A few months ago, a friend gave me an old phone – it had been a “works” phone and had been relegated to the cupboard when a new one was provided. The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S (the original gt-i9000). It’s been flashed and is currently running CyanogenMod 10.

GPS is turned off, as are bluetooth and wifi – I don’t use that stuff, this is just a phone with which I can take pics if needed and whichi I can (and do) use as a music player for the commute (and on which I play angry birds when I have some “alone time” 🙂 )

I charged the phone overnight, and unplugged it just before 7.30 this morning. SO far today, I’ve sent one text and received a reply. It’s now 10.30 and the battery is down to 80% already.

20% battery use in 3 hours. really?b Battery use shows 66% used by Android OS, then the next biggest ones are 8% on facebook and hotmail – these things are installed but very rarely used and are set, where possible, to manual updates only

Should I be turning the phone off overnight to force services to shutdown and clear caches? Is there a way of figuring out just why Android OS needs to use so much battery? Is it just a shagged battery from being used so much?

FB is running all the time. You can’t really stop it except by uninstalling it.

TBH 80% sounds a little high but not stupidly so, particularly on what is presumably an old battery.

Sounds like you either have a rogue setting within the OS munching battery or the battery itself is on the way out.

They won’t last forever, especially on smart phones which are typically used and charged every single day. Maybe see if you can pick up a new battery off ebay and give it a go?

Have you got updates/sync set to WiFi only? Stuff might be syncing in the background and using juice.

But, to be honest, it doesn’t sound out of the ordinary for an old phone and battery.

old battery i’d say – i have the same phone, fully charged overnight, unplugged about 06:00 and the battery hasn’t moved all morning and i have all the sync cr*p turned on.

batteries are classed as consumable items, they wear out.

Assuming it is the original battery, on a Galaxy S, this could be up to 3 years old – a long time in smartphone battery terms. I find the capacity starts to drop off after 12-18 months of use, depending on use/abuse.

Pick up a new battery (ideally a branded one for best results) and you should see an improvement. Even an Ebay job will probably be an improvement.

I get about 20-24 hours out of mine normally, with few calls. It’s fairly normal for a smart phone in general, although lower power ones are better. I just leave a charger by my bed and charge nightly. A desk charging dock makes it super easy.

The biggest difference I find is background apps, which are usually doing things with data. If you turn off ‘background data’ in the settings it saves tons of power. It almost doubles the runtime of mine.

Install AVG and use the task killer often.

Install AVG and use the task killer often.

…..just….no. And no, in classic internet style i’m not going to go into the details of the whys. The only reason you’d need to do that would be a broken app, in which case just uninstall it.

New battery +1.

Correct.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, a task killer can readily make your battery life worse. Constantly terminating apps that automatically restart will empty your electrons in short order. You don’t need a task killer unless you’ve got a rogue app, and the solution there is to get rid of that app. Android (and iOS) simply doesn’t work like that.

Do a factory reset, see if the problem persists.

Sounds like it might be an old battery, mine is going the same way. Replacement batteries are quite cheap though.

Juicedefender from Play store is also worth a look. It turns off all radios when not needed so takes a bit longer to wake up but greatly improves battery life.

Task killers are no longer necessary since around Android 2.0

Old phone and likely old battery too.

You can go into the Google Play store and set updates to manual….you can also set them for wi-fi only if you dont want big data use over 3G.

You can log out of Facebook, it shouldnt do anything in the background then.

You can turn the frequency of email syncing down too.

….but i’d just buy a new Samsung battery.

For comparison my Galaxy S2 has push email enabled, facebook on in the background with notifications switched on, auto screen brightness enabled, wi-fi in the house but 3G outside, live weather widget running on the home screen, GPS off most of the time but maybe used once a day to find somewhere at work, location settings through Google switched on etc etc….basically i use it like a smartphone should be used and dont have to toggle down any features or put it in airplane mode mid afternoon like some phones to save battery….i always get 24hrs, if i have a few days off work and use the phone sparingly then i can get 2 days use from it.

There are rumoured to be a couple of phones from both Motorola and Google (Nexus) later this year with massive batteries, i’ll probably change to a Nexus again at that point.

Is this the first time you’ve used it? A few days charging and discharging cycles might get it back to better performance. I always plug mine into a charger each night.

If android OS is showing at 80% of battery consumption, then it is quite likely some dodgy app you’ve installed is doing notification checking or some such rubbish and wasting the battery away. Or it might be something in your custom rom. It’ll probably be bringing the phone back to life repeatedly to check something.

You can find out if this is happening with better battery stats, which if you get a login on xda-developers.com is free.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809

Don’t waste money on new batteries till you’ve checked this.

Joe

I bought a new Galaxy last year and after a couple of months got thoroughly pi55ed off with daily charging so spent £15 on a really basic phone. The new one usually goes 10 days between charges.

Go to your settings and turn off background data. Lots of applications like Twitter, Facebook and email will check for updates every 30 minutes or so, which drains your battery quicksharp. If I do this my phone lasts for more than one day on a single charge, although bear in mind that smartphones use a lot more juice than old style mobiles.

And, as stated above, mobile phone batteries do wear out over time. If you get a new one, keep it topped up when possible (running them flat is bad for them, unlike older rechargeables) and don’t let it get too hot.

spent £15 on a really basic phone

Yep – don’t buy a smart phone if you don’t need one.

waste money on new batterie

It’s a 3yo phone, the battery will be shagged to a greater or lesser degree. A new one isn’t a waste.

It’s a 3yo phone, the battery will be shagged to a greater or lesser degree. A new one isn’t a waste.

Possibly true, assuming the phone was used lots previously, but I would fix the software problem that is causing the battery drain, before I go putting a brand new battery in it and shagging that. No point spending money on hardware to fix a software problem.

Android OS should be showing something like 2% of the battery use, certainly not anything like 80% (does on both phones I have here). Something is screwy with your software, you’ve installed some dodgy app or a dodgy rom.

Joe

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is the quality of the phone signal. If you’re in a weak are you’ll find that battery consumption is significantly greater than when you have a strong signal. (Though that probably comes up as “Cell standby” rather than “Android OS”. Cell standby is usually the biggest spender on my phone.)

Also, I do occasionally find that the battery gets eaten rapidly and a reboot will cure this. I’ve not yet accurately identified the cause – but a reboot every couple of weeks or so isn’t too painful.

I would suggest you install “Battery Graph” so you can get a 7-day log of the battery charge. Then you can correlate it with what you were doing and where you were at the time; after a while you’ll have a better idea of the factors in battery usage.

Worth trying things before you spend on a new battery, but it’s eminently possible that a new battery will help anyway.

And +1 for don’t install task killers, they’re counter-productive.

If the symptoms continue then I’d be asking questions about Cyanogen.

You should be able to see what has been using the battery via the settings menu.
You could also try actually turning data off completely, this will drain the battery lots if its in a poor signal area.

batteries are classed as consumable items, they wear out.

that is why you can’t change the battery on several of the current smartphones – not smartphones but smart manufacturers and dumb consumers…

As has been said above, the first thing would be to try an new battery.

High Android OS drain can be an issue with a lot of AOSP & AOKP ROM’s like Cyanogenmod. It was always the biggest battery muncher when I tried different ones on my Galaxy s2.

Might be wowrth reading this on XDA
XDA Battery guide

If you want to go back to Samsung stock firmware then head over to Sammobile
Sammobile Firmware

Keith.

Cyanogenmod is pretty battery friendly in my experience. Reset to default settings on everything and get rid of the facebook crap etc then you can see where you are.

Tinfoil hat time, Google must be monitoring me as since I posted this thread, the phone’s behaved perfectly, using only 1% battery.

I’ve turned off more or less everything – data, gps, updates where possible, only updating over wifi and all that. I’ve only recently “upgraded” from the venerable Nokia 6310, so I’ve gone from charging every other week to every other day. I was just surprised to see the battery go down by 30% in just a couple of hours

might try that battry thing from xda develpoersa, thanks

I’ve got a Galaxy S (same model as the OP) and recently it’s become sluggish with the occasional hang/crash. I’ve got Elixir2 installed which can show all processes running, how much CPU they’re consuming etc. So I ran that and looked at the apps which were constantly running and wouldn’t be killed. Stuff like Camera360, a face picture morphing app and a few others. Why these apps are designed to be constantly active I don’t know. Anyway, uninstalled said apps and I’ve got my phone back 🙂

Just looked at Elixir2 as it’s a new one on me.

They’ve taken all the features which require access to personal data, and put them into a separate add-on. So if security is a concern for you, you can still use all the features that don’t require that access.

How good is that? I can’t comment on the app yet, but I’m bloody impressed with that policy.

that is why you can’t change the battery on several of the current smartphones – not smartphones but smart manufacturers and dumb consumers

They’re designed to last a couple of years, warranties and contracts are typically a couple of years, most people’s phones don’t outlast the battery. I’m typing this on my three year old htc desire, which could vaguely do with a new battery, but still goes for a day no problems. Most people will dump their shiny phone way before the battery dies.

And really, most of them it is just a matter of undoing a couple of screws to change the battery, a pain, but not that bad really.

The only pain about new batteries for old phones is that often the batteries for a three year old phone will be three years old, so you have to hope they’ve been stored sensibly before you get your replacement, not kept anywhere too hot or anything stupid, which in three years could screw up even an unused battery.

So the solution there is, buy a second battery when you buy a new phone.