Will battery lifetimes improve with 2.2?

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evelynmfaulkner

New member
I recently had a Desire and all things considered I really liked it. But it got hot quickly and the battery life was probably the worst I have ever seen on a phone.

I was looking around at some X10 discussions and poor battery life seems to be a common complaint with that as well. I was just wondering is this across the board with Android and if so is it something they are aware off and intend to rectify with 2.2?

I am not sure what to get now. I was thinking of the Samsung i9000 Galaxy but to be honest I now regret selling my 3GS as the hassle doesn't seem worth it.
 
What were you doing on your Desire (browsing? playing games?) and how long did the battery last (an hour? two?)

Just a thought... but compare it to a laptop (similar processor power after all) that has a battery 10x the capacity as your phone. How long would your laptop last doing the same thing? Would it last 10x longer? 10 hours? 20 hours? I think not...

There are very few power optimizations in Android 2.2 over 2.1. I doubt it'll make any difference.

The HTC Desire can last around 15 days on a single charge on standby, so if it's lasting less than that then it's your use of the phone that's draining the battery. A day's use is a decent amount on any smartphone, and all anybody needs - you can charge it while you sleep.

Try looking at Settings -> About phone -> Battery use, to see what the culprits were that's draining the battery, and then reduce those. For example the screen uses a ton of power, so turn the brightness down.

There are also several threads on this forum that give tips on reducing battery use in general.
 
great post extorian.

i'm kind of having battery life problems with my g1 as well. it's been used for a while, so i'm sure it's battery is starting to die. also, i never got a chance to "prime it," or whatever people call it, where you drain the battery all the way down and charge it full. granted, it still gets me the through the day, but it kinda bothers me because a good 7-8 hours of my day, i'm at school/work, so my phone is on standby. and i don't have a data plan--i'm not sure if i'd be content with my phone if i was using more features more often.
 
Conditioning (or priming as you called it) hasn't been needed to be done on batteries for years. It's a relic from NiCd battery technology from the 80s. I truly have no idea why LiIon batteries come with such suggestions in the instructions, it just feels like they've kept standard advice from years ago.

In actual fact, the opposite is true for LiIon batteries. If you fully discharge a LiIon battery, you will slightly damage it each time, and reduce its capacity.

LiIon batteries usually come pre-conditioned from the factory. Sure, a few full recharge cycles might add 5% to your battery capacity, but you'll do this eventually anyway. A discharge cycle is from fully charged to when the phone warns you that the battery is low (at about 10% to 15%). Try not to let it get any lower.

A LiIon battery will last around 400 to 1,200 charge/discharge cycles (400 if you fully discharge it, 1,200 if you plug it in at 50% charge) before it loses 50% of its capacity. So... if you have to charge it every day, you might want to consider replacing the battery after a year or so.
 
The only thing you may consider trying is clearing the battery cache. The only way I know to do this is using Amon Ra recovery...

Sometimes if your battery is not reporting properly, this will help. But from reading this thread it does not seem like this is your problem. There are many factors that can contribute to poor battery performance on smartphones these days (GPS, data polling, etc etc).
 
Other than "priming"- as it was called above- the two things that have saved my N1's battery life has been Advanced Task Manager with automatic app kills, and Screebl pro, which is a more advanced screen timeout monitor... Both are available in the market, but I think they are paid apps
 
Be careful with task killers. Android works very differently from the likes of Windows. Background processes really do use almost zero resources and do use 0 CPU (unless they're actually doing something). Killing off a process uses battery, and when it automatically reloads shortly afterwards it uses a ton of battery, and more memory than had you left it running.

See http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html
 
Extorian I found that after only 5 mins of web surfing or using Ebuddy the phone got hot. In terms of usage this was an example of my day.

Maybe 20 mins of web browsing, 10 mins of calls, 4 or 5 SMS, an hour or so of ebuddy. And all this is pretty much at work whilst the phone is on charge. So I leave work and maybe surf for 15 mins on the train home and that is it for the rest of the day, no more usage at all.

I will wake up in the morning and the phone is off as the battery is dead. And I wasn't even listening to any music on it or watching video or using the camera. I tried fully charging to emptying it several times and it didn't do anything to help battery life. I was also very careful with what background apps were running. I didn't have friend stream on, in fact the only widgets that were running were the clock/weather and an RSS feed for news snippets.

Coming from an iphone 3GS I naturally compared it with that. In fact I think the iphones battery is less in capacity than the Desire and that same usage coupled with around 4 hours of music + 20 mins of video each day get me through right the way through to the following afternoon at work no problems.

The point is though I shouldn't have to get any task managers or kill apps or do this or that. Ok maybe tweak the screen brightness down a notch but that's it.

As mentioned I was thinking about the Galaxy S but I think I am just better off with waiting a month for the new iphone.
 
It shouldn't have lost that much power over night. My battery goes down by like 10% to 20% over night when not being used.

The hour of ebuddy would use a good chunk of your battery I'd imagine.

It is almost certainly an app that's causing the problem.

Anyway, the way to see what's killing your battery is to go to Settings -> About phone -> Battery use (assuming it's the same in Sense). It'll show you a nice bar graph of everything on your phone that's used some power (both hardware and apps), and you can see what the big ones are.
 
While this would be a great thing, ive come to accept that any touch screen device i own will drain/have crappy batt life, so i i have a charger at work, in the car and at home.
 
Agreed. Smartphones in general consume a ton of power... then when you are using a large touchscreen display as the primary input method it makes the battery drain even quicker.

I love touchscreen devices because of their intuitive interface, but they are a battery killer.
 
I appreciate having a TS phone will lead to less battery life but I am just surprised at the gulf in usage time between the android phones and iphone 3GS. Some people have said 2.2 Froyo addresses this but I wan't to see something in writing from them to say they are looking at this.
 
I've have the desire and I've just brought an extended battery from mobile fun,its getting better each time I charge it takes about 8charges so I'm told,I'm on my mobile all the time I used to give it 1-2charges a day but I can get round to next evening now ,got the battery last Thursday its had about 5 charges so far. I'm glad I brought it now Ann.
 
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