of mine that I carried over with the Blackberries I have used.
To better identify your issues, the Battery Usage is KEY to identifying your problems and also doing EXACTLY what I did above to help narrow down the possible causes of power drain on your droid. Without knowing details like how I posted above, it makes it difficult how to better help you.
The problem here is a lack of understanding some of the apps in question. For example, there is a lack of understanding the definition of 'standby' for many people here. Just because the screen is off on your phone, does not necessarily mean 'standby' for a Smartphone. A smartphone, like the Droid, will have the ability to do other things. Just like many techs telling users turning off the monitor does not mean it turns off the computer, the same is true for the Droid. Even if you are not doing something on the Droid, it does not mean the Droid is not doing something while the screen is off.
The following Apps are example of things going on in the background:
Locale
Beautiful Widgets
Weatherbug
Weather Channel Widget
Alarm Clock
Calendar
Corporate Calendar
Talk
Meebo
Note, I just listed several apps, someo f which I have, some of which I do not. However, if you were like me, paying attention to minute details with regards to what is going on, you will find these are things running on the phone at a given time.
Now, as Cereal Killer mentioned, some of these apps, you don't want to kill, because they will come back up and slow down the phone because part of their innate design is to keep running. Things like Calendar, Corporate Calendar and similar.
However, things like:
- Weatherbug
- Meebo
- Other IM programs
- Some Beautiful Widget Functionality
- Battery Status
- Battery Widget
- Locale
It is important to understand that Widgets that do 'up to the minute updating' such as Weatherbug or Weather updating widgets use power. They use it by constantly chatting to some weather service server to get up to the minute data to display. This counts as Talk or Airtime to a phone as it requires power to send a message and receive a message versus just 'receiving' a message. A few of these data apps are not using push based data transfers, they are pull based data transfers.
I would hazard to guess the weather module for Beautiful Widgets does the same thing.
The other thing that people seriously need to understand is the IM clients... IM clients are notoriously chatty. They have to keep telling the IM server that the user is 'online' so it can tattle tale that to your friends or people who want to find you online. This is a known problem for ALL smartphones. While you may not be doing anything on Meebo or any other IMing client, the important thing is, if you are not doing anything with it, you should really sign off the IM client.
Failing to do so, means you are burning your battery's "talk time" (This being how long the phone can function while talking on the phone) because you have an app just constantly going, "I'm online... I'm online... I'm online." This is how IM is designed. It will need a 'poke' from your IM client to be sure to say, "Hey, you are on, so here is where the message goes."
I highly recommend people who have short battery life issues with the 2.0.1 Update, to stop for a moment... And post the following:
- List all apps installed on your Droid Phone - In all seriousness, just saying the problem exists without helping identify possible causes is much like going to the Car Mechanic and saying your car is broken, but not saying what is wrong beyond that.
- Take the time to get the Battery Usage Information and post it - This helps identify where most of your battery power seems to be getting lost.
Just to give you a fair example of a situation - My phone...
I had it unplugged on December 10th, around 6:30 AM PST time
Did not plug it in until around Decmber 12:th, around 8:30 PM PST time with about 30% power left.
On that phone, I have the following Apps:
Meebo
*Locale
Auto-Pilot (Locale Airplane Mode Plugin)
GPS Plugin for Locale
*Battery Status
*Battery Widget
*Automatic Task Killer
*TasKiller
*Flexis' Lookout
Barcode Scanner
Corporate Directory
DroidLight
GPS Status
IPCalc
Movies
OneManga
Opensudoku
Pente
Reversi
Ringdroid
Rockon
Shazam
ShopSavvy
Solitaire
Timeriffic
Word Search
The ones with the * are the ones that running at all times on my Droid that I don't have ATK killing or manually killing myself.
My Battery Usage shows as:
Phone Idle---------43%
Cell Standby-------25%
Display------------13%
Browser-----------5%
Android System---5%
Android OS-------5%
Locale-------------3%
Voice Calls--------2%
Email--------------2%
I want you to note that as you can tell from here, I am sitting at roughly 52 hours of Uptime on my phone with that setup as it is now. I do not have ATK killing Mail and Gmail either, and I do receive mail. I did some web browsing. The fact that I am a fairly light user and managed to eek out 52 hours or so of battery life this way, should point out the fact that 2.0.1 isn't necessarily the culprit of battery issues, but definitely something else is for other people.
I will further add that I also have Background Sync enabled, GPS enabled, Auto-Brightness disabled, WiFi disabled, and Bluetooth disabled by default. Auto-brightness is at the lowest setting for brightness. Haptic (Vibration) feedback enabled. I use Locale to enable Airplane Mode for time windows, like between 11:00 PM to 6:20 AM on Weekdays, 8:20 AM on Weekends if I am at home. So whether or not this behavior helps in lengthening the battery life is hard to say, but it is a habit of mine that I carried over with the Blackberries I have used.
To better identify your issues, the Battery Usage is KEY to identifying your problems and also doing EXACTLY what I did above to help narrow down the possible causes of power drain on your droid. Without knowing details like how I posted above, it makes it difficult how to better help you.
Last edited:
