maemo.org - Talk - ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

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- - ~7 h battery live, who get's less? (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=56856)

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by afaq (Post 726064)

You know what i make from this thread and other's similar? That there is no single culprit for battery drainage. It sounds like doing anything on this sucks the life out of the battery. True some report miracles with 20+ hours with always online.

I dont think MfE is to blame.
I dont think IM online is to blame.
I dont think Ovi maps is to blame.
I dont think MicroB is to blame.
Ultimately, they all are to blame.

I have disabled every possible function of the phone and discovered it made no difference (lowest brightness, all radio intennas off - except phone function, vibration off, zero multi tasking) and battery drops life like a ....

(View The graph)

- Internet browsing through the wifi drains the battery AS fast as 3G.
- When the phone radio is offline (underground train) the battery stabilises but still falls. What does this tell me? well that no application is sucking the battery excessively. No extra devels app uses the phone radio so this filters this possibility.
- Idle. Not really, connected through 3G (check emails etc, but not online on any IM account). But nothing else. Kinda idle i guess.

I know, with long testing that 2G is wonderful to the battery life. But who can seriously advise that we use 2G on a daily basis? it's fine for IM chat etc but when you have to open a browser window the pain returns.

I think there's probably more to this than meets the eye. Just because you're underground and the phone radio is offline, it doesn't mean it's not draining any power. In fact, I suspect that constantly looking for a connection will drain more battery. Offline /= off..

As for extras-devel apps not using the phone radio, that may be the case, but there are other things apps can do to affect battery life. One of the biggest is keeping the CPU working and stopping it from stepping down to a lower frequency. WIfi & bluetooth will use up your battery even if they are not connected (unless you switch them off).

For the record my n900 does anything between 6 and 24 hours. I generally have wifi on, 3g on, skype, yahoo, facebook and ovi messengers on, feedingit rss hourly, 6 email accounts (1 hourly, 5 through ovi push email), facebook widget, and dataplan monitor widget.

On top of that I probably talk ~2 hours a day, sms, browse, play games, do some coding, calendar, todo etc

All in all, I'm not really careful about battery life and, for what I do with it, I'd be surprised if it had longer battery life.

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by dantonic (Post 725646)

I bet that won't feel very comfortable in your pocket....

It's fine in cargo pants. All geeks where cargo pants right?

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by afaq (Post 726064)

...True some report miracles with 20+ hours with always online.
....
I have disabled every possible function of the phone and discovered it made no difference (lowest brightness, all radio intennas off - except phone function, vibration off, zero multi tasking) and battery drops life like a ....

- Internet browsing through the wifi drains the battery AS fast as 3G.
- When the phone radio is offline (underground train) the battery stabilises but still falls. What does this tell me? well that no application is sucking the battery excessively. No extra devels app uses the phone radio so this filters this possibility.
- Idle. Not really, connected through 3G (check emails etc, but not online on any IM account). But nothing else. Kinda idle i guess.

I know, with long testing that 2G is wonderful to the battery life. But who can seriously advise that we use 2G on a daily basis? it's fine for IM chat etc but when you have to open a browser window the pain returns.

Did you actually turn the radio off in the underground? Looks like it was just not connected what means to power up for signal strength automatically and broadcast for AP constantly till connection is established. With nothing on you tell you get that kind of graph? Nice, that looks like you got some stuff installed running in the background.
This battery-eye graph does not show much detail, would you mind to install batterygraph in replacement and take a full graph lets say charge till full when you get at home and turn radios off but GSM just no BT, no wifi, no data uplink and disable autoconnect and update for your clients (mail etc.) aswell. We will see what your graph looks like tomorrow.

The graph shows also that you have charge loss while charger is plugged in, there is already a bug filed about this behavior.
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8965

There you also see my graphs from batterygraph.
I found some weird CPU load I wasn't able to attach to any process but it started to drain the battery.

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by dantonic (Post 725983)

The only reason I disable the gsm option when I am at work is because reception for me is so poor that it is worthless to keep it on.

I am not sure about Exchange as I do not use it. Maybe you're right that is the culprit of your battery issues.

All I was doing was offering you an example, ie. My battery usage profile.

I would definitely like it if the N900 had better battery life, but for my use, and considering I have USB in my car as well, I end up being able to charge the device any time I need, so it is not really an issue for me.

Hi, I hope it didn't seem like I was dismissing your reply, I didn't mean it that way. Thanks.

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by mece (Post 726109)

I use the 2g/3g switcher about 10 times a day.
on 2g while idling and online on im's, and I switch to 3g when I browse and do other stuff. The switch only takes 2 seconds so I don't mind. I get 13-16 hours, depending on what I do. Online on 2g only checking mail every 30 minutes I got 48 hours. (Did about an hour of 2g browsing during that period)

I get only about 3 hours battery life when I watch the world cup over 3g ;)

Try Autodisconrct it does exactly what you do but on it's own, I think the app still needs a bit of work or playing with the settings but is defo a good app to have, the worst thing about manually switching is when you forget to switch back to 2g and drain your battery, this is compounded when you get used to the battery life using 2g, come to use the phone "aaaaaaah" left it on 3g and now it's dead! autodisconect will turn back to 2g for you WOOT! ;)

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

The only problem with autodisconnect is it's tricky to setup if you leave your IM status online. Since it took me a few tries to find the sweet spot for switching to 2G when I'm only using IM.

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by afaq (Post 726064)

Only if you have them open all of the time. 90% of the time one of the following will kill your battery:

Excess CPU usage
Weak cellular signal (switches to higher power xmit)
Constant radio activity (IRC constantly ticking, AJAX scripts)
Poorly behaved program waking up the CPU (foreground or background)

Quote:

I have disabled every possible function of the phone and discovered it made no difference (lowest brightness, all radio intennas off - except phone function, vibration off, zero multi tasking) and battery drops life like a ....

What software have you installed? There are a handful that are known to be brutal on the system for no good reason.

Quote:

- When the phone radio is offline (underground train) the battery stabilises but still falls. What does this tell me? well that no application is sucking the battery excessively. No extra devels app uses the phone radio so this filters this possibility.

When phones lose contact with a cellular base station, they go into a high power mode to try and reach the nearest one they can. This kills your battery.

Quote:

I know, with long testing that 2G is wonderful to the battery life. But who can seriously advise that we use 2G on a daily basis? it's fine for IM chat etc but when you have to open a browser window the pain returns.

I can, have to because I'm on AT&T. And honestly I've had little issue with the browser at those speeds, though I'd rather have 3G if available.

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Laughing Man (Post 726789)

The only problem with autodisconnect is it's tricky to setup if you leave your IM status online. Since it took me a few tries to find the sweet spot for switching to 2G when I'm only using IM.

lol how true, hence my post in the autodisconnect thread ;)

still though once setup you can't go wrong, should be part of the firmware!

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

what is that sweet spot then? I also use autodisconnect, does the job for me, although i'm actually trying to use as much data as pos at min (vodafone issues).

I dont know what i've done recently, but my battery was draining VERY fast all the time, If I played a game or used the web it would fully drain within an hour or 2. Today my battery has been fantastic, when i'm not connected to the net my battery eye line is almost horizontal (still flies down when I actually use the phone thou)

Re: ~7 h battery live, who get's less?

Seriously batterygraph is Waaaay better! I used battery eye but battery graph shows the cpu usage so could help with the like of games, playing a few hours of scummvm can use up the battery so I assume the more you hammer the cpu the quicker u drain the battery.