This thread refers to cases where the HTC Kaiser (and probably other HTC phone models with the same built-in GPS chip, such as Polaris) sucks the battery empty within a single day, particularly during standby, particularly if all features of the phone are DISABLED, or after low usage. Another symptom may be a phone which unexpectedly did not come back to life, but operated normally after recharging. Yet another symptom is unusually short battery life through normal use. Note, this thread is not about limited battery endurance due to heavy usage.
*** Battery drain FAQ ***
How can I see whether my Kaiser is affected?
- A large percentage of HTC phones with Qualcomm chipset and internal GPS seems to suffer from the bug described here, some appear to be robust enough, likely depending on chip revisions. If you never ever use GPS, you are probably out of risk. If you use GPS at least occasionally, you should have a look at your phone, and closely. It is possible that an otherwise normal to heavy use of the phone conceals a basic, added current consumption which is what we are talking about here. In such a situation you may have got used to a certain battery endurance, which may be much higher under normal circumstances. So far I observed currents between 28 and 78 mA, depending on DUT and OS. Some users reported currents in excess of 100mA. Note, this added current does nothing for you, except accelerate your battery drain!
How to check this?
- Check the true standby current (see the following description). That simple.
How to measure the standby current?
- Clean up: switch all phone features off (GPS, Phone, Bluetooth, Media Player, really everything). Terminate all applications, use Task Manager to verify this. Make sure no processor intensive background tasks are running (standard installations should meet this requirement). Do NOT soft reset at this point!
- Put the phone in standby, and wait approx. 10 seconds. The phone needs a while to complete entering the standby though it appears to be off immediately.
- Now measure the current. Best and fastest way of doing it would be to have a current meter connected between your battery and your phone which gives you realtime readouts. Second to that is a suitable battery tool, such as "BatteryStatus", but you have to get used to the delayed current display (see post #4 for details). Using the software battery gauge, you should wait an additional 20 seconds or so to allow for the current capture, then reactivate from standby and take the lowest possible current readout.
- If the phone is in a good condition, the standby current must be in the range 1..3 mA, roughly. If you see a repeatable current well in excess of 20mA, your phone is in the BAD condition !!
- Another simple method is to leave the cleaned up phone in standby overnight. Next morning, soft reset your phone because the phone may have lost track of the battery capacity. Check whether the capacity dropped dramatically. And also check whether the phone feels warm to the touch.
How to reproduce the problem?
- Activate GPS until you get a fix. Probably receiving the first NMEA strings is good enough, but I have not verified this. GPSTest, HTC's GPS Tool or any navigation software does the job.
- Deactivate GPS. Just to be safe, terminate the GPS software, too.
- Check the standby current.
- The fault does not pop up always, so you may have to repeat these steps several times until it appears. The phones I tested usually catch fever after only one or two tries, but it is possible that you need to cycle through this procedure 5 or 10 times. Which is in the nature of intermittent bugs.
How to reset this nasty condition?
- Fault recovery is possible by continued on/off cycling of the GPS unit, similar to what provoked this fault.
- Activating the cellphone unit does also seem to cause the phone to return to a low consumption, but maybe not in all cases.
- Try to soft reset your phone, or to cycle the power to the phone (long press of the power button).
- If you really cannot get rid of the problem, back up your phone data, then execute a hard reset. BEFORE restoring the phone, load a battery gauge software and see whether the consumption is gone. If yes, some application is likely to cause your headaches.
After performing one of the above steps you may repeat the described current measurement, to confirm that the standby current is back in the normal range.
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Original text:
I have reason to believe that all Kaiser models are prone to the "excessive standby current consumption" problem. I tried it on two original "VPA compact V" by Vodafone (= HTC Kaiser), using the original WM6, ROM 1.56.162.5, Radio 1.27.12.11. I gave a **** on warranty now, stepped up through HardSPL to "Duttys_Official_WM6.1_Rom_5.2.19716_UC.zip", Radio 1.64.08.21. The results are all the same: an excessive current consumption which can vary between 25 and 75 mA. Interestingly, the current is always the same in a specific setup, but varies between phones and operating systems. In the latest case, the same phone took 28mA under WM6, went up to 78mA under WM61. Consequence being, the battery will be sucked empty within a day or so, without obvious reason. The only mitigation is a reset, or a complete switch-off.
There is no application which could cause the current consumption, at least none I installed. It does not even matter which GPS application you used. The only active processes are (according to TaskManager, latest WM6.1 version, ".exe" omitted for the sake of ease): filesys, device, biotouch, gwes, shell32, cprog, services, quickdial, connmgr, mediahubmini, taskmgr, htcactionscreen, sapsettings, aplauncher, quickmenu, nk. I repeat: ALL applications properly terminated, ALL internal units are OFF (WLAN, Bluetooth, Phone, GPRS, GPS, Camera, Media Player etc. - really NOTHING).
Before anybody prematurely states that these findings can not be reproduced: the problem is unlikely to appear if you switch on the GPS for a couple of NMEA strings, then off again (though it did already). If need be, you have to leave it on for a while, play a bit, walk around a bit and so on. Take your time testing it _thoroughly_, really. I cannot tell when the fault actually appears, and it may not come up immediately because it seems somewhat sporadic in nature - but take my word, it will, I observed this issue for a long enough time. I can only repeat myself: I am sure there is something wrong with the power management in the GPS driver.
Anybody, feel free to contribute, but PLEASE avoid funny statements like "you have to shut down all programs", "WLAN can take up lots of energy" and so on. And before you express doubts just because there are not quite many people out there who come to the same conclusions, think again. Without going into details, most users are simply not in the position to come to the correct conclusions.
BusterTyTN
OK, making it sticky; depending on the feedback, I (or other mods) may unstick it in the future.
How do you measure current while in standby? When it's running, I can see current usage in the battery monitor of AE Button plus. Just after wake up from standby, it shows 16ma. A few seconds later it jumps to 385ma and then settles at 140ma.
I'm using 3.02.DKv0.0 6.1 Lite Rom from akadonny.
@ Menneisyys: thanx!
@ tdusen:
there's two ways of doing it. First, I do not know whether "AE Button plus" works in a similar way, but "BatteryStatus" (also included in Dutty's newest WM61 release) has some seconds of a delay in the current display. I assume this is because of an averaging process running in the background which collects current samples over a certain period of time, or soemthing to this effect. Anyway; you have to keep your in standby for at least 10..20 seconds, then reactivate the PDA. If it's still showing a high current, tip on the current/power display a few times, in most cases this helps getting the low standby current. You simply have to try to catch the lowest reading, right after reactivation from standby. If everything is OK, you will get a current reading of a few mA, maximum (in most cases 1..3 mA), assuming you shut every feature of your phone off.
The other way is also the verification of the "BatteryStatus" method. I built a current shunt test probe and measured the battery current directly. Attached is a screenshot taken with my digital scope, which shows typical results (see above -- moved to post #1).
In your case - just to be safe, give your PDA a soft reset, and leave everything off. Check your current reading. If it's still at 16mA as you wrote, I wouldn't bother. Later you may fire up a GPS application like GPSTest, the HTC GPSTool, Tomtom, OziExplorerCE or whatever, and play with it for a while. Running a circle or two around your house should do it. Switch GPS off again, make sure all tasks have ended (if you want to make it perfect). Repeat checking the current as described above. It is also possible that you have to redo the test one or two times until the problem appears. You will see!
BusterTyTN
Addendum to the previous post: explanation of the screenshot.
The vertical center is zero current, discharge currents are going down. To the very left you see the PDA coming out of a soft reset, then I switched it into standby (the short flat line right before the 200sec division, ~0..1mA). Directly at the 200sec division I reactivated the phone, started GPSTest, waited until GPS was all up and running, stopped GPS and terminated the program. I also checked that no other applications were running at that time. After a little while the current settled to a discharge current of approx. 48 mA (the wide track in the center; the exact level can vary between devices). It continues drawing this amount of current until the battery is empty, or until you soft reset the device. I did the latter to the right of the screenshot, which shows another boot sequence followed by a standby, which in turn returned to a very low current consumption.
Also give a try to acbTaskMan - it's a very nice meter tool, see my related articles
I don't know anything about current measurement, but my kaiser usually lasts 2-3 days of intensive use (1-2 hours calls/day + some GPRS data + bluetooth always on + GPS once a week) and it seems quite OK for such device.
Rumcajs_tr said:
I don't know anything about current measurement, but my kaiser usually lasts 2-3 days of intensive use (1-2 hours calls/day + some GPRS data + bluetooth always on + GPS once a week) and it seems quite OK for such device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seriously thats gr8... What ROM / Radio are you using??
Rumcajs_tr said:
I don't know anything about current measurement, but my kaiser usually lasts 2-3 days of intensive use (1-2 hours calls/day + some GPRS data + bluetooth always on + GPS once a week) and it seems quite OK for such device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's intensive????????
How about 5-6 HOURS of calls a day
4-5 HOURS a day of HSDPA
checking emails every 15 minutes on 3 email accounts
sending emails 60-75 times a day
WI-FI 1-2 hours a day
150 SMS/Texts a day
10-20 MMS a day
and then a few misc. apps ran.
To me, my usage is not really intensive, but I do have to have a car charger and a couple of wall chargers because I can run a battery dead in about 5 hours.
i played doom for 30 minutes starting at 100% battery, and the battery was at 75% afterwards. i had to charge it for about 30+ minutes to get it back up.
On a daily basis, i will go to school, leave my phone in my pocket on standby, then by the end of school its at about 80%. i did nothing all day and it dropped 20%.
I would agree, 5-6 hours is probably the max i can get out of it.
BusterTyTN said:
...
I have reason to believe that all Kaiser models are prone to the "excessive standby current consumption" problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
At least two devices work nicely as far as battey power is concerned.
I still enjoy more than 10 days standby with phone switched on.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=1652208#post1652208
I hope you'll find a solution.
Regards,
V
T-Mobile Germany
VARIO III rom 1.56.111.4
radio 1.27.12.11
When my phone is on, but not running any active apps, it consumes about 145 mA - 150 mA with nothing but my phone on and backlight lower 3rd bar.
I've read some others guys on the forum have a power consumption of about 100 mA with higher backlight settings.
indeed excessive consumption
I must confirm the OP's finding. Though I assume it is simply related to the Radio used (see comparison in another thread where est. time of usage went from 227 to +400 minutes)
When I used my stock rom with radio 1.27, I wouls still have 40-50% cap using all day Blutooth on, no 3G, still GPS enabled for 3 hours.
When I falshed to DCS 1.7 and changed radio to 1.64, power consumption doubled, draining the battery at incredible speed (full chare morning, less than 10% in late afternoon)
I had to disable BT radio and set backlight low to let me go through the end of the day.
Looking forward to read a solution here.
With stock orange radio and rom, my device would last circa 36 hrs with very light usage and about 6/7 hours with heavy usage.
With Dutty V3 and orange stock radio (1.27) I got very similar, maybe slightly faster drain.
I have today flashed dutty 6.1 and a 1.64 radio and will monitor battery usage tomorrow.
There's a lot of anecdotal information here...
To get this to baseline information I suggest the following starting point:
1. Device (Kaiser, tilt, etc)
2. Which battery are you using (brand, mAh rating, etc)
3. Which Rom and radio version
4. What application are you using to measure current draw? (Great spot for a recommendation or a .CAB file)
5. Provide typical usage description and corresponding battery life
6. At what point do you charge the battery (i.e. top off every night, charge whenever power's available, recharge only when battery hits low level (i.e. 10%)
To effectively analyze the data, there needs to be a consistent method of capture.
Be careful not to mix up the problems here!!!
1. I assume you will not be confronted with this problem when you never use GPS at all, though you should not treat this as a final statement - has to be investigated further. So far I have not found any increased standby consumption if I did not touch GPS (well, at least after the last soft reset).
2. I am not talking about short battery uptime under heavy use, either. For instance, if you have GPS permanently on, you can suck the battery empty within 4~5 hours, max.. However, it is well possible that a suspiciously short uptime is somewhat concealed by an overall heavy use of the phone. To figure this out, you simply have to check the standby current consumption of a suspicious phone, with all its features (temporarily) disabled, as described earlier.
3. Note, this problem is all about current consumption during standby !
@ Liquidsilver:
"anecdotal information", sure. Please read again, particularly the start of the thread which will answer most of your questions. Add the thread "TyTN II / Kaiser issue: GPS & battery drain" for the remaining ones.
Please try to understand. You can get the phone into a condition where it sucks the battery dead empty within 24 hours give or take, during standby, all features of the phone OFF. ZERO usage. PROVEN, some 10 times, on different Kaiser's, using different OS's.
@ Stay0Puft:
if your battery capacity does not drop much overnight, you may look at an issue other than the one described here.
I would like to add my observation to high battery drain. Normally on my stock Kaiser rom that I used for about 4 months, normal overnight drain is 4% with radio in standby and BT On, WiFi Off. I use GPS with iGuidance almost daily and seldom soft reset.
I have witnessed extremely high power drain only a few times and they were always involved somehow with WiFi. If I have WiFi On and forget to turn it off and just put the phone in standby or let it auto power off, I have found the phone hot to the touch and dead or close to dead in only a couple of hours. The phone is usually locked up and non responsive at this point, needing a soft reset. I haven't found what causes this, it's been at home on my wireless LAN but with no active application, WiFi was simply on. I make it a point to keep WiFi Off when not actively needed and never have issues in many months of use.
If you haven't checked this out, I'd be curious to see what the current meter would show. At some point I'll drag out the scope and make a shunt as well, just no time these days...
AT&T Tilt...
I used to get 2-3 days with mediocre usage when i first bought it... and now i'm lucky if it lasts an entire day... I cannot trust it with my morning alarm anymore... I dont think its the ROM, because i even tried flashing AT&T Tilt rom back on and even the minor update on HTC... but still no luck... I think i need like a calibrator program...
Had to hard reset my Tilt the other day, re-installed my software and seeing unusually quick battery drain. Phone has been in standby almost the entire time as I've been out of signal area. As far as I know the only software which is different than before is Dutty's 10 button comm manager, and maybe a few options in Kaisertweak, however I tried defaulting alot of the options and still seeing much faster drain than before.
Activesync usually shows up running under programs, I shut it down, but it of course restarts.
Nothing shows running under memory
Program memory shows 101.38 total, 32.58 in use.
ATT Tilt running original rom.
Installed software:
HTC Album
HTC Camera 5.x
HTC Home
Kaisertweak
Advanced config
PHM regedit
live search
HTC GPS tool
Opera mini
vibra switch
WiFiFoFum2
pocket nester+
enable band switch
TCPMP and Flash bundle
PTT fix
Any suggestions as to what could be causing the problem? If not I guess next step is hard reset and test battery life. If still draining fast guess I'll replace the battery, if not I'll have to install everything 1 program at a time.
Well, I had an issue with RSS Hub causing my battery to drain completely in just under 6 hours.
However, to be fair I now have all sorts of hardware issues, so it could have been faulty/failing hardware the whole time.
It does sound like a radio or hardware issue.
#1 I suggest you try re-seating the battery, and see if that does not get rid of some of the issues: I have had a weak connection on one of the terminal points cut my battery time by half before.
#2 Re-seat your sim card.
#3 Try a different radio rom, Because you were out of signal range it could have been using up your battery searching for a signal/maintaining a weak signal constantly.
thanks fenny. I wasnt having any problems with my battery life or reception but just for the hell of it I cleaned my battery. Before I took it out I had about 25% charge left, after I cleaned and put it back in I had a little over 50% charge. Ive also noticed that my battery life is better and my reception improved as well.
behrouz said:
thanks fenny. I wasnt having any problems with my battery life or reception but just for the hell of it I cleaned my battery. Before I took it out I had about 25% charge left, after I cleaned and put it back in I had a little over 50% charge. Ive also noticed that my battery life is better and my reception improved as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When I cleaned my battery contacts, I changed back to a human from a newt! I feel better!
khaytsus said:
When I cleaned my battery contacts, I changed back to a human from a newt! I feel better!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ill probably get banned but I dont care.
Go back **** yourself asshole.
... and I just LOVE the Diamond. I always thought the Diamond's just a VGA version of the Touch with GPS built in, and hesitated for a while before I decided to go for the upgrade. Almost a month since the upgrade and I can't even imagine myself going back to the Touch.
I love the Diamond for ...
- beautiful VGA screen
- great form factor, fits perfectly in hand or pocket
- 3.5G is FAST ... especially considering I'm coming from a EDGE machine
- The 535MHz processor may be under-rated when running the bad ass TF3D2 interface, but its speed advantage shows in other apps say, like TomTom when alternative route calculation is required
That said, on the other hand ...
- battery life sucks. This is the first phone since ... man ... the Nokia 6190?! when I actually carry a spare battery with me. I setup the Diamond to check email once every 30 min, and keep it to EDGE for email, use 3.5G only with Opera, do very little web browsing, and my battery still can't make it through a 10 hrs day without giving me low battery warning before I get home.
- Compared to the Touch, which had Talk / End / Camera buttons on top of the D-pad, the Diamond loses yet another hard button in the camera button. I use AEB+ to get more functionality out of my hard buttons, but still I wish there's at least the camera button. OTOH, I don't know about others, but I almost NEVER use the back button. I thought it'd be somewhat useful if it gets you back to the last webpage when browsing the web ... but it doesn't. It gets you back to the last app. Worse, the Home and Back buttons cannot be remapped, or controlled by AEB+.
- The Diamond looks stunning with the piano black finish but the whole phone is a finger print magnet. I think I'm developing an anxiety disorder rubbing and cleaning my phone every chance I get these days.
- The phone heats up quite a bit after a number of resets, or after browsing the web for a while. It gets hot enough I wonder if I'd burn myself leaving it in the jeans pocket.
- The combination of heating up and poor battery life makes it a BAD navigator. If I use turn GPS on and leave the phone running TomTom with screen turned on all the times, the battery hits low battery level within an hour. However, if I plug the charger in, the battery overheats (40C or higher) within 30 min to a point either it stops charging, or resets itself.
All in all, I love my new phone! I think it's a great phone, and most of the shortcomings don't bug me much ... but it'd be great if the battery life and the last point about using it as GPS can get addressed.
Any suggestion?
little info, you can remap the back button with aeb+ the button is called "ok" in aeb+, if i remember correctly.
only the home button cannot be remaped..
Also update your Radio. My battery used to be exactly like how you mentioned until i updated it to the Radio v1.13.25.24 (Blackstone) found here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=470306
Make sure you read the instructions of updating the Radio VERY CAREFULLY or you'll brick it.
Since updating the Radio ive noticed a significant improvement not only in battery life but also other things like my phone connects to 3G faster and also my TomTom gets a fix within 10-20 seconds. (before it was more like sitting there for 1-2 minutes before getting a fix).
I also recently upgraded from my beloved S710 to this one since the S710's display broke after it fell out of my pocket.
Being used to the S710's great battery life, the TD was surely a bit disappointing. Apart from that, it really is a cool device.
Regarding TomTom take a look at this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/archive/index.php/t-412321.html . It describes how to reenable the dim feature. Unfortunately, TomTom doesn't allow the background light to fully switch off but at least dimming it enhances battery life.
I tried one or two radios and made the best experiences with v1.00.25.05 using T-Mobile (Germany). Fast GPS fix and stable signal, good battery life, great voice quality.
To enhance battery life, I also disabled 3G and used all the other tweaks of Advanced Config Tool. Bluetooth seems to be a battery drainer, so I only use it for ActiveSync.
Having BT/WiFi deactivated, my battery lasts about 3-4 days with medium usage. When listening to music or navigating, much shorter.
Did you condition your battery by fully unloading and reloading it several times?
Hello i recently bought an older xperia x1. The problem is that the battery is emty in really shor time (10 hours), so i bought a new one. But the problem is the same.
I tried Kovsky unoff rom, also official rom.
Also tried clean rom with nothing installed and no settings changed, also some power management apps for win mobile.
Everything is turned off, wifi, data connection...
abcPowermeter shows 150mA power consumption, also when display is off.
taskmanager shows only 5-10% CPU usage for gwes.exe, i think thats normal when rendering results from taskmanager and all other CPU is for idle process.
I dunno what to try to solve this problem. Any ideas ?
My guess is you are running an always active program (like an IM program) that is sucking juice.
You may want to do a clean install and run it for a couple of days. See if the problem is your hardware or if it is that some software is the cause.
My battery life has improved from about 11-12 hours to about 48 hours after removing Palringo from my startup folder.
Also you mentioned you tried a clean ROM with no installed programs. If you didn't install any and you consistently have short battery time you have a hardware issue. Do the hard-reset, flash, hard-reset to ensure a clean install. Use a good ROM and do not install any apps. If after 4 days you still have short battery life then either your battery is dying (or generic and bad quality) or you have a hardware fault.
i tried hard-reset, flash, hard-reset. No changes
150ma idle is quite high IMHO. I run a test before because someone question my roms' battery usage and it should be around 80ma idle. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=4784976&highlight=battery#post4784976
1. load the same radio.
2. Install Homescreen ++
3. Follow the conditions I tested over that post and see what you got.
Make sure you are in an area with good GSM signal too. Bad signal could lead your phone use a lot more power.
BTW, I found FDC task manager may not report real CPU usage especially if problem with services.exe. Try Memmaid to read CPU usage.
That acbpowermeter is a cool app. I never realized the panel I was using used so much power, and I didn't think having wifi on would consume as much as it did. Right now I'm using the WM6.1 that came with my phone and using the SonyEricsson panel with wifi off, and I'm getting an average of 70-80mA with the display on. Is this a good number?
I was looking into flashing to a 6.5 rom. Would I be getting better or similar battery consumption than the 6.1? If not, I think I'd rather just stay on 6.1 and customize my today screen with some eye candy, etc.
@jackleung
tried your radio with your rom, power consumption is even bigger, than in stock rom