Just an idea about screen power consumption - Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hope posting here does not violate any of XDA forums rules.
I have an idea for a while and I need your opinion about it, and therefore if anyone wants to help...
There are too many apps, solutions etc. for power saving. However, most of them create a bigger consumption problem or limit the phone experience. We also know that about 20-40% is consumed by screen brightness, especially when it is above 30%. Auto-brighness is a solution but not the optimum because in many cases it is not the desired one. Not to mention that many devs state that auto-brightness should be avoided because it could be power-consuming as well. Finally, it becomes obvious from the battery menu in settings that the line declines sharply when we have the screen turned on for a LOT OF TIME. Cpu processing does not even seem to consume as much as the screen (when not processing in full).
So, noticing that the screen can become power hungry in relation to how much time it is turned of, then the variable that adjusts the brightness could be the time.
What I mean: Most of our essential actions, like reading a message, make a call, change a song or even search something in internet take about 30 seconds to 2-3 minutes and require a relatively high brightness at any case. Other actions such as internet browsing, gaming, reading etc take more than 4 minutes up to 20 or what ever.
So, I was thinking to apply a minimum and a maximum limit in brightness. For the first actions like reading a message the brightness can start at the higher limit and stay there for as long as this short-time action takes place. For the second group of actions the brightness could start from the higher limit and after 3 or 4 minutes the brightness to start decrease at why not an exponential rate until it reaches it lower limit.
Advantages:
1)You set high and low limits so you are never dissatisfied with what the device gives you
2)Not quick and sudden brightness chances as it happens in auto-brightness.
3)Always high brightness for short-term actions
4)Great energy saving from long-term actions, like gaming
What do you thing? Is it worth give it a try? i would have tried it but I do not know how to make a script for it. Also many ideas for it and mods that I can share if you think it is worth spending some time.

Sounds alright, but the deal breaker for me would be seeing the screen slowly get darker before my eyes..

TheStickMan said:
Sounds alright, but the deal breaker for me would be seeing the screen slowly get darker before my eyes..
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Click to collapse
Exactly, that's the point. For example during the 2 first minutes the brightness to stay as high as the upper limit and then after the two minutes to start GRADUALLY getting darker up to the lower limit. So you can start at 80% which is pretty convenient to check the time outdoors with sun and then if you browse in internet it can start gradually getting darker until it reaches the 65%. If you could see the graph the area is significant amount of energy. If only I could make a script I would try it or at least make t happen for myself....

Related

[Q] Display Killing Battery life :(

I'm not typically on the phone for long amounts of continuous time, just to text then i turn the screen off (the display is on auto brightness), and i'm getting half a days battery, and display is showing up as using about 70% of my battery at any given time. Any ideas on what could help or anything? Any help is much appreciated
I've had the same thing since day one. What I always do is turn the brightness down when ever I can. It actually helps a lot. You'll notice a difference
Sent from my double barrel Shooter. BANG!
I play HD games for like 5 hours before battery runs out .
How often you sync your emails? every 15mins?
Also try UC , UV and turn your screen brightness to as low as you can.
I hardly ever sync my emails, i have it to auto-sync but i never open it. and whats a good kernel that allows me to do that?
% means nothing... Tell us how long your screen was on
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
total screen time was about an hour
riku-vomoto said:
total screen time was about an hour
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if you never change your email sync setting, it is sync every 15 minutes I believe and that sure use a lot of juice.
Really you should try UV and UC and don't use force dual core if battery life is most important to you.
do you know what kernel would allow me to do this?
I take it most of you run manual w/ the screen fairly dim. I have had it on automatic. Im curious at about what percent auto hovers at. I know it auto adjusts but it probably has a general range it stays at - just curious if its like 35% or 55%.
What Percentage do you guys keep the brightness on for the best combination of battery life and visibility?
riku-vomoto said:
do you know what kernel would allow me to do this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine is GSM version, so probablly can't help you. I am sure it will be all over the place in CDSM section.
I will start looking, thank you very much for helping me
I thought we've been over this. A high screen on percentage doesn't mean youre screen is killing the battery. It means its using the most amount of overall power. Technically that's a good thing. It means the rest of your phone (syncing, android processes, games, etc. Etc.) Aren't running wild in the background while the phone is asleep.
I'd be more worried if your display was only using 40% of the battery!
Turn auto brightness off.... It's too simple to pull down quick settings to change it that way,
Find an app to see running processes and services,might see stuff listed you have no idea was running.... Don't force close anything or mess with anything just use it as a refrence and find out if u really need the app or not, I use titanium back up to keep apps that I use just not to often and just restore them quickly use it and delete it.... I've seen a lot of games running in the background to give notifications and stuff, could be a lot of things... Best soulution to save batttery.... Buy a spare lol
Shot from my shooter in 3D
injected with cleanrom2.7
Good day.
I have following battery consumation: display eat battery capacity very quickly. In decreasing area i was veawing 3d video trailers on youtube constantly. And during this perion screen eat 78% from all processes. Is it normal? Can i change this horrible appetites of screen? Backlight in automatic.
what app can effectively track our battery drain in MA?
battery monitor widget is quite erratic, or is it really that high during idle
-50 to -150ma (screen off)
I had installed battery monitor and noticed, that when using phone in internet plussed in usb for charging - BM shows -430mA!!! Is usb port so weak? why phone consume so many power?

How do you measure battery ilfe?

Good morning all,
I know we all try to get the most out of our battery in our phones, and it seems to be an ongoing struggle and brought up alot. I'm just curious how everyone measures their battery life. Do you go by total running time? Screen on time? Awake time? Another method?
Personally I tend to go by how much screen on time I get. Obviously it should be able to make it through the day as well. But at the end of my day if i'm trying to see if my battery is holding up as i'd like, i usually check how much screen on time i had throughout the day. I find that generally if i'm at about %25/hour of screen on time I'm Satisfied. (usually get about 4-4.5 hrs in a 14-16 hr day).
Obviously there is no perfect method (ie you'll get less screen on time if you spend alot of time streaming with screen off, playing games, etc). But i'm just curious as to how most judge whether or not their battery is holding up to their expectations.
Thanks!
Really long ruler.
The moment you start using your phone, there are too many variables that are going to change. There are also few optimizations you can do - screen fundamentally uses a lot of battery for example.
The key is to reduce baseline idle drain as low as possible - saving your battery for when you use the phone.
So when I'm hunting power management regressions or running tests, I focus on baseline idle drain. The method I use is sort-of covered in my Known Battery Drainers thread - charge to full, reboot on charger, remove charger after boot complete, reset timers in CPUSpy, let the phone sit overnight.
My definitely for "my battery life" is the amount of time between charges, aka. using time.
"Using time" does not mean time that I physically use it but the total time when it unplugged and ON (ready to use).
I guess each individual person has their own usage, some use more than others. I posted the "Battery Usage" image so that gurus can verify it "ok, it's typical" or "that's ok, it's normal for that much of usage" or "nah, something wrong, it's a defective"
Sorry, I just couldn't resist...
Screen on time plus phone calls and music time. Also gotta factor in the radios that were on (GPS, wifi)
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using XDA App

Battery Usage Patterns

I thought I'd start a thread to track battery usage patterns, to see if we can identify some consistent... well... patterns across Primes. This is NOT meant to be a complaint thread, but rather to simply indicate how much battery is used per hour for given use cases. I realize there are bound to be many variations (e.g., how often email syncs, how many accounts are syncing, how much Flash is running, etc.), so I'm looking to just see if people are having the same range of experiences in terms of battery life.
Note: I believe that there's still quite a bit of tweaking to be done on how the Tegra 3 manages processor states. I think it spends too much time at higher states for some things, particularly browsing.
This is what I've found to be fairly consistent. All results are on lowest screen brightness except where noted, Balanced mode, undocked, in good wifi range, and running .15.
1. Standby (with wifi connected and background sync running): .3%-.5%/hour.
2. Light use (ebook reading, email, calendar, task managers, etc.): 7.5%-10%/hour.
3. Video (e.g., HBO Go in the browser, YouTube, Netflix): 10%-15%/hour, with brightness at about 30%.
4. Browsing (with Flash on-demand and moderately used, stock browser): 15%/hour consistently. Includes apps that use the browser, such as Google Reader.
5. Gaming (pretty much any game, from Angry Birds to Shadowgun): 30%/hour consistently.
6. IPS+ Mode and full brightness, light use: 30%/hour. IPS+ mode is a killer, but worth it to me for sunlight visibility when I need it.
For me, battery use is quite acceptable across all use cases except browsing. It makes little sense to me that viewing video (with higher brightness to boot, and including video running in the browser) would use less battery life than browsing--perhaps they've charged up processor speeds when the browser runs to overcome some inherent performance issues with it?
If you've made note of any consistent battery usage patterns like this, please report them in this thread.
These results are consistent with my experience, probably closer to 20% on the browser %. I'm also surprised at how quickly the browser uses up my battery. I've tried using different browsers and have noticed no appreciable difference. I've also set everything to manual sync, except for Gmail. I use the balanced mode with screen brightness set to approx. 30%. I almost never use Flash when browsing.
Nobody else wants to weigh in?
wynand32 said:
I thought I'd start a thread to track battery usage patterns, to see if we can identify some consistent... well... patterns across Primes. This is NOT meant to be a complaint thread, but rather to simply indicate how much battery is used per hour for given use cases. I realize there are bound to be many variations (e.g., how often email syncs, how many accounts are syncing, how much Flash is running, etc.), so I'm looking to just see if people are having the same range of experiences in terms of battery life.
Note: I believe that there's still quite a bit of tweaking to be done on how the Tegra 3 manages processor states. I think it spends too much time at higher states for some things, particularly browsing.
This is what I've found to be fairly consistent. All results are on lowest screen brightness except where noted, Balanced mode, undocked, in good wifi range, and running .15.
1. Standby (with wifi connected and background sync running): .3%-.5%/hour.
2. Light use (ebook reading, email, calendar, task managers, etc.): 7.5%-10%/hour.
3. Video (e.g., HBO Go in the browser, YouTube, Netflix): 10%-15%/hour, with brightness at about 30%.
4. Browsing (with Flash on-demand and moderately used, stock browser): 15%/hour consistently. Includes apps that use the browser, such as Google Reader.
5. Gaming (pretty much any game, from Angry Birds to Shadowgun): 30%/hour consistently.
6. IPS+ Mode and full brightness, light use: 30%/hour. IPS+ mode is a killer, but worth it to me for sunlight visibility when I need it.
For me, battery use is quite acceptable across all use cases except browsing. It makes little sense to me that viewing video (with higher brightness to boot, and including video running in the browser) would use less battery life than browsing--perhaps they've charged up processor speeds when the browser runs to overcome some inherent performance issues with it?
If you've made note of any consistent battery usage patterns like this, please report them in this thread.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Naturally I don't particularly want to screenshot my usage over an entire week or anything, but here are my general figures so far on update .15 with all my apps as I see it.
Again, I don't have anything backing it up and haven't done detailed analysis on battery drain since .13, but I generally get 3 days with varying use including hard gaming for short stints.
1. Standby (with wifi connected and background sync running): .3% (pretty consistent, but some times the Prime won't enter Deep Sleep which unmercifully consumes)
2. Light use (ebook reading, email, calendar, etc.): 5%/hour
3. Video (Netflix): 8%/hour, with brightness at about 10%
4. Browsing (with Flash always-on and moderately used, Opera Mobile): 15%/hour
5. Gaming (set to Performance, OC'd to 1.6 gHZ): 35%/hour
6. IPS+ Mode and full brightness, light use: 40%/hour
My tab wont deep sleep only when docked. Sometimes I lose 4% an hour sleeping while docked.. pathetic. When not docked I can see with battery monitor widget that I lose 1% every 8 hours
d1ez3 said:
My tab wont deep sleep only when docked. Sometimes I lose 4% an hour sleeping while docked.. pathetic. When not docked I can see with battery monitor widget that I lose 1% every 8 hours
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Click to collapse
Mine goes into deep sleep when docked no problem, and standby usage remains about the same.
But, I don't want to derail this thread. It's about usage patterns when undocked, specifically to avoid throwing the dock into the mix as another variable.
Just wanted to resurrect this thread, and ask if anyone is having a problem where reported battery life drops by 2% periodically instead of 1%. Seems like there's a glitch either in how the system is reporting battery life.
See the attached pic... Notice 70% to 68% and 59% to 57%.
wynand32 said:
Just wanted to resurrect this thread, and ask if anyone is having a problem where reported battery life drops by 2% periodically instead of 1%. Seems like there's a glitch either in how the system is reporting battery life.
See the attached pic... Notice 70% to 68% and 59% to 57%.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's not updating or syncing or something? Do you use a real-time monitoring widget, or multiple diagnostics apps? These things will tax the system here and there for their information won't they?
buxtahuda said:
It's not updating or syncing or something? Do you use a real-time monitoring widget, or multiple diagnostics apps? These things will tax the system here and there for their information won't they?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just use the Battery Drain app, and all it does is poll every minute to see what battery life is at. I suppose the app could be skipping a minute, but then I'd hope it would adjust and not report twice the usage/hour. And, I'm pretty sure I've caught the battery life dropping like that outside of the app.
Thing is that it's not just using more power per hour according to the app, but that it's dropping the 2%. Just a minor mystery...

A suggestion to help with battery lifel, not cpu or radio related

Problem: For most of us, the big, bright screen eats up most of our battery power. One advantage of LED screens is the darker you make them (including using dark backgrounds), the fewer milliamps they use. So you could turn off auto-brightness and manually adjust the brightness to darker settings. Far from perfect since you must adjust it every time you go from a dark building to a bright sunny day - and vice-versa. A pain.
I recently installed Screen Filter by haxor industries. They only tout its ability to make the screen really dark for night-time viewing, with the side benefit that it will also save some battery. It works great for that. It will make the screen much, much darker than the lowest stock brightness level (even using apps which take it to its absolute lowest setting, which the stock brightness slider won't allow you to do). I've found going to 25% is perfect. It makes the screen a little gray when you go really dark but its a minor downside.
Solution: I realized it can also be set to only dim the screen a little, like 75%, or 80%. Not helpful at all in a dark room since it is still very bright. But I also noticed that it works along with the stock auto-brightness setting. So you can apply a fairly bright setting to Screen Filter and leave it on all the time, effectively lowering the stock auto-brightness level a few notches no matter what brightness it picks. You still get the benefit of auto, and you get to reduce the battery draw all the time, on the single-biggest battery user on the Note.
You can save multiple widgets on the home screen, each set to different levels, so you can turn off the 75% setting and apply a 25% setting at night with two button presses. Or turn it off with one button press in bright sun. And/or you can add it as an app shortcut which allows you to adjust the brightness from an "ongoing notification" in the notification bar.
I'm starting a test today, leaving mine on 75% all the time with auto-brightness on, and using 25% in dark situations which doesn't happen often. I expect this will produce a noticeable improvement in battery life.
are you representing the app ?...or for the company?......
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using XDA
Look at my post count and how long I've been on this board. No.
The app has no ads and is free, BTW.
Looks promising. Ran mine down to 5%. 15 hours on battery, 4 hours of screen time. Most people here only report 3 to 3 1/2 hours of screen time.
I just maintain my brightness, im anal like that. Especially with that notification shortcut for increasing or reducing brightness someone recently posted. i am good to go.
Kony 2012 is Propaganda.
www.Facebook.com/freeyourmindcampaign
I use screen filter and did not think to use it all the time with auto brightness, I will give it a go thanks for the idea.
Simply setting my brightness down to about 25% and leaving it I get 4.5~5 hours screen on time.
This is still working well for me, with a noticeable increase in battery time.
I've adjusted my lowest setting from 25% to 30%, too much of a gray cast to the screen at 25%. 30% is still pretty dark in a dark room. The 75% setting is good most of the time but I've found in full sun I usually have to turn it off.
Lol at wish777, ya he is promoting a free app. Do some research before you assume and accuse someone of something.
Thanks to op for app suggestion, it works great. I downloaded it, you must of brainwashed me with your deceiving free app propaganda
<--- that's me I don't know what happened I read your review then I blacked out, when I came to I had this strange FREE app on my phone
Sent from the only smartphone designed by Chuck Norris
Yes, the screen is almost always the biggest battery hog in these devices. Thanks for sharing that app.
Here is another, https://play.google.com/store/apps/...XJ2ZWZpc2gud2lkZ2V0cy5icmlnaHRuZXNzbGV2ZWwiXQ.. It is FREE, so no acusations. I am not the dev and I didn't even play one on TV. This one is nice because you have a single widget that pops up a window with several options of screen brightness.
ANd if you are using Juice Defender Ultimate, There is Brightness feature built in that do the same thing.
kimtyson said:
Yes, the screen is almost always the biggest battery hog in these devices. Thanks for sharing that app.
Here is another, https://play.google.com/store/apps/...XJ2ZWZpc2gud2lkZ2V0cy5icmlnaHRuZXNzbGV2ZWwiXQ.. It is FREE, so no acusations. I am not the dev and I didn't even play one on TV. This one is nice because you have a single widget that pops up a window with several options of screen brightness.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Looking at the reviews for that app, someone said that Dimmer takes the screen down farther. I tried Dimmer before Screen Filter (only for night time viewing) and can confirm it will take the Note down to the lowest allowed 10/255 where the stock brightness only allows you to go to 30/255. However, Screen Filter will make the screen even darker than Dimmer. Something to consider - not bashing any of the above. Just sounds like Screen Filter is better both for daytime and nightime use.
I use screen filter to read at night. I'm not sure about the battery savings but with screen filter set at 12.5% the screen is unreadable unless you are in a dark room. In a dark room at that level white text is more gray than white as well.
wish777 said:
are you representing the app ?...or for the company?......
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using XDA
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
asking a question is now the same as accusation?
good thread. i installed S.F. in Feb, def works great for me. but i prefer manually adjusting screen brightness via the shortcut "Slider" at top of the Gnote's screen
I use this app for night time reading. It works great and I didn't know about having multiple widgets with different darkness settings. Thanks for the pro tip!!!
Which app did he promote? I don't see any mention :-\
techntrek said:
Looks promising. Ran mine down to 5%. 15 hours on battery, 4 hours of screen time. Most people here only report 3 to 3 1/2 hours of screen time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm getting just shy of and over 4 hours screen time, depending how long I'm actually talking on the phone for that day. Not using this app btw, wifi at home, LTE everywhere else
Actually, for me, the screen is the number 3 item for killing battery, trumped by phone calls at number one. And I dont even spend that much time on phone calls, usually less than an hour per night (I wish I could find a solution for this besides not making / taking calls).
Under Settings->Display->Auto Adjust Screen Power, I have this DISABLED.
This helps significantly with the 'greys' on a dark screen (to the best of my limited comprehension, this is being called black crush?) AND virtually eliminates the 'banding' I was seeing initially. Strangely however, I had to disable this option and it took a day or two before the banding almost completely disappeared (I was seeing it ALOT on the Google Market initial grey screen before it loads in the ads).
I use Auto Brightness.
I also have Settings->Power Saving->All Options are DISABLED.
Anyway, you might try disabling the power saving and auto adjust screen power and see if that helps with black appearing grey using the app you are mentioning.
Use the 15 toggle mod to turn of all cellular data when you don't use your phone. You can still receive messages/calls but there is no reason to leave mobile data on while at work or you're not using the phone.
I usually leave school with around 90% battery left and I'm on school from 8-1. All because I leave data off while not in use.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using xda premium

Trick to extend battery life

As Samsung declare, to extend battery life of your gear S, never recharge more than 80%!
I don't know why, but a Samsung engeneer teach me that this trick works perfectly on all devices, in SAM laptop, for example, user can choice this function from BIOS!
So charge until 80% and get out more than the original 100%??
Sent from my SM-N910F using XDA Free mobile app
Basically this trick is not to make the battery have a longer period before it drains to 0% but rather to make its entire lifespan longer. It's the same thing with draining if to zero. Ideally, lipo batteries would be kept at their nominal voltage (40-50% on most batteries) in order for them to have the longest life.
Hope that helps.
Thank you for the tip!
m0nz said:
Basically this trick is not to make the battery have a longer period before it drains to 0% but rather to make its entire lifespan longer. It's the same thing with draining if to zero. Ideally, lipo batteries would be kept at their nominal voltage (40-50% on most batteries) in order for them to have the longest life.
Hope that helps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
m0nz thank you very much for the tip !
I normally follow these tricks on increase the battery life of Android devices
Adjust the brightness
The display on your watch doesn’t always have to be super bright, especially if you’re indoors most of the time. There are usually five or six levels of brightness depending on the Android Wear watch model, and the default is usually a setting of 4. A setting of 3 is a happy medium, but you can probably get away with a level of 2 most of the time.
Turn off Tilt to Wake Screen
Tilt to Wake will automatically wake your watch when you hold up your arm and tilt it towards you. A very useful feature, but you might find that your display actually turns on a lot of times when you never intended to look at it. This might seem harmless, but it adds up over time and will lower your battery life.
Block unnecessary notifications
Getting notified about new emails, reminders, the weather, and other important stuff are crucial to your experience with Android Wear, but there might be notifications that aren’t as significant. Blocking those that aren’t will reduce the amount of time your watch wakes up.
I normally don't let the battery runs under the 20% of charge for smartphone and smartwatch too....
Rickyzx said:
I normally follow these tricks on increase the battery life of Android devices
Adjust the brightness
The display on your watch doesn’t always have to be super bright, especially if you’re indoors most of the time. There are usually five or six levels of brightness depending on the Android Wear watch model, and the default is usually a setting of 4. A setting of 3 is a happy medium, but you can probably get away with a level of 2 most of the time.
Turn off Tilt to Wake Screen
Tilt to Wake will automatically wake your watch when you hold up your arm and tilt it towards you. A very useful feature, but you might find that your display actually turns on a lot of times when you never intended to look at it. This might seem harmless, but it adds up over time and will lower your battery life.
Block unnecessary notifications
Getting notified about new emails, reminders, the weather, and other important stuff are crucial to your experience with Android Wear, but there might be notifications that aren’t as significant. Blocking those that aren’t will reduce the amount of time your watch wakes up.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's not a batter management tip - its a tip for the Samsung designers to get a clue and improve the detection algorithm. This is a problem on many Samsung devices I have hard - they bungle the face, motion and light detection algorithm, so the phone is always slow to detect you when you do need it, yet there are far to many false detections.

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