G1 battery life sucks

N

Nomad

2[H]4U
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Jun 3, 2004
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I have a G1 with wifi turned on and GPS turned off - regular usage of the phone and the battery will deplete itself in ~3 hours.

Is anyone else seeing this kind of battery life - or am I lucky?
 
wifi sucks at the battery hard.

How long does it last with the wifi off?

I know with my ipod and tmobile MDA, having wifi on drops the battery life by 70% or more.
 
well, mine lasted all nigth with wifi, BT, and using the GPS some.. I had to recharge this am but it's been pretty good today.. it's draining the batt faster that my iphone did though... but I need to cycle this batt a couple more times before it's up to full potential.

FYI, it disables wifi just like the iphone when you're not using it.. the GPS on the other hand is always on when you enable it and does kill the batt like no other.
 
3 hrs!? I wasn't impressed with the battery, but after a day's use (nothing particularly heavy, just some texting, chatting, emailing and maybe a half hour to an hour worth of conversation) it'll be at 35% or so. That's off the charger at 7.30am and checked at about 7.30pm. I'm still quite disappointed with the battery life, but what you're seeing just doesn't seem right.
 
I have to admit.. the G1's battery life is kinda bad... I can live with it, but it's not ideal for sure... on the other hand, I have signal in places I never had signal before... and 3G signal also.. fuckin a. I was pretty happy about that.. I guess I for now I'll keep a charger with me at most time.. lol. *sigh*
 
revenant said:
I have to admit.. the G1's battery life is kinda bad... I can live with it, but it's not ideal for sure... on the other hand, I have signal in places I never had signal before... and 3G signal also.. fuckin a. I was pretty happy about that.. I guess I for now I'll keep a charger with me at most time.. lol. *sigh*
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At least if they arrive with some kind of higher capacity battery, we'll be able to swap em out. Worst comes to worst, have an extra : /
 
yeah, they might be able to curb some of the power use with firmware updates also.. we'll see.
 
3hr battery life is really low. maybe your battery has a fault and needs replaced. as someone mentioned earlier, did you cycle the battery properly?

w/ existing battery tech and increasing phone functions, we will continue to see decreased battery life. the only option right now is either to turn off functionality or get more chargers. i have 3 chargers for my motorola Q. one for work, one for car and one for home. I rarely use the car charger.
 
yeah, it's all about keeping chargers handy for sure... and also, I hear turning off the 3G while not surfing the web and stuff is also a good batt saving tweak... Obviously leaving the GPS off also is wise..
 
I swapped out my battery at a TMO store earlier this afternoon. We shall see if that helps.
 
I might try that.. but when I charged the phone this morning, it took a lot longer to fully charge than it used to... so I think batt has been trained to know it's upper limit now.. finally! it took all of 1:20 to fully charge the phone the first three times, then the fourth time, more than 2 hours.. like somewhere between 2:30 and 2:45.. so I am thinking the batt just needed to be trained up a bit.. it's not the chemistry of the batt, like a nicd, but the level meter needs to be calibrated... if that's not calibrated I think it shuts the charging off too early.. so you're not getting a full charge on the bat.. I noticed this also with my Li-Po batteries which I use in my RC cars... after about 3 charges it took a while longer to fully charge and the run times were better. well, let's hope so.
 
Came back home today after similar use as the first day at 62% battery remaining (up from the ~35% the first two days when I got home); I'm wondering if it just needs to stretch its legs.
 
for sure... I don't care what anyone says about Li-Ion batts not needing to be cycled, every one I have ever owned does.. it's more of a calibration with the Li-Ion though.. there is no memory per say, but the level meter needs to be calibrated..
 
yeah, it seems like Android on the G1 needs to be tuned so it only uses hardware when it's needed.. it seems to be pretty good about that with wifi and bt, but like the gps and 3g could be off until needed easily... that should help battery life and it would be more convenient for the end user not having to toggle stuff on and off... you could just leave everything on and the OS would manage it better for you. I am sure that will come with a later fw or an app of some sort.
 
I have a feeling the next major update they make will have tweaks on battery life, as well as an application killer. Right now it leaves apps in a background process I believe, I think battery life would improve if we were able to kill apps when we wanted.

I'm not a heavy user, some textign, some fooling around with apps, showing the phone off, and light browsing when I need it, and my battery is usually at around 65% after about 8 or 9 hours.

Plus, I means, you can charge it anywhere you have a PC and a mini usb cable, so I just charge it a bit while I'm at work. I may look into an extended battery when they come out though.
 
I am posting with my phone.

11 hours out from home. 67% battery.

Gps off

Wifi blue tooth on

Lite use
 
Yeah, Mine goes from 9AM to 5PM... I can't take it anymore, I have to use the phone while I am at school. Most of the usage is from web browsing, texting (about 300-500 a day), and some youtube, yeah I sound like a 15 year old, but no I'm dead serious about the texting =)
 
there's a 1600mah battery... I got one at www.fommy.com and the ordering process was not the best.. it said available but the item was not in stock, then they strung me along for weeks, I finally got it yesterday though and it's a definite improvement over the stock battery.. this is what should have shipped with the phone. anyways, just thought I would mention it. I would recommend fommy, but man, after what I went through with them I just can't... maybe wait for the battery to hit another e-tailor and get it from there.. unless you are desperate. ymmv with ordering from them.
 
revenant said:
there's a 1600mah battery... I got one at www.fommy.com and the ordering process was not the best.. it said available but the item was not in stock, then they strung me along for weeks, I finally got it yesterday though and it's a definite improvement over the stock battery.. this is what should have shipped with the phone. anyways, just thought I would mention it. I would recommend fommy, but man, after what I went through with them I just can't... maybe wait for the battery to hit another e-tailor and get it from there.. unless you are desperate. ymmv with ordering from them.
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Are you able to roughly quantify the improvement? Even if only a guesstimate, it would help given that the battery is $55...
 
quadnad said:
Are you able to roughly quantify the improvement? Even if only a guesstimate, it would help given that the battery is $55...
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the battery I got at fommy, the 1600mah which looked and weighed the same as the stock battery was a real dud.. it got worse and worse as time went on.. furthermore I will never give Fommy another cent of my money...

I finally ended up with a Seido 1400mah which is a little larger and heavier than the stock unit, but it still fits under the stock battery lid... this is a great battery! I can go for 2 days now without a charge on typical talking, texting, and email use.. the device should have shipped with a battery like this.
 
revenant said:
I finally ended up with a Seido 1400mah which is a little larger and heavier than the stock unit, but it still fits under the stock battery lid... this is a great battery! I can go for 2 days now without a charge on typical talking, texting, and email use.. the device should have shipped with a battery like this.
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Interesting -- thanks for your thoughts. I passed on getting an extended battery initially, and now I think I'll probably be replacing my G1 with another Android towards the end of the year. With the sheer number of phones being introduced, there will be some better options (maybe a Google licensed Hero?).
 
yeah, the Hero is on my list also.. looks nice. but I want to run the real Hero rom on it with Rosie/Sense UI..
 
I'm sure almost everyone is now running v1.5 "cupcake" which helped battery life out a little bit. To be honest, my battery life jumped up like crazy after a full power cycle. What I did was charged the batt to 100 percent, drain it until it shut down and the fully charged it again. After that, things have been pretty good. I keep 3g and wireless location on all day, and between text/IMs calls and browsing I still have 40-50 percent left at the end of the day.

WiFi and GPS really drain the battery. As to games that use the accelerometer and do physics calculations.
 
revenant said:
yeah, the Hero is on my list also.. looks nice. but I want to run the real Hero rom on it with Rosie/Sense UI..
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See my only issue with running the custom UI is the lack of OTA updates to Android. I just don't want to rely on the carrier/HTC adjusting whatever code they need to so that it doesn't break the new UI, and then manually update it from my PC.

Ideally I would like a hard keyboard too, but it doesn't look like there's a way to avoid that making the device fairly clunky..

Looks like there will be between 15-20 new Android phones on the market by the end of the year, which means plenty of choice no matter what happens!
 
I use Locale to turn my WiFi on when I get home (from 5-10pm), and always have my GPS on. I don't call a lot, but I text a bit.

I have never run my battery completely down. I charge regularly, but I've gone 2 days w/o a charge. It isn't that bad for a sweet smartphone.
 
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