Technology Android

[Casey]

Had my phone stuck in a bootloop for an hour last night. All is good now.


Any way to restore SMS? I didn't back them up and forgot I had some important details in one.

Nope, but for future reference there's an app in the Market that automatically backs up all your texts to a Gmail folder.

 

[Casey]

OK, battery life on CM7 RC2 is just WAY better than RC1. Yesterday on RC1, I dropped 10% in about an hour, today I'm still on 100% in almost the same amount of time.

EDIT - I don't know what changed between RC1 and RC2 but this is really impressive. After 6 and a half hours - my battery is at 77%.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

most times, i travel to uni (takes an hour) and listen to music non-stop until i get there and the battery is still 100% (CM 6.1 FroYo). I hope CM7 will be better than CM 6.1 for battery life.

 

[Casey]

After 18 hours, I still had 30% left. Color me seriously fucking impressed.

 

[Prize Gotti]

most times, i travel to uni (takes an hour) and listen to music non-stop until i get there and the battery is still 100% (CM 6.1 FroYo). I hope CM7 will be better than CM 6.1 for battery life.

I all ways found even when using 1.6 stock Android on my G1, that music had near no effect on battery usage, probably 30% over a period of about 8 hours.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

After 18 hours, I still had 30% left. Color me seriously fucking impressed.

is color me an app developer or group of developers? i see chomp sms, dropbox and other apps come up when i google it.

 

[S O F I]

If after even light use your phone shows 100%, it's not accurate lol. You don't have 50% but you have some percentage in the 90s...just mathematically speaking.

 

[masta247]

yup, they probably changed something with the way the meter works. I agree that listening to the music drains very little battery but even in idle a processor and a gsm module would drain at least a percent or two (but in reality more like 5) per hour. It's hard to measure properly though. Most algorithms that measure battery usage are far from reliable. I mean - there's a lot of guessing involved. For example the most noticeable one is that the algorithm gets confused when the battery voltage drops while it still thought that the battery still has a lot of charge resulting in much faster drops when your battery is less than 50% full. Sometimes it stops at some point and refreshes when the voltage drops. Usually these meters also monitor the way your battery acted after previous charge and just copies the scheme adjusting it thanks to the voltage data from the battery.

The problem is that it's really close to impossible to tell how full your battery is because the physical voltage is almost the same until the battery is almost empty so a battery level meter just works thanks to a few tricks and it's up to a programmer to make it work the way he wants making it more or less reliable. You can't just read battery charge percentage from the battery itself.
So usually it's like - "aha, a week ago you charged your battery and it lasted you for 2 days, so I assume that it will be very similar this time and display my data accordingly but just in case I will monitor battery voltage levels in case there are any changes and also apply them to the displayed data when needed". That's also why you can easily confuse the system by charging your battery for 5 or 10 minutes. It will usually display much more than there usually is. You can have 50% and then after 20 minutes it might go down to 30%. The system just has no idea how full the battery is.

dunno why I maed this rant lolo.

 

[Casey]

That's all just specifics though. The fact remains that I'm getting on average 12-14 hours on RC2 from fully charged to empty. On RC1 it was more like 9-10. They probably fixed a few bugs that were pulling in unnecessary data in the background.

 

[masta247]

hours? That's terribly short imo.

 

[Casey]

hours? That's terribly short imo.

No, it's not. You have a warped perception by not having/using a 3G data plan.

Every person I know who uses Android gets between 12-16 hours depending how much they use their phone. If you keep GPS off all the time and don't use Wifi, it'll be longer. Plus, I have Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook pulling data in real time.

 

[Pittsey]

I have Wifi and GPS switched off. I get about 16 hours. But use my phone a lot. And have a lot off data in the background.

I was considering switching off 3g, but I think I will just switch off all data when I go to sleep from now on.

 

[masta247]

But it's less than my phone's talk time on paper.. Hard to imagine for me.

I would get really pissed if I had to charge my phone every day, now not to mention my phone not being able to last for the whole day.
Sometimes I use my phone a lot but I rarely use a lot of data and I have 3g off. Always. I do have Wi-Fi on all the time though and gps only when I need it. But I often make a lot of phone calls and texts, I play with it a lot and that way I charge it once in a few days.
Spica is my secondary phone now and I charge it less than once a week. But its role is dumbed down to being an alarm clock and occasional texting and phone calls to a specific network.

edit: come to think of it I once used my phone for navigation and for the whole day it had data and gps on and the battery survived that somehow.

I'm always looking for even better battery life in a phone but it looks like I'm lucky anyway. I know that these over 600 hours of stand-by is achieved only in perfect conditions but somehow they were able to achieve it after all and it usually annoys me how overestimated that is. But 9-10 hours would be crazy short for me. Actually 16 hours too.

 

[Flipmo]

Same - toggle off GPS and WIFI and I get about 16 hrs depending on the days. Shit, at times I just toggle off the data when I know I won't be using it, like in class cause I have my laptop.

 

[ARon]

Short? I get about the same. People just use phones more than others obviously

 

[Pittsey]

But it's less than my phone's talk time on paper.. Hard to imagine for me.

I would get really pissed if I had to charge my phone every day, now not to mention my phone not being able to last for the whole day.
Sometimes I use my phone a lot but I rarely use a lot of data and I have 3g off. Always. I do have Wi-Fi on all the time though and gps only when I need it. But I often make a lot of phone calls and texts, I play with it a lot and that way I charge it once in a few days.
Spica is my secondary phone now and I charge it less than once a week. But its role is dumbed down to being an alarm clock and occasional texting and phone calls to a specific network.

edit: come to think of it I once used my phone for navigation and for the whole day it had data and gps on and the battery survived that somehow.

I'm always looking for even better battery life in a phone but it looks like I'm lucky anyway. I know that these over 600 hours of stand-by is achieved only in perfect conditions but somehow they were able to achieve it after all and it usually annoys me how overestimated that is. But 9-10 hours would be crazy short for me. Actually 16 hours too.

After having an iphone and needing to have a car charger, a charger in the office and a charger at home. Getting a full day is pretty sweet to me.

I have a shitty nokia that I use for work. It lasts a week without needing a charge lol.

I don't mind charging every night. I spend a lot of time on the phone and the screen is lit up for at least 3 solid hours.

 

[masta247]

okay, so I guess that I'm just either lucky or I use my phone in an economic way. Perhaps it's also have something to do with network and distance from the nearest transmitter as most of my friends from here that I've asked also get much longer battery life.
I'm still very surprised about your results, guys. Perhaps it's the data/3g draining your battery as here using 3G is not very popular because of shitty data plans (they are getting much better lately though, since they want to encourage people to buy smartphones).
3G is the no. 1 battery killer for Android after all. I wonder how much more battery life would you guys get without 3G.

I'm especially surprised about Pittsey since if I remember correctly he has the Galaxy S which has pretty decent battery life. My friend has one and we were using it to watch movies in a car for 8 hours straight until the battery started to go low and after charging it in a car it was on for 5 days of our trip without a single charge. He wasn't using it often at that time though. Only to take pictures or short phone calls.

 

[Casey]

It makes no difference to me. Since I use my phone as an alarm, I have the charger right by my bed, so it gets charged every night. I'm almost NEVER away from home long enough for the battery to die on me, and even when I am out, 90% of the time I'll have my laptop, with the USB cable, so I could charge it from that if I wanted/needed to.

G2 battery is heaven compared to the G1. With the G1 I was lucky to get 6-7 hours on the battery it came with. I ended up buying a much higher capacity battery because it pissed me off so much.

I also have my screen brightness on max, pretty much all the time.

Battery life is not a major issue for me. I wasn't bothered by the 10 hours or so I was getting on CM7 RC1. Anything less than that would probably begin to be an inconvenience, anything more is just a bonus.

 

[Rukas]

Hey Casey, got the NookColor today. AutoNooted it already and tried Honeycomb on a spare SD card. Both lots of fun!

 

[Pittsey]

okay, so I guess that I'm just either lucky or I use my phone in an economic way. Perhaps it's also have something to do with network and distance from the nearest transmitter as most of my friends from here that I've asked also get much longer battery life.
I'm still very surprised about your results, guys. Perhaps it's the data/3g draining your battery as here using 3G is not very popular because of shitty data plans (they are getting much better lately though, since they want to encourage people to buy smartphones).
3G is the no. 1 battery killer for Android after all. I wonder how much more battery life would you guys get without 3G.

I'm especially surprised about Pittsey since if I remember correctly he has the Galaxy S which has pretty decent battery life. My friend has one and we were using it to watch movies in a car for 8 hours straight until the battery started to go low and after charging it in a car it was on for 5 days of our trip without a single charge. He wasn't using it often at that time though. Only to take pictures or short phone calls.

I turned 3G off last night. Went to bed with 35% battery. Woke up with 34% 8 hours later.