Dilemma - Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I bought a Samsung Galaxy S 2. Very happy with it, but for the battery life. It lasts a day with medium usage. I want to stop that. I thought of two methods: root it and delete any unnecessary apps, like Hubs or use a customRom.
I am new to Sammy, new to Android and don't want to brick my phone or something. Could someone give me an advice please. When I saw the others with 2 days and 80% battery left i was like "Damn..."
Mine lasted 2.5 days, tops, with minimal usage.

Ten Billion Battery threads on here might be worth reading .
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15137641&postcount=1
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15137641&postcount=1
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=14958686&postcount=1
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15866655&postcount=1
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
jje

~2 days with normal usage for me - since I went to Android 2.3.4 based firmwares (XXKG*); before that it was ~1 day.
About flashing, just read all the thread here about the matter, Intratech's firmware download threads, the CF-Root root thread and others.
They all have good and solid info on what to do.
Just try to figure what needs to be done and most importantly why, take two or three days for that and after your first flash you'll see: Flashing the SGS2 is easy as 3.1415
// EDIT
*lol* jje beat me a bit xD yeah follow his link battery xD

Root your phone, it will do no harm but add some advantages.
And mate, please don't see those persons posting they are getting 2/3/4 days outta battery, it's not about the Standby time, it's about the Screen On time. If you get around 5-5½ hours of Screen On time then you are pretty good, now you can use that in 12 hours, a day or even two days. Besides, just check under Battery usage stats/graph that your Awake and Screen On time is synchronized or not. If you see a lot of Awake bars activity when screen is off then you must have something going on background which is causing the battery drain. To see what is actually running on Background download and install 'Better Battery Stats', it's a damn helpful app to have. Download it from here,
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
See under Wakelocks and check which apps are causing the wakelocks and then freeze/uninstall them with Titanium Backup/Pro, if you don't need them.
Regards.

Why do you need 2+ days of battery life? Do you not have electricity in the room you sleep? As long as I have battery left after 18 hours, I know there will be at least a 6 hour stretch to charge.
What's the difference if you charge it every night or every second, or even third night? It's not like it's a difficult chore.

Related

[Q] Extreme low battery usage / Battery drops/ SG2 suddenly shut down

Hi all,
I've got my sg2 since june and since the first moment I have got the same problems. I had the stock ROM & kernel with android 2.3.3. The problems I experienced were these:
1) extreme low battery life (6-10 hours, with normal usage)
2) when using heavy apps, my s2 just suddenly turns of. When rebooting it, it has a battery drop of like ~15%. (this only occurs when battery is already bellow 40% left).
3) Like 5-20 times a day (it really difference day-to-day), I got the notification that I have to put my sg2 on a charger. - So the battery bar drops from example 80% to 1%. After like 1 or 2 minutes it just fills up back again to the 80% before. Sometimes when this occurs, it also turns in a few % (like 80% before, and afterwards 75%).
So what did I already tried to fix this?:
- bought new 1600mah battery > didnt solve the problem, conclusion: no hardware malfunction
- I thought the problems could be occured by the tiny space between the battery and the frame of the phone. So it had a lack in connection... So I filled up the little space with i tiny piece of paper> nope didnt helped.
- downloaded mutiply apps for battery saving, task killers, etc etc.> didnt help!
It's really really frustrating, and I'm guessing more and more it's just a software problem. I do have warranty/insurance on it, but i don't want to send my phone to a repairservice because then I've no phone for like 3 or 4 weeks.
So my last option for me was to try a custom ROM and Kernel. So last week I installed the Lite'ning ROM. I also followed up the advice to calibrate my battery, so i did.
And the first day it was running really smoothed! At the end of the day my battery was still alive and I've used it for over 20hours, so I was really statisfied... But a small sidenote: I had a really busy day at work, so I didnt use my phone that much.
So next day, used it alot more. After 5 hours it had only 50% left.... And that's not all, my phone turned off suddenly. Not once, not twice, but 5 times that day.
Seems all these solutions didnt help. The only positive thing of installing Lite'ning ROM is that i now have about 4 or 5 hours more battery life a day.. But if I use it alot, it shut downs a lot more. Wich lead in more battery drops after reboot.
I'm really desperate, and I really don't know what to do now. Does someone have got these really frustrating problems, and do you guys have got some solutions?
And one more question: is my warranty/issurance voided after installing the Lite'ning 6.1 ROM? or can it by tresspassed by using a Jig?
Tnx for your time, and I really really hope you guys can help me cause i'm really getting sick of all this. It's killing me!!!
ps. sorry for my bad english
your warranty is voided by installing custom rom but u can unroot and use the jig to remove counts in counter.
now apart from that it seems if u use your phone for 5-6 hours continuous it will drain the battery because main source of battery drain is the screen display but for moderate use it should be a little over a day.
i am unclear about your usage but still if you have doubts you should really get it checked at a service center.
I would flash back to stock, use the jig to clear the flash counter and exchange that phone, seems it has some type of hardware issue that could be related to temperature as it only shuts down when you use it.
My 0.02 cents
vickarul said:
your warranty is voided by installing custom rom but u can unroot and use the jig to remove counts in counter.
now apart from that it seems if u use your phone for 5-6 hours continuous it will drain the battery because main source of battery drain is the screen display but for moderate use it should be a little over a day.
i am unclear about your usage but still if you have doubts you should really get it checked at a service center.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My usage is definetly not THAT extreme, i guess moderate: I never watch movies or youtube, just some messages with WhatsApp, about 4 of 5 times a day checking Facebook, same for Twitter, always GPS off, some time of the day Wi-fi on, never play games, always closing apps on background.
i've got an example of my battery usage (this is one of the best battery usage days i got!!!):
imageshack.us/photo/my-images/809/sc20110622204452.jpg/
(Can't post direct link because i dont have 8 posts yet...)
Battery life the beginning .
better battery stats .
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
check Wakelocks .
jje
Today step 2) happened to me

Poor battery life after root

Ok, for the first week I had my galaxy s2 my battery would be like 75% after low usage. Now after following the root guide. Then updating it to entropies DD I have terrible life. It seems like even on light usage I lose over 10% an hour. I can't say for sure when it happened. I want to say it wasn't immediatly after the root, but within a week of it.
Here's a pic of the battery life:
Well there would be a pic if I had enough post to post a pic. Anyways it shows my android OS using 71%
It shows that I have a 41% charge at 7:15pm after an hour charge from noon to 1pm that brought it upto 75%. The only thing I've done is text the wife half a dozen times.
Is there anything else I need to log or post to help troubleshoot this?
I love having my phone rooted, and I would hate to have to flash back to stock if I can't get my battery issue lined out.
devlmaycry81 said:
Ok, for the first week I had my galaxy s2 my battery would be like 75% after low usage. Now after following the root guide. Then updating it to entropies DD I have terrible life. It seems like even on light usage I lose over 10% an hour. I can't say for sure when it happened. I want to say it wasn't immediatly after the root, but within a week of it.
Here's a pic of the battery life:
Well there would be a pic if I had enough post to post a pic. Anyways it shows my android OS using 71%
It shows that I have a 41% charge at 7:15pm after an hour charge from noon to 1pm that brought it upto 75%. The only thing I've done is text the wife half a dozen times.
Is there anything else I need to log or post to help troubleshoot this?
I love having my phone rooted, and I would hate to have to flash back to stock if I can't get my battery issue lined out.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nothing to troubleshoot really. You probably have most of the known battery draining apps runing on your phone. (listed on another thread)
I would suggest you flash a ROM like Unnamed that removes all the bloatware and all these battery hogging apps. I would also get an app like Setcpu to set the cpu to conservative to save even more battery.
Good luck!
Entropy's DD already sets the CPU governor to conservative. Anyways, post a pic of your battery usage (by uploading it then linking it), and if your phone has blue bars all over awake, then you know you have a wakelock problem. Search for the known battery drainers thread and see if you have apps there, also remove all widgets and add them back one by one to see if any of those affect battery life.
Battery
It's just common sense, before rooting a phone like the i777 it's not much fun spending a
lot of time playing with it.
But after it's rooted and we have access to the CWM Recovery ready to do our bidding
we all get carried away by all the fun and interesting things we can do with the phone
if you get my drift! (and it's easy to get carried away with a phone like ours)
I just don't understand how so many people can say that "My battery is great" or
complaining that "My battery only lasts xx amount of hours" with a straight face
because just like any other battery operated electronic device, our phone's battery
consumption is a lot more variable than the weather!
Without conducting tests like starting with a fully charged battery keeping the screen
on until the phone goes dead or playing non-stop music until the battery dies there is
no real accurate way to test battery life unless it's done under labratory conditions.
Otherwise all we are doing when talking about battery life is a big guessing game!
Even little things like the ambient room temperature and the amount of moisture in the
air have an effect on battery life in all electronic devices even if they are powered off.
In other words, simply rooting a phone and doing nothing else has no effect on the life of the battery.
Hey I think you should try to wipe your battery stats in recovery after ah full charge cycle ..then let it discharge then fully charge it again. It worked for me after flashing cm7 on my evo.
ACTUALLY HERES THE LINK HERE
Recalibrating Your Battery Stats...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=765656
Hope that helped???
Battery stats should not be wiped on these phones. There are threads that discuss why not to do that in this forum.
Sent from my páhhōniē
gr8hairy1 said:
Battery stats should not be wiped on these phones. There are threads that discuss why not to do that in this forum.
Sent from my páhhōniē
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
Entropy has repeated it in detail time and time again why there's no advantage to doing it and while it works fine on other phones, it doesn't with ours. If I can find a link of his, I'll post it later.

Getting better battery life?

I would like the communitys opinion on how to get better battery life on this device.
Currently running a build of CM9 Getting around 4-6 hours battery use.
I'd like your ROM suggestions/Setting suggestions to try get bettery battery life.
Id rather avoid juice defender as I seen no improvment on my last phone, and felt it just got in the way (Like turning of data at 10%)
Juice Defender is crap. No if's no but's.
Install BetterBatteryStats if you haven't already, this will help you identify any apps/processes that are stopping your phone from spending the majority of it's time sleeping when it's idle (which it should do). Definitely have a look at the BBS thread on here, plenty of tips/ideas on how to get more juice from every charge.
Yea just installed it, Not really clear at the moment, But I will have a look tonight see how its went.
Went I look at battery after say 4 hours my battery life has been 60% with screen taking up 20% but the Android OS normaly sitting at double that.
I've been documented on G+ with a few of us trying to get better battey life.
Let it run overnight/for a day or whatever period you're finding you're getting drain when you think you probably shouldn't be.
Defo have a look @ the BBS thread. Read the first 10/last 10 pages to get an idea of the sort of details you'll need to post in order for the guys who frequent the thread/help people out to maybe sort a few things for you.
Bouncer5 said:
Yea just installed it, Not really clear at the moment, But I will have a look tonight see how its went.
Went I look at battery after say 4 hours my battery life has been 60% with screen taking up 20% but the Android OS normaly sitting at double that.
I've been documented on G+ with a few of us trying to get better battey life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

[Q] Battery issues

I have been using my AT&T Galaxy S II for a while now, and I have run into a bit of an issue. I had been able to optimize my phone's battery to last almost 26 hours, but I don't even mind not getting that. I wouldn't mind even 20 hours at a charge. The problem is that I get intermittent times when my phone barely lasts 13 hours, even when doing nothing on it. Anyone got any thoughts??
Take a look in Settings>About Phone> Battery Usage. It should tell you what is sucking the juice.
You might want to look at what processes are running in the background too. You may have wifi/GPS/BluTooth enabled on those days... So many possibilities. Haha! Good luck!
*I also found this post over in the General Forum: [REF] Known identified battery drainers
This has almost everything to do with how you use your phone, and the conditions of your environment. If signals are weak, or you are checking email a lot, or getting a lot of texts, battery life can easily cut in half. Doing battery tests in a proverbial vacuum are the only way to really be certain, but they never represent actual use.
If you can get about 1 hour of screen time per 10-15% of your battery, you're fine.
If you can get about 1 hour per 1-2% of your battery during screen-off standby, you're fine.

[Q] Question about S2 battery usage

Hi everyone
So I recently got a S2, upgraded it from stock Gingerbread to stock ICS via Kies, then flashed CM9. CM9 was great, but I quickly noticed worse battery drain than that of GB. I sorted out all wakelocks, now facebook is the top one in better battery stats list and it's only 10mins in a day so I don't think that's a problem. When charging, vbus_present shows up and keeps the phone from sleeping, but that's a normal thing when the phone is plugged, right? CPUspy shows the phone is in deep sleep the majority of time I don't use it, so I assume I have no wakelock problem.
But even then, the battery still seems a bit bad. When in deep sleep with wifi and mobile data off, it would lose around 1.5% per hour; and with moderate/high use (internet with wifi or gaming), I'd be lucky to have it last 3 hours. Charging to 100% from zero takes about 3 hours.
I also tried recalibrating the battery through BC, but haven't noticed too much of a difference.
Recently I found a guide on disabling fast dormancy via the build.prop file. Still waiting for results though.
So, my questions
1, My battery usage seems normal, doesn't it? 1.5% per deep sleep hour is acceptable I guess, but 3 hours of usage seems a bit short. Too short.
2, What effects does fast dormancy have?
1) Totally unacceptable. Mine lasts at least 7-8 hours with high use..
Does your phone heat up while the heavy use ???
What brightness level do you use for the display ???
How many apps do you have that can gain internet access ???
2) By default, the Samsung Galaxy S II has Fast Dormancy support enabled. One of the goals of Fast Dormancy is to increase the battery life of a device, by limiting the amount of signaling between the phone and the cell network. But, when Fast Dormancy it is not enabled in the network and is enabled on the phone it ironically works the other way around, and actually drains more battery than before.
Luckily, Fast Dormancy can be disabled on the phone. For the Galaxy S II, do the following:
Dial *#9900#
Press “Disable Fast Dormancy“
Press “Exit“.
Easy as that!
Thanks for the suggestion I have brightness manual and at around 20%. Wifi is disabled when not used, and mobile data is always turned off unless I need it, so basically apps only get internet access when I want them to. I have also disabled sync for both google and facebook, but fb still pushes notifications to me while it's connected. Is that a major battery drain, and if yes, how to disable it?
Anyways, facebook, instagram, youtube are the only apps than can access the internet. No messengers or anything that may keep a wakelock.
My phone doesn't heat up during normal use, maybe a bit when I do some gaming (Max Payne?)
Also, *#9900# doesn't do anything on my phone. It doesn't bring up a menu or anything like that.
Bump. Guys?
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
Install BetterBatteryStats (search for it on here/Google Play), might help you nail what's causing the drain.
Yes I did, as said in my original post. After a night the highest wakelock are just around 10 minutes, and that one was facebook. Uninstalling it however had no effect.
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
Thinking logically, there's got to be something else in those stats (partial wakelocks in particular) that's causing that drain. There's no way having fast dormancy enabled/disabled is either going to cause/fix the drain you've mentioned getting '3 hours of usage'; (I can get 5 & a bit hours screen on with CM9 & variable usage/mostly 'moderate' use) given everything else you say you've tried.
Post BBS logs here if you want someone to have a look.
Edit to add - Also post a screenshot of the 2nd screen in settings/battery, the one that has history 'details' at the top, with the 'mobile network signal' bar underneath the main battery graph.
Here you go: pastebin.com/1UwicChJ
I just registered half a day ago and don't have enough posts yet to paste links, so sorry the phone was only on battery for nearly 2 hours with some light browsing and facebook, but I hope it works.
Anyway, I looked through my running processes, and dsp manager is the only non-OS process running, besides facebook. I got CM9 so it came by default. Could dspmanager be the culprit?
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
It's a new phone he's got there and I doubt it could be anything battery related itself.
I'm using CM9 nightlies and I get around 9 hours moderate use. It has been said though that a lot of these CM9 builds have battery drain and heat issues.
I use Juicedefender to help with the battery life which seems to work.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
MistahBungle said:
Edit to add - Also post a screenshot of the 2nd screen in settings/battery, the one that has history 'details' at the top, with the 'mobile network signal' bar underneath the main battery graph.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
About 1/3 of this time was on wifi browsing. The drop is much more drastic if I play games.
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
A couple of observations. There's nothing that stands right out in the BBS log. The other one is, looking at that graph you've lost ~15% over a bit under 2 hrs. The screen has been on most of the time the phone has been awake (confirmed by the BBS log) if you look at the respective bars. You've also been using WiFi for most of the time the screen has been on/phone has been awake.
Roughly speaking, going by the screenshot, you'd get ~5hrs+/- screen on time if you kept using the phone in the same way you had during that just under 2 hrs, and this is pretty much normal. I haven't had drain issues for ages, so I double checked my details on the 2nd screen of settings/battery to make sure CM9 is reporting these details accurately (screenshot attached). Certainly in my case, this screenshot reflects what my phone had been doing for the just under 5 hrs it had been off charge/since last reboot; that is, >90% of the time in idle/deep sleep. So it probably isn't CM9 reporting these details inaccurately in your case either.
The BBS log & screenshot don't illustrate the problem you talked about in your OP. Now, if I had to take a stab in the dark at what's causing problems when you do have them (and FWIW, I do believe you're having the problems you mentioned in your OP at times), in the absence of any other info, maybe your WiFi router is constantly sending the phone packets (what's been referred to as a 'dirty router' on here before) when you're connected to WiFi & not actually using it. This scenario has been known to cause relatively high levels of drain.
So to be honest with you, based on that screenshot & the BBS log, I'm not really seeing a problem.
Now, if you want to post the same again when you actually have a problem with drain similar to what you described in your OP, happy to have a look at them. But for that ~2hrs covered by the BBS log & screenshot you posted, that's pretty much normal.
MistahBungle said:
A couple of observations. There's nothing that stands right out in the BBS log. The other one is, looking at that graph you've lost ~15% over a bit under 2 hrs. The screen has been on most of the time the phone has been awake (confirmed by the BBS log) if you look at the respective bars. You've also been using WiFi for most of the time the screen has been on/phone has been awake.
Roughly speaking, going by the screenshot, you'd get ~5hrs+/- screen on time if you kept using the phone in the same way you had during that just under 2 hrs, and this is pretty much normal. I haven't had drain issues for ages, so I double checked my details on the 2nd screen of settings/battery to make sure CM9 is reporting these details accurately (screenshot attached). Certainly in my case, this screenshot reflects what my phone had been doing for the just under 5 hrs it had been off charge/since last reboot; that is, >90% of the time in idle/deep sleep. So it probably isn't CM9 reporting these details inaccurately in your case either.
The BBS log & screenshot don't illustrate the problem you talked about in your OP. Now, if I had to take a stab in the dark at what's causing problems when you do have them (and FWIW, I do believe you're having the problems you mentioned in your OP at times), in the absence of any other info, maybe your WiFi router is constantly sending the phone packets (what's been referred to as a 'dirty router' on here before) when you're connected to WiFi & not actually using it. This scenario has been known to cause relatively high levels of drain.
So to be honest with you, based on that screenshot & the BBS log, I'm not really seeing a problem.
Now, if you want to post the same again when you actually have a problem with drain similar to what you described in your OP, happy to have a look at them. But for that ~2hrs covered by the BBS log & screenshot you posted, that's pretty much normal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay, much appreciated so I guess I'll take it from your reply that 5 hours with wifi browsing isn't too bad. Seems okay, but I still find it a bit strange that (in my case) wifi browsing uses just as much battery as games do. I always thought it was a light activity!
Or maybe it wasn't the battery that had a problem, but that I set my expectations a bit too high. I came to this S2 from a BlackBerry 9700, whose battery would last half a week with very frequent use. But anyway, I just got this phone for a week, so I consider myself a pretty heavy user. Probably when I get familiar with it, I won't feel the need to play with it every five minutes and battery will last a bit longer then! xD
Nah. Anything with screen on is far from 'light activity'. Screen consumes far & away the most juice. In saying that, I've seen some people on here say they can get 8-9 hrs screen on with 2000mAh battery. How they do it I have absolutely no idea.
But if yeah, 5 hrs with the screen on most of the time whether browsing or playing games (games in particular are very CPU/GPU intensive & thus use a lot of zzzzs; unless they're really basic games like chess or similar), or anything else isn't too bad. Can you do better ? Obviously, if people say they can get 8-9 hrs. But it's not a matter of doing A, B & C and you'll magically end up with massive screen on times. Every phone is setup & used differently, and getting the absolute max out of every charge takes a lot of trial & error and experimenting with settings/setup.
There are tons of threads about the subject on here if you feel like going down that path. For me, I'm happy with the battery life I get these days because you can really obsess over it & spend a lot of time stressing over it/trying to maximise it for often very little gain. I'd rather simply use my phone a lot during the day & charge it at night.
Yeah Crackberries are like Japanese cars, they can run on fumes pretty much ;-) Having a dual core processor, a decent GPU & a huge screen kinda changes things.
There is one thing you can do fairly easily tho. And that's to make sure the phone spends as much time as possible in deep sleep when you're not using it. That will ensure that you have enough juice to get you by when you do want to use it. Simple ways to help achieve that is to turn off data/WiFi completely when you're not using it (tho many people don't like to do this for different reasons; which is perfectly OK if you're happy to live with the resultant drain), and make sure you've got no apps that are doing things they shouldn't be doing (like syncing, for example) while the phone should be sleeping. Again, there are lots of threads about same if you ever feel like a bit of light reading ;-)
So yeah, if you do find you experience drain that's not normal/outside the usual pattern you have, definitely post details & people can have a look for you. And as you said, you'll get to know what really is normal with regard to drain & so on is as you use the phone more (I tended to use it constantly for that first couple of weeks as well).
nyancatland said:
Okay, much appreciated so I guess I'll take it from your reply that 5 hours with wifi browsing isn't too bad. Seems okay, but I still find it a bit strange that (in my case) wifi browsing uses just as much battery as games do. I always thought it was a light activity!
Or maybe it wasn't the battery that had a problem, but that I set my expectations a bit too high. I came to this S2 from a BlackBerry 9700, whose battery would last half a week with very frequent use. But anyway, I just got this phone for a week, so I consider myself a pretty heavy user. Probably when I get familiar with it, I won't feel the need to play with it every five minutes and battery will last a bit longer then! xD
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Already took such measures. Wakelocks killed my battery over my first night with the phone, and I woke up after 7 hours to find a ~50% battery completely empty. Now things are alright, I clear CPUSpy stats before I sleep and wake up to around 95% of deep sleep time. Overnight drain varies between 5 and 10%.
And yes, yes you are right. Maybe I should stop going nuts. I'm checking BBS and CPUSpy every hour, reading every XDA thread on battery, and calculating my battery drainage every morning I wake up :laugh::laugh::laugh:
Re: dirty/'noisy' WiFi networks, have a look at this post as an example of what I was talking about above.
MistahBungle said:
Re: dirty/'noisy' WiFi networks, have a look at this post as an example of what I was talking about above.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Umm...so I just woke up, and noticed a wakelock in the kernel category. It was PowerManagerService, and it occupied around half an hour. Overnight, aftet I've slept 10 hours (got a day off ), my battery came from 24% down to 13%. That's a rate of roughly 1% per hour. Is that normal? And also, what is that PowetManagerService wakelock?
Delivered using Nyan Cat's rainbow powers.
Fantastic. Looks like you got your 10 posts That tip is about as useful as "don't plant cauliflowers in concrete".
trojans63 said:
Turn off wifi and dont play games and your batter will last longer
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