Android newb wants better battery life. (edited 1/15: Google Maps sucks. Fixes?)

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dzgx216

Junior Member
Jan 8, 2013
4
0
0
So, being that I am a Wireless industry professional I'd like to say a few things.

The "Talk time" rating of the phone is the absolute WORST way to gauge how your battery life is going to be. It is a short-throw number that includes statistics taken with ZERO interference and no external influencers.

The higher the MaH of your battery does not guarantee the longer the battery life. There are many other things that average into the mix. I can have a phone with a 4000mah battery that has worse battery life than the phone with a 2500mah battery because of the different power consumption levels of the internal components.

It comes DIRECT from the phone manufacturers.. DO NOT USE POWER MANAGEMENT APPS ON YOUR 4G LTE SMARTPHONES. They actually make it worse, because there are task managers built into the OS by the manufacturer.

The Iphone 5 has similar battery life to the Razr M (not the maxx, the M) Whoever said that you should switch to IP5, please understand that I say this out of consideration for future generations intelligence levels... If you can't take the time to understand something, don't talk about it... Iphone 5's are the center of attention not because of how awesome they are, but because of the powerful marketing prowess of the last generation of apple execs, spec for spec IP5 is underpowered compared to many phones available at half the price. The true draw to IOS is it's rock solid stability.

Your absolute best bet is to use a portable battery charger. These devices are charged at night along with your phone and store power in an enclosed battery module so that they can be used to charge your phone back up when it dies. These are more useful than extended batteries because they can be used to charge most any device that charges by USB (not just your phone / tablet)

They charge at different rates, and have different size internal batteries. They can fit in your pocket or your purse and you can use them as a pass-through for charging simultaneously with your phone at night time or in the car.

Some of you may disagree, and have the right to, but just remember that this is what comes to wireless industry employees and is going to, for the most part, be the thought process of the nice people behind the counter at the ATT, VZW, TMO, SPR stores when you go in.
 
Dec 30, 2004
12,553
2
76
So, being that I am a Wireless industry professional I'd like to say a few things.

The "Talk time" rating of the phone is the absolute WORST way to gauge how your battery life is going to be. It is a short-throw number that includes statistics taken with ZERO interference and no external influencers.

The higher the MaH of your battery does not guarantee the longer the battery life. There are many other things that average into the mix. I can have a phone with a 4000mah battery that has worse battery life than the phone with a 2500mah battery because of the different power consumption levels of the internal components.

It comes DIRECT from the phone manufacturers.. DO NOT USE POWER MANAGEMENT APPS ON YOUR 4G LTE SMARTPHONES. They actually make it worse, because there are task managers built into the OS by the manufacturer.

The Iphone 5 has similar battery life to the Razr M (not the maxx, the M) Whoever said that you should switch to IP5, please understand that I say this out of consideration for future generations intelligence levels... If you can't take the time to understand something, don't talk about it... Iphone 5's are the center of attention not because of how awesome they are, but because of the powerful marketing prowess of the last generation of apple execs, spec for spec IP5 is underpowered compared to many phones available at half the price. The true draw to IOS is it's rock solid stability.

Your absolute best bet is to use a portable battery charger. These devices are charged at night along with your phone and store power in an enclosed battery module so that they can be used to charge your phone back up when it dies. These are more useful than extended batteries because they can be used to charge most any device that charges by USB (not just your phone / tablet)

They charge at different rates, and have different size internal batteries. They can fit in your pocket or your purse and you can use them as a pass-through for charging simultaneously with your phone at night time or in the car.

Some of you may disagree, and have the right to, but just remember that this is what comes to wireless industry employees and is going to, for the most part, be the thought process of the nice people behind the counter at the ATT, VZW, TMO, SPR stores when you go in.

a lot of us are smarter than the people behind the counter.
The Note's battery life is stellar because the internals' power management isn't much different from the S3, yet it has a much larger battery, even larger than is required to compensate for the bigger screen.
 

Red Storm

Lifer
Oct 2, 2005
14,233
234
106
a lot of us are smarter than the people behind the counter.
The Note's battery life is stellar because the internals' power management isn't much different from the S3, yet it has a much larger battery, even larger than is required to compensate for the bigger screen.

It really is impressive: (bottom image includes watching over one hour of video at full brightness too)

6sb9m8.jpg
 

Yuriman

Diamond Member
Jun 25, 2004
5,530
141
106
It comes DIRECT from the phone manufacturers.. DO NOT USE POWER MANAGEMENT APPS ON YOUR 4G LTE SMARTPHONES. They actually make it worse, because there are task managers built into the OS by the manufacturer.

This is totally correct. Task killers and the like often waste tons of battery because they have to constantly run in the background, killing processes that keep restarting - processes that otherwise don't eat up any CPU cycles when sleeping if they're made correctly. If an app is misbehaving, delete the app, don't install a task killer.
 

phucheneh

Diamond Member
Jun 30, 2012
7,306
5
0
LOL, that reminds me to mention: I installed 'Watchdog,' and it kept giving me alarms for runaway programs.

The main culprit appeared to be some process called 'watchdog.' :confused: :D
 

dzgx216

Junior Member
Jan 8, 2013
4
0
0
a lot of us are smarter than the people behind the counter.
The Note's battery life is stellar because the internals' power management isn't much different from the S3, yet it has a much larger battery, even larger than is required to compensate for the bigger screen.


God bless ya then, because the drooling idiots that I deal with on a daily basis are the reason why I drink at night. TBH, the note's battery is one of the good ones if you're an average user. However I still managed to kill it in 6.5 hours because I can't put my phone down. I think I saw red earlier this morning when I read people recommending task managers and Iphone 5's. lol. :oops:
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
24,054
1,693
126
Remembering to charge a phone every 3 days or so sounds like more hassle than charging it nightly to me. All you need is a days juice.
That is the strangest excuses I've heard in a while. Now having shorter battery life is a good thing? What?!?

As far as I'm concerned, the longer the battery life, the better, as long as weight and size are kept in check. In fact, this is one place where I think Android really falls down compared to the competition. Battery life is something Google should be paying more attention to with Android, instead of forcing companies like Motorola to come out with phones like the RAZR MAXX HD which brute-forces a solution with a giant 3300 mAh battery in a 4.7" phone to overcome Android's battery life problem.
 

Red Storm

Lifer
Oct 2, 2005
14,233
234
106
That is the strangest excuses I've heard in a while. Now having shorter battery life is a good thing? What?!?

As far as I'm concerned, the longer the battery life, the better, as long as weight and size are kept in check. In fact, this is one place where I think Android really falls down compared to the competition. Battery life is something Google should be paying more attention to with Android, instead of forcing companies like Motorola to come out with phones like the RAZR MAXX HD which brute-forces a solution with a giant 3300 mAh battery in a 4.7" phone to overcome Android's battery life problem.

Implying the iPhone is longer lasting than the most popular Android flagships? I haven't seen that to be the case in real life. Also the Maxx HD is no bigger than other high end Android phones.
 

gorcorps

aka Brandon
Jul 18, 2004
30,739
454
126
LOL, that reminds me to mention: I installed 'Watchdog,' and it kept giving me alarms for runaway programs.

The main culprit appeared to be some process called 'watchdog.' :confused: :D

Odd, I use watchdog from time to time and it's caught a number of things I wouldn't have found otherwise. On my galaxy s2 I would notice it would be warmer than normal, and it kept finding that "android media process" was running even during idle. Through google I found out that one of my media files must be corrupt, and when the phone did a scan to refresh the media it gets hung up and drains the battery. A format of my SD card and reloading files fixed that.

Then just recently I used it on my Nexus 7 to find out that Currents is using a lot of my resources at times for some reason. I also have it installed on my phone and never saw such a thing, so I know it's wrong. So I uninstalled currents. I've never had watchdog catch itself unless you're a moron and leave it in "real time mode" before you leave the app.
 

thecapsaicinkid

Senior member
Nov 30, 2012
382
0
71
That is the strangest excuses I've heard in a while. Now having shorter battery life is a good thing? What?!?

As far as I'm concerned, the longer the battery life, the better, as long as weight and size are kept in check. In fact, this is one place where I think Android really falls down compared to the competition. Battery life is something Google should be paying more attention to with Android, instead of forcing companies like Motorola to come out with phones like the RAZR MAXX HD which brute-forces a solution with a giant 3300 mAh battery in a 4.7" phone to overcome Android's battery life problem.
A bigger battery isn't free both in terms of weight, size and cost so yes, smaller can be better.
 
Feb 19, 2001
20,155
23
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Implying the iPhone is longer lasting than the most popular Android flagships? I haven't seen that to be the case in real life. Also the Maxx HD is no bigger than other high end Android phones.

My iPhone 5 certainly lasts longer than my Nexus 4 under standard use. I also play an excessive amount of temple run on my iPhone mind you...