Weird Battery Life - Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I've turned everything off (Wifi, GPS, Sync, brightness, and autorotate by mistake) in an attempt to increase my battery life just like everyone else. The only item I leave on is Bluetooth for my car. The last couple of days my phone lasted all day. I can live with that.
This morning I went onto a web page and turned my phone sideways to read the screen a little better and it didn't flip. That’s right I turned the autorotation off so I turned it back on. Use the phone and set it down. I picked it up about an hour ago to check an email and the battery level was at 68%. At this rate I'll need to charge it sometime after lunch.
Could this feature be draining the battery this much?
Just an observation that seemed strange to me.
I would have never guessed that it would use that much battery. I assume it is constantly looking at the sensors which could be leading to the increased battery usage.
Leaving it off seems to be helping me get through the day without charging.
Dave

My battery life seems pretty similar on perception, I'll be running without auto rotate for awhile to check the graph. Will let you know. FYI Screen Filter has made my battery last an extra few hours+.

it could just be that your battery meter is not reporting the percentage properly. an easy remedy for this is recalibrating the battery by allowing it to discharge completely until it shuts off and then proceeding to charge it back to full without unplugging it. autorotate is definately not a battery drain, but the screen definately is.

Related

Battery meter stuck at 100%

In addition to my other issues, refer to thread http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=43272 (ERROR: ITWriteDisk - An internal error occurred), I have noticed that battery meter on my 8125 flashed to the the imate aku2 rom, is always at 100%. I'm unsure whether this will effect charging since when I plug in the charger, the led turns green immediately and stops charging, and I have had the device turned on for 4 or 5 hours disabling all the power saving features, leaving the backlight on, turned on BT and wifi, and its still at 100%... either its a great battery, or somethings screwy.
small update.
after about 5 hours the battery meter started to drop quickly. Although this is good, the problem that comes up for the first 5 hours, you cannot charge the device as it thinks the battery is full.
Am I the only one experiencing this?
same here.... after 24 hours battery meter droped from 100 to 94
bafore it was 90 after 24 hours
maybe they improved something.. thats why it does not go so fast as before
I think it is the fact that the new rom seems to be much better with power consumption. I am getting almost a 50% gain between charges due to my pattern of usage!!! Very happy!
I'm more then happy at the battery improvement, what I am not happy about is that if this is a bug (granted there is improvement), the problem becomes when charging the phone, so I have it for 12 hours, its still showing 100%, I have an offsite meeting the next day, and would not be able to charge the phone for the entire day, the battery will start to drop very fast since the phone thought it was fully charged, when it really was not... I'm confusing myself here, but I think you understand what I am saying.
Also, while my battery was at 84%, I did a soft reset, when the phone came back up, it showed 100% battery and refused to charge... this is a problem.
You might want to inquire about a replacement device or battery - in case it's not the sotware.
My laptop has this issue. It's always been on external power and somehow that's weirded out the control circuit telling the machine how full the battery is. It will read 100%, but it's actually at 75%. Then if I disconnect it, it will go down to 5% in 8 minutes. However, it will happily run for 3 hours+ on that last 5%. Similarly, if I hook it back up to the charger, it goes to 99% (leaving the battery indicator light amber) in another 8 minutes. Takes many hours more for it to get back to 100% (making the battery indicator light blue).
With any luck the control circuit will be in the battery (I believe it is), and the easiest way to check is to exchange your battery for a temporary new one and see if the problem goes away.
Bebbo said:
I think it is the fact that the new rom seems to be much better with power consumption. I am getting almost a 50% gain between charges due to my pattern of usage!!! Very happy!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agreed.
If you think your battery is stuck - just do this little test.
Turn on Bluetooth, WiFi, make a GPRS connection, and set back light at 100% and don't let them turn off or let the unit power off. The battery should drain pretty quickly in this senario.
I thought mine was stuck, but it dropped 5% in less than 10 min in this mode.
FYI,
JB
I'm not so sure its the battery.. another issue that I just noticed, is taht even though the backlight is turning off, the screen itself is not turning off after the designated time I set...... this is rather bothersome as if I forgot to manually turn off the screen.. it remains on constantly.
Even with my original Qtek 9100 EN ROM, the screen doesn't turn off - only backlight. If you want the screen to be off, you'd need to go to Standby, or use a third party utility to turn the screen entirely off.
Although lithium batteries are best kept at a full charge, they should be periodically drained to recalibrate the fuel gauge.
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
I was also having this problem but after about 2 days use it began to go down. My G3 device seemed to hang at 100% and drop quickly after it hits 25%. I believe this must be a hardware issue as I now have a G4 (setup identically to the G3) and it does not have this issue.
i am having the same issue but i believe it the battery because my phone 8 months old and if you read the battery thread it has all the same issues your having

[Q] Battery drain issue?

Hey everyone,
I'm not sure if I have an issue with a defective Captivate or if it running as intended. That's why I've come to you guys for some insight.
Here's my scenario:
A few days ago, I decided to leave my Captivate off of the charger overnight to see how much battery I would awaken with. It was just a little experiment I thought of to see how much the battery drains while not having anything intensive to do (such as power a screen). I fully charged the Captivate to 100% before setting it on my desk and going to bed. As normally, everything was turned off except wi-fi. When I awoken the next day (8 hours of sleeping), to my surprise, my battery was down to 27%. I was shocked that something could have drained almost 70% of my battery overnight. I downloaded an app called Spare Parts as a recommendation by some people and I seen "Running 100%" which means that the phone spent no time sleeping. When I look at any partial wakelocks, it showed "Android System" as a full bar. I assume that it could be a bad app that was keeping my phone from sleeping.
I restarted the phone, battery pulled, charged up and uninstalled some apps. Everything seemed back to normal as when I checked the the running %, it was proportionate to how often I was using the phone (not at 100%). I specifically checked if the phone was sleeping and it was through some monitoring. I would use the phone for 1 minute and then let it sleep for 2 minutes and you could see that the running % went down, as it is suppose to.
I kept monitoring the running % over the course of the day and it was fine. The less I used it, the lower the % would go; the more I used it, the higher. I also monitored what kind of apps I was firing up and I specifically made it an effort to not open any apps that were out of the ordinary. If I did, I checked to see if it kept my phone from sleeping and it did not (through my same usage tests as above). However, even after my close monitoring, sometime during that day, my phone would stop sleeping once again. I could tell because my running % never lowered, no matter how long I didn't use my phone. It would keep climbing which means it no longer slept. I made sure that I didn't do anything out of the ordinary too as I used the same apps as I did when the phone was sleeping fine. I checked "Android System" and it was getting larger. The battery was around 80%.
I charged up the phone again to max and made sure that nothing was preventing my phone from sleeping. Did the tests again and running % was proportionate again and I double and tripled checked to make sure the phone slept. I then left the phone not charging again to see what would happen as I would have no interactions with the phone to open any apps or change any settings. To my surprise, my battery was down to 60% (~ 6 hours of sleeping) when I awoke. I checked the running % immediately in the morning and it was at a very high percentage. "Android System", once again, dominated the partial wakelock portion.
So what's going on here? It doesn't actually seem like I'm doing anything on the user end to prevent the phone from sleeping. How come it decides to act up all of a sudden? If it was a bad app, how come it decides to prevent sleeping all of a sudden and not before? Even if it was a bad app, I didn't even launch anything while sleeping. Does the phone decide all of a sudden to stop sleeping?
The apps I use are:
Tasker
Y5 Battery Saver
Launcher Pro Plus
Twitter
SwiftKey
NHL Gamecenter
Handcent SMS
doubleTwist
Dropbox
Does anyone have the same problem?
Any help is appreciated.
Get rid of any task killers and battery savers they do more harm then good and most developers recommend not using them, they cause battery drain. The only battery app I use is Juicedefender because it keeps the phone from connecting constantly and keeps apps from running in the backround. I set it to connect every 15 min for 1 minute to sync, I turned off all notifications because they annoy me and I don't need to be notified everytime I get an e-mail or someone posts on Twitter or FB. My battery life has improved greatly once I dumped task killer. Also, I am running a Froyo mod and my battery is amazing now and my GPS works.
If you are in an area with a weak signal this will kill your battery because your phone is constantly searching for a signal and trying to connect. Also turn off wifi if you are not near wifi this will save battery.
Also try calibrating your battery and bump charge it. Here is a link for that. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=765656
The battery will improve, mine got better after a few weeks of break in. I am at 60% been unplugged since 10 am and I made plenty of calls, checked e-mails, sent e-mails, checked XDA developement all day and I have plenty of juice.
Good infos. O agree with not using task killer
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using Tapatalk
Hmm, thanks for the tips but there still seems to be something lingering around in my system that doesn't allow the phone to sleep. It seems to activate all of a sudden as well without user intervention.
I again left it overnight and it drained again when I woke up. I lose significant battery overnight when I sleep. I'm thinking about just restoring to factory settings. I've only had the phone for a week so I wouldn't lose that much data. I'll monitor it from the onset once I factory reset it and see if it's a hardware defect or something that was bad in my phone.
Do you have a live wallpaper installed? Also, do you have a bunch of Widgets on your homescreen? Are you constantly synching with e mail, FB, etc? No doubt something is running all night. It's not the phone, it's something you have installed. I set mine to sleep with Juice defender at night so nothing syncs. Check your wireless bill to see how much data is being sent while you sleep. Why not charge your phone while you sleep?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Nope, no live wallpapers and the only widgets I have on my home screen are the LauncherPro Plus widgets, Smooth Calendar and BattStatt. The only syncing I have going on is Google Calendar and Gmail but both of those shouldn't cause the phone to not sleep.
I was thinking of using Juice Defender but I would rather just get to the root of whatever app is preventing my phone from sleeping and kill it at the root instead of finding workarounds. For all I know, my phone may not be sleeping not just overnight, but with normal use as well and it would adversely affect battery life throughout daily use. I need the piece of mind that my phone is properly sleeping.
And I have no issues with charging while I sleep, but again, I need to find the root cause. If for whatever reason I'm can't access a charger overnight in the future (such as if I sleep over at my gf's house), I want to know that I won't wake up with a dead battery in the morning.
I really appreciate the help though.
As for what I decided to do next, I actually factory restored my phone yesterday morning and so far it is working well. I did not download any apps at all to make sure that this problem didn't persist with a stock phone. If it did, I would know that it's a phone defect and not something I did. Throughout the next week, I'll be installing different apps one by one to see any one of those apps will cause my phone to not sleep. This will allow me to isolate the app. It's long and tedious, but I would go through it for better battery life. So far, it's been working as I'm already through 10 hours on my phone with moderate use and it's only at 50%. Whatever was destroying my battery before absolutely had an effect on my daily battery life as I would struggle to even get 10 hours on my phone with moderate use.
Same Here
I find your post very interesting. I have not yet used Juice defender, however, I am now more keen to battery drainage. I talked on the phone for about an hour the other day and my battery went from 100% to 40%. I find this unacceptable for a phone. Imagine taking conf. calls and conducting business in the field throughout the day. My battery would be dead in two hours without checking email
I hope you can reveal your findings to help us all.
Regards,
JROCK
Battery problem fixed using the simple technique similar to the one shared back in this thread.
I used to lose 10% per hour (or there abouts) and by 5 or 6pm needed to go on charger. At the very best with no use it dropped 3-5% in an hour.
Now its all changed...
After being off the charger for 35 min and taken 2 calls and sent a couple of txts she still read 100%.
At 5hrs 17min off the charger it is at 81% and there has been 6 calls in total and about 9 txts, plus a couple of appointments added.
Here is what they said to do and it worked...
1. Charge the phone for 8 hours, but make sure it is turned on while charging.
2. Unplug the phone, turn it off, plug it back in for 1 hour.
3. Unplug it, turn it back on for 2 minutes, then plug it back in for 1 hr.
Then unplug and enjoy the new battery life
Sounds too easy to work, but bugger me, it did!
27% is clearly abnormal.
Sometimes, I put the phone on it's charger after a pull day only using 27%.
I read somewhere on XDA that some early phones had defective screens that would only shut the backlight off and not turn off completely. Don't remember what came of that thread though.
I have a battery drain issue as well. My Captivate is 2 days old and been charging it every night. The first charge was done via the computer while transferring music over. After moderate usage (1 hour of music, browsing apps, learning how to use the phone, etc.), the battery died after 10 hours. GPS, and bluetooth was turned off. WiFi was used for maybe 20 minutes. When I got home, I charged it overnight for around 10 hours.
Today, the phone died on me after 9 hours. I rooted via z4root and applied RyanZa's latest OneClickLagFix, which both apps can be found on the market. Before that time, the battery said there was about 80% remaining. Fast forward to 6 hours later and the battery is gone. Again, moderate usage.
According to *#*#4636#*#*, my Screen On is at around 60%. A few other bars are pretty high as well, but I'm not sure how to do a screenshot on the Captivate right now. The only method I found requires using a PC. Plus, my battery is dead meaning I have to charge it overnight again.
I had an issue for the last couple of days, just figured it out earlier today. I had a corrupt thumbnail file on the external SD so my android.process.media (something like that) was constantly running.
I first realized something was wrong before I determined the battery life was bad when I noticed that my CPU was constantly at 11470-1200mhz or 975-1000 when I disabled the OC.
Unmounting the card would allow the CPU to drop to under 200 at idle so I knew it had something to do with the external SD. Turned out there was a bad file under a DCIM (camera folder), so after I deleted it, it became smooth as silk!
Of course it's still an i9000 rom so battery life is still questionable
geokilla said:
According to *#*#4636#*#*, my Screen On is at around 60%. A few other bars are pretty high as well, but I'm not sure how to do a screenshot on the Captivate right now. The only method I found requires using a PC. Plus, my battery is dead meaning I have to charge it overnight again.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try Shoot Me
Sorry for the hijack!
Here are yesterday's results:
Does these results look normal to you? I'm particularly concerned about the Social Hub and screen, and running. They're all higher than I expected. The brightness of the screen is set pretty low, maybe 2/10 of the brightness bar. As for Social Hub, well all I got is the Facebook widget, which is set to sync every 4 hours. Other kinds of syncing is off. GPS is off too. I don't have any battery saving type of apps yet, except for RyanZa's OCLF which includes the WiFi timeout.
I ended up charging the phone at 5% battery left. I had to sleep!

[Q] drastic battery drain galaxy s

After a difficult update with Kies I was able to upgrade to Gingerbread.
Everything seemed to go well the first time then I found drain battery and slowing down on the system.
So I decided to make a simple wipe which reported the phone as fast as at first, but the battery still has problems.
In one night from 90% it was completely drained so today I decided to use 'Battery Calibration' made from user 'marosige'. This time in 5 hours I lost 30% of battery life using some sms, internet for 15 minutes, and playing cut the rope for 10 minutes. More or less.
However I have to see if the battery loses all of a sudden like last night which is the biggest problem.
All of this is not normal have you any advice?
Thanks in advance
Hi Fattox,
Dont worry your socks off I flash Roms quite often and this requires me to calibrate the battery. Sometimes with certain Roms I find the battery may drain quickly the first time and then things get better.
You say you have calibrated so that means the app you used should have deleted the old battery stats from your systems file. In saying that if you follow these next few step you should be ok (unless there are other issues causing the drain)
1. Make your you drain the battery fully until phone dies and can't be turned on by pressing the power button then....
2. Plug in phone and keep it off until battery is fully charged. Don't take it off charge as soon as it says full. Just let it go for about an hour more or so to ensure it's at capacity.
3. Turn phone on and use as normal until dead...
Providing there are no other issues causing the battery drain you should find your battery usage to be satisfactory. Remember to turn off wifi and gps when your not using them as well as maybe turning your screen brightness down. Anything that uses less power the better....
Hope this helps.
between the recalibration with the app and your point 1, I had the same problem: during the night the battery loose all the energy.. so strange.
All this after I upgraded to Gingerbread.
I'm going to test all this week then I'll spend my warranty.

Battery Help Please

I have my Vivid for just over a month. Battery life was initially good. Doing my usual stuff and being left with 40% or so at the end of the day.
I rooted the phone still battery all ok.
I loaded on of the battery widgets to monitor current use and all seemed fine.
I then loaded the APN to switch of LTE and not sure if there was a bttery improvement but it was not worse.
All of a sudden the past few days current consumption seems a little high.
Usually around 130mA on screen switch on and jumping as high as 650mA on certain activity often taking long to settle back to 130mA once the activity stops. The battery is reaching 10% early evening instead of 40% at midnight.
I have restarted the phone.
ROM is stock
WiFi is switched off unless needed.
GPS is off.
BT is on but only in use when I am in the car less than 30 mins a day.
Screen set to auto.
I think I have removed most of the bloatware.
No autosyncs set.
Battery usage screen shows most consumption on calls 65% then display 21% and then single figures for the rest.
Any ideas other than a battery going bad that could be causing this?

[Q] Battery Life - Is This Normal?

Just wanted to query if my battery life is normal or not.
I charged it to 100% last night (phone turned off whilst charging) at around midnight then went to bed after turning it on.
This morning I spent 5 minutes on Twitter and checked my notifications which took me around 1 minute.
My battery is currently at 73%. Wondering if this is normal or not?
In regards to my settings:
My GPS is set to Battery Saver
Assist features are turned off apart from Sleeping Mode
Brightness is always at the lowest setting
Bluetooth, NFC, Data, etc all off as normal
WiFi and Sync are always on and never turned off unless I'm away from my access point.
All notifications are turned off apart from SMS & Email.
The only other app that is always running is Power Toggles which gives a battery percentage indicator in my status bar and a bunch of toggle options accessible from my notification bar. Could this be sapping my battery life?
Just noticed Google Location Reporting was turned on. I've turned it off to see if it helps give me better battery.
Also I installed QualComm Battery Guru a few days ago but it's not made much difference so far.
First, battery guru will waste more battery life than it saves. Trust me.
Second, we need meaningful screen shots to help....personally I think gsam is the easiest to use. Make sure you run a long discharge before doing screen shots....like 100% to like 10.
Third, you'll get more attention in this thread......
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2418077
Get those screen shots and post in the above thread. Lots of people active in it. Also, read through the thread a bit...start on last page and read backwards a bit. Tonnes of great info and tips in it.
Good luck!
Thanks I've now taken Battery Guru off.
Will get screenshots up once my battery hits around the 10% mark.
It's currently on 48% and I've not done much with it.
I think it may be good battery life..

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