[Q] one more battery question - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I have searched xda-developers and many, many other sites that I won't list, and I get conflicting answers with every thread I read. Some of the threads are dated and hope that someone can give me a clear answer.
Like many, I have poor battery life on my VZW Galaxy S3 (non-rooted). It seemed to get worse after the 4.3 upgrade, but that may be a coincidence. I have read several posts that say deleting batterystats.bin can solve this issue. I have also read several, and convincing posts that debunk that theory.
I somehow need to find a valid solution to calibrate my battery. Here is the behavior I experienced today -
8:00 am - full charge and removed from charger
5:30 pm - 63% battery remaining; moderate use during the day on wifi the entire time (extremely pleased with this, yet very unusual lately)
7:00 pm - full 4g service from 5:30 - 7:00, but not on wifi. No usage during this time. Battery down to 33% (still not too bad after 11 hours)
7:05 pm - 3% battery without any usage, phone shut off
7:07 pm - plugged phone into car charger and immediately turned it on. Battery showed that I had 56% remaining. Disconnected phone from charger as soon as I turned it on and the phone was functional for 3 more hours on battery.
So, it appears that the phone is "thinking" that the battery has less juice than it really does and powers off automatically. I need a real solution to fix this. I know that people may respond with conflicting information, but I need a real solution or cause. Is deleting baterystats.bin really a myth (see: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2256038)?? Will running the battery down/recharging/running down/recharging/repeat/repeat/repeat really work?
background - Before my 4.3 upgrade (on 4.1.2), I used to get 12-14 hours consistently. I didn't install any new applications or change any of my existing application settings, but my battery life dropped to 5-6 hours between charges, and all with similar signal strength.
Any help or thoughts are appreciated.

Related

[Q] I9108 battery drain issue

Hi,
I got an I9108 recently (from China Mobile). Found a very serious and strange battery drain issue. The phone works normal at day time. but at night, 8 hours stanby can eat 50-60% of my battery, for both of my batteries. Had a check by the service center, they siad the phone has no issue, and gave me two brand new batteries, problem still exist. I turned off almost everything: Wifi, GPS, background update, GSM data, etc. Battery usages shows Android OS is eating >80%.
One funny thing I noticed is: if I put the phone in a warm environment (say in quilt when sleeping), the battery drain seems to be normal: around 5% for 8 hours stanby.
I installed Battery Monitor Widget, and set current monitor to be every 5 minutes. I noticed that normal standby (day time, it is normally warm as I will put the phone in my pocket) current is around 5-10ma. When making a call, the current is around 25-40ma. But at mid night (realtively cold, may 10-15C), the current can easily be 50-60ma (not evry minute). So basically night time stanby is consuming more battery than a call.
Anyone see similar issue before? Any solution? Help is great appreciated.
Find/install BetterBatteryStats (thread on here or Market). Allow your phone to run overnight/for at least a couple of hours with it installed.
Read the first 10 pages/last 10 pages of the BBS thread on here so you have an idea of the info the guys on the thread will need from you in order to identify what's causing this drain & help you possibly improve this battery drain issue.
Ok, I've download BetterBatteryStats. will let it run for today and send updates tomorrow.
Looks to me the issue does not seem to be App related. Since it goes with working temperature, may it be possible that at night CPU just could not down the frequency to 300MHz but just keep working at 1200MHz?
anyway, will see how it goes for tonight.
Had it run for a night. Found partial wakelock: RIJL, ActivityManager and Alarm Manager are the tops 3, but all below 1.5%. AlarmManager seems to have a lot of count though (>2000)
For Kernal Wakelock, found samsung-battery is the one using 35%.
How should I fix it?
Ask in the BBS thread on here (search for it).
Got my issued solved by replacing the MB. Now stanby battery drain down to 5-8% for a night (8-10 hours).
Thanks for help anyway

[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?
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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
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

[Q] Ray battery recently shortened and it has also started time travelling

I've got a bit of a problem with my Xperia Ray and despite hours of googling I still can't find a solution so I thought I'd see if you guys could help
Had it for about 6 months now and it worked great up until a couple of weeks ago when suddenly the battery life got way shorter, like I used to be able to get close to 3 days if I didn't do anything but sending messages and using some basic apps and even with pretty heavy use it still lasted well over a day.
Recently though it lasts under 20 hours with absolutely no usage, when I leave the phone overnight it loses about 40% charge when previously the use was under 10 for the same time period and even if its turned off it loses charge at a similar rate.
The other problem that started around the same time was that whenever the phone turns off from lack of charge or I take out the battery the date resets to 6 January 1980 and the phone seems unable to automatically correct it. Previously my phone was able to retain the date even after the battery had run down completly.
The only thing I can think of that changed before the problems started was that I used a solar powered usb charger for a few days because I was tramping but I have no idea what that could have gone wrong or how I could fix it.
I've tried a full factory reset, upgraded the android software to 4.0.4 and used various battery apps to try to find anything that might be using all my battery with no success.
Its driving me crazy so any help would be great.
Also here's a picture of a recent day of usage (not enough posts to embed it properly sorry), except for a short run I didn't use the phone for anything
i.imgur.com/jZpybCN.png
AW: [Q] Ray battery recently shortened and it has also started time travelling
have you tried to use an other battery? maybe someone of your friends has a ray and can give you his battery for a few hours to test..
Logical_Leopard said:
I've got a bit of a problem with my Xperia Ray and despite hours of googling I still can't find a solution so I thought I'd see if you guys could help
Had it for about 6 months now and it worked great up until a couple of weeks ago when suddenly the battery life got way shorter, like I used to be able to get close to 3 days if I didn't do anything but sending messages and using some basic apps and even with pretty heavy use it still lasted well over a day.
Recently though it lasts under 20 hours with absolutely no usage, when I leave the phone overnight it loses about 40% charge when previously the use was under 10 for the same time period and even if its turned off it loses charge at a similar rate.
The other problem that started around the same time was that whenever the phone turns off from lack of charge or I take out the battery the date resets to 6 January 1980 and the phone seems unable to automatically correct it. Previously my phone was able to retain the date even after the battery had run down completly.
The only thing I can think of that changed before the problems started was that I used a solar powered usb charger for a few days because I was tramping but I have no idea what that could have gone wrong or how I could fix it.
I've tried a full factory reset, upgraded the android software to 4.0.4 and used various battery apps to try to find anything that might be using all my battery with no success.
Its driving me crazy so any help would be great.
Also here's a picture of a recent day of usage (not enough posts to embed it properly sorry), except for a short run I didn't use the phone for anything
i.imgur.com/jZpybCN.png
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Could be a lot of things. If the solar powered charger made your phone really hot while charging then the battery might be permanently damaged and you should try a different battery. It could also be that your power meter has gone wonky and this can be reset by charging the phone to 100% and then removing the battery and the usb cable from the phone for 10 minutes. Return the battery to the phone and charge it back up to 100%. Usually, when I experience something like this, it is some app that is draining the battery. Since you have just been trekking, maybe it is google maps. If it is tracking/updating you location, it will drain your battery really fast. You should be able to see this, just by going to system settings->battery. Stand by or Display are usually the big battery hogs.
AW: [Q] Ray battery recently shortened and it has also started time travelling
Logical_Leopard said:
...even if its turned off it loses charge at a similar rate
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you should really try another battery
justmpm you're always there to help i see
Thanks for the replys everyone!
I don't know anyone with a ray battery but I can buy a new one relatively cheap so I'll do that and see how it goes
I'll post results in a few days
Well I got a new battery yesterday as suggested and tried it out from full charge but unfortunately there was no change in the battery life, it still ran all the way down in less than 20 hours with minimal use
Begining to wonder if its a hardware fault within the phone itself

VZW Galaxy S4 "krtccd" battery drain

Hello all, I hope I'm posting in the right section.
I've been searching for info on the battery drain problem for some time now. I have used GSam and System Panel to find the culprit and observe it for a while and I think I see what is happening. Don't know if there is anything to be done but I'm hoping there is a fix out there.
Background:
Stock Verizon Samsung Galaxy S4, stock Rom on latest OTA update (screen shot attached)
One morning around Christmas time my phone drained the battery from full to 10% in about 5 hours. I had my phone in my pocket like every other day at work, I had noticed it was heating up as well. I got an error message at some point that morning about some kind of "Samsung Power Share" I had never heard of. Then I could not get the phone to charge unless powered off, and that very slowly; it was the "grey battery" problem. This problem persisted for several days and then turned intermittent then nearly back to normal, though never quite right.
What I've done:
Wipe cache, FDR, replaced USB charge port, replaced stock battery with Anker battery.
The new charge port dramatically improved recharge time and eliminated the grey battery error but I still have terrible battery life compared to earlier in this phone's life, in other words, compared to before the latest OTA which appears to be a disaster. Didn't notice any significant improvement with the new battery.
Here's what I've seen:
As soon as the battery drops below 50% the rate of discharge maxes out and this matches up almost exactly with the activity or CPU usage of the system process "krtccd." (See attached pics showing krtccd activity corresponding with increased battery drain below 50%). GSam shows the "Kernel Android OS" (in which is krtccd) using 50% of the battery where it used to be that the screen was the biggest drain, pic attached.
Is there any way to control "krtccd" as it seems to go rogue? Why does it only seem to go rogue when the battery gets below 50%?
This is a company owned phone so rooting is not an option unfortunately.
Thank you so much for any input you may have!
I apologize if this posted in the wrong part of the forum. I did do a lot of attaching for info on what the krtccd process does and why it changed so drastically with the last OTA update but I can't find much out there or in here. I don't have the option to root phone so am I such with this weird poor performance whenever the battery drops below 50%?
Thanks again, I appreciate any input you guys have.
As a follow-up, here is a screen shot from System Panel this morning showing that "krtccd" stopped activity as soon as the battery began to charge. I don't get it, it's like it spins full bore in the background sabotaging the battery for the last 50%.
BTW, the discharge last night (in my first set of screen shots) happened while the phone dat idle on my windowsill, don't think I even turned the screen on during that whole time as I was in discussion with a friend. It's weird...
Rooted Galaxy S4 (Sprint)
Same issue. Can anyone provide any information on what this process does?
Someone opened an issue report with android open source.
Issue 160689: KRTCCD Bug?

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