Well the battery life on this phone, is terrible.

[Grey Hawk]

300 texts per day would drain any ones battery that "quickly"

That's some HEAVY texting.

You got great advice here already the only thing I will add is that you shouldn't expect your device to get a lot more battery life than what you are getting right now. The huge screen being on constantly and all the texting will drain it quickly. No getting around that one.

Well its 150 sent, 150 received. Not 300 sent.

Yes, I text a lot, something like 15k a month used.

When I go to battery check it says Display is eating up my battery. :\

Oh yea, I only have installed 2 apps, and have NO WIDGETS running.

Not surprised the display eats your battery, it is the biggest battery drain for me too. What phone did you have before that survived 150 texts sent a day? :icon_eek:

Many. The Dare, Chocolate VX550, Env 2, Env 3

Granted over time they got laggy and glitchy. All 4 of them. I think it has something to do with 15k texts a month.

 

[carbine]

I personally went 12 hours without charge, several calls and random texting throughout the day. I was at 60% when I finally charged it.

 

[jimnutt]

I can only make it through half the day. Which is:

• Zero phone calls
• 300 texts
• 30 mins of web

Thats all I do, and that kills my phone. I adjusted the brightness to auto, and WIFI is off, Bluetooth off.

Help.

What's your signal strength? A weak signal is a real killer in terms of battery as well. My guess is your display is killing you though, as others have suggested, turn off automatic brightness, set it as low as you can stand (you can always turn it up if you need to) and set the timeout to be fairly short. I'm guessing you'll see a significant improvement. I get 12-14 hours out of my battery with GPS and WiFi turned on (at home, I turn WiFi off when I'm not connected to a hotspot).

 

[Rettocs]

The only reason I use auto is because when I would put it into any other setting, the screen wouldn't turn off during a call using the proximity sensor. Did I do something wrong? Does the proximity sensor still turn off the screen for a phone call when you are NOT using auto?

I have mine set at about 5% and the screen always blacks out during a call perfectly. Something else is amiss with yours.

I didn't test it very thoroughly, I just noticed it happened once and assumed that was the cause. THis was within the first few days of having it. When I go home, I'll put my phone on the low brightness setting and see if anything happens. Since you say it works, I'm going to assume that it was User Error on my part.

 

[jbsangel]

There are bad batteries out there for sure, but I still maintain that most of the time, bad battery life is user error.

Get you an app that allows you to access the battery history screen. Battery Left, Battery Status, Spare Parts, and BetterCut are all apps that let you see this screen. This is a different screen from the usage screen accessible through settings. This screen tells you how many minutes your phone has spent: running, with the display on, with wifi on, with BT on, and with wifi running. It will also tell you what apps are waking your phone up from sleeping and how long they have kept it awake for, as well as what apps have used GPS and how long they used it for.

If your display is top of your % usage list, and given your txt amounts, I bet when you look at your history your will see that your phone is running something like 50% of the time it is on battery, and your screen is probably on for an almost equal amount of time. Surefire battery killer.

Since you are texting so much, I think Screebl will be your best friend. It will allow you to set your screen timeout to 'minimum' which is even shorter than the 15 seconds listed in the settings menu. Get that screen off when you aren't txting. And definitely go on the lowest brightness you can handle. I don't dig auto at all.

Last, its so hard for someone to tell you your battery is busted unless you provide some useful usage numbers.

 

[dylanthecat]

I am in the habit of pressing the power button everytime I set the phone down. I have been doing this ever since I got my Q several years ago. I don't even realize I am doing it anymore. I know that his helps with battery life by minimizing the display on time.

I can't quite comprehend 15,000 texts a month. Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day, that means you are sending or receiving a text every 2 minutes. I guess I must be old.

 

[Woork]

OP - I had bad battery life on my first Droid. All I can really recommend is swapping it with Verizon or buying another battery. I went from barely being able to make it a whole day barely doing anything with my phone. I tried pretty much every solution I can find and nothing worked.

When I finally traded it out, the battery life jumped way up. I went from having the phone die after 11 hours while idle to not having to recharge for at least a full 26 hours after moderate usage (60 minute calls, 150+ texts, 5-10 minutes of web browsing, and Pandora)

 

[Grey Hawk]

OP - I had bad battery life on my first Droid. All I can really recommend is swapping it with Verizon or buying another battery. I went from barely being able to make it a whole day barely doing anything with my phone. I tried pretty much every solution I can find and nothing worked.

When I finally traded it out, the battery life jumped way up. I went from having the phone die after 11 hours while idle to not having to recharge for at least a full 26 hours after moderate usage (60 minute calls, 150+ texts, 5-10 minutes of web browsing, and Pandora)

If I swap it with Verizon, will I get a refurbished one or a new one? Will it cost me money or what?

 

[Woork]

OP - I had bad battery life on my first Droid. All I can really recommend is swapping it with Verizon or buying another battery. I went from barely being able to make it a whole day barely doing anything with my phone. I tried pretty much every solution I can find and nothing worked.

When I finally traded it out, the battery life jumped way up. I went from having the phone die after 11 hours while idle to not having to recharge for at least a full 26 hours after moderate usage (60 minute calls, 150+ texts, 5-10 minutes of web browsing, and Pandora)

If I swap it with Verizon, will I get a refurbished one or a new one? Will it cost me money or what?

I wasn't able to swap out just the battery without having to pay $30 for the new battery, but I was still within my 30 days and was able to trade for a new Droid. They tried to give me a refurbished one which would've been fine except that the one I had bought was less than a week old, but after some protesting I was able to get a brand new one.

 

[funken]

While we are on the topic, does leaving GPS on drain the battery if you aren't using programs that use GPS?

 

[BayouFlyFisher]

While we are on the topic, does leaving GPS on drain the battery if you aren't using programs that use GPS?

No, I have excellent battery life and I leave GPS on all the time. In fact, I leave WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS on all the time. Of course I don't use a program that like Locale that can use resources like GPS in the background. Be aware of what your are using.

 

[asmallchild]

had to change my screen brightness back to auto

it's too annoying to keep changing from low to bright when stepping outside

that's what my car charger is for anyway if I somehow deplete the battery in one day of work (has yet to happen)

 

[jsh1120]

Lots of useful suggestions on this thread, but GreyHawk maintains he averages 15,000 texts per month. That means his 150 sent/150 received is a light day. He's averaging 500 text messages per day.

Frankly, and I don't mean this to be insulting, this seems to be a case where therapy (either on the thumbs or the personality) is called for. Assuming he sleeps for 8 hours, that means he's averaging over 30 text messages an hour for 16 hours a day. It appears he's doing nothing but typing and reading text messages for his entire waking life.

And if that's true, all the suggestions about dimming the screen, setting a short timeout, looking for battery draining applications, etc. are simply useless.

 

[Daver]

My battery life is what I think GREAT. Stock phone, factory wall paper, at least two hour a day talking on it, min of 1 hour on the web. I get around 40 hours from a full charge.

Can I have you battery??? lol. If I turn off everything, running app, no sync, no gps, no refesh, no texting, no calls, and no web, Just let the phone idle I would not get 40 hours...

I don't turn off anything, use my phone quite a bit, and I make it through the whole day. Not 40 hours, but 1 day is perfect.

+1, I use it all I want during the day and it's still usually at 30% or better when I go to bed. One day with all the time I kill on this thing is very tolerable imo.

 

[crspang]

The first month my son had his cell phone (LG rhythm) he had 22,000 texts! About 75% of those were incoming texts though. Thank goodness we had unlimited texting. Since he's had his phone for almost a year now he's slowed down to about 14,000 texts. He got his LG rhythm in Feb of 09 and by Dec it was completely worn out and now he has a chocolate touch.