Larry Page: Your Android battery life should last a day

12. try using black google mobile at http://bGoog.com! it saves battery power and loads faster. it looks slick too...

11. TuneWiki.

Also ShopSavvy.

As the proud owner of an Android phone for ... oh, just a little over 3 days now, let me relate my own findings :)

I'm using a Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10, and my experience is based on the flavour of Android that is available for that device and that device alone. 1.6 nominally, but who the hell knows what they've changed. As I explain later, in my cases I don't know if those apps were actually the source of the problem - they may simply be exposing bugs in the Android image provided by Sony-Ericsson.

So basically under normal circumstances Android will put the phone almost completely to sleep a short period of time after the screen has been turned off. This uses almost no power. Maybe 1-2% of my 1500mAh battery every hour. I fully expect that if I left it "off", it would last at least two or three days.

When the phone is in this almost-powered-down state, a few things will wake it back up. A timer going off is probably the most common event (e.g.: an alarm clock, an app which has set a 5-minute timer so it can download feed updates, etc.). There are in fact many flavours of timers and events which will briefly wake the phone up, but you'll never notice them unless something's really broken. Network traffic will, of course, also wake the phone up (e.g.: an incoming phone call).

However, in order for Android to so aggressively save power - shut down the phone almost completely - applications need to co-operate with the OS. You see, there are too many use cases for applications to do some processing while the screen is off. So there's all sorts of behaviour governing this area. If you noticed that Twitdroid was causing massive battery drain (couldn't get through a day with it on, could easily get through a day with it off), then it was either poorly-written, or exposing a bug in the Android code supplied by your phone manufacturer (which in turn got the code from Google).

Twitdroid _should_ say to the OS "wake me up in 5 minutes" using a standard API (I think Timer is the one that's generally used). This will let the phone sleep almost all the time. If it uses a (Partial) Wake Lock instead, then you're buggered - Android has no idea that Twitdroid doesn't legitimately need a Wake Lock, so Android respects Twitdroid's Wake Lock and won't shut down the phone. And Twitdroid might be doing something even _more_ obscene.

In my case, TuneWiki was my main culprit. It was preventing the phone from sleeping (or exposing a bug in the Android code provided by Sony-Ericsson which prevented the phone from sleeping), and for my Xperia X10, this results in probably 10% of my battery evaporating every hour. That's about 10 hours of battery - WITH NO USE. Truly ridiculous.

The Spare Parts application can help you. If you open it up, and go into the "Battery Information" screen, you'll see how long it's been since the phone was booted. (You might also be able to get this data from *#*#4636#*#*.)

Then go into the "Battery history" screen and select "Other usage", "Since last unplugged". Click the "Running" bar. If the "Time spent without sleeping" amount matches the length of time since the phone booted, _something_ is preventing the phone from shutting down. It will suck down power like mad.

I use my phone very heavily, and have a number of applications which poll the Internet for data regularly (5 minutes in some cases, 30 minutes for others).

My "Running" percentage is rarely more than 25%. If you see it higher than 85%, I'd say something is seriously wrong. 50% might be okay, depending on what you're doing. But given what I've seen, I'd personally think that even that's very high.

Playing video, I think, uses less power, believe it or not, than the phone being unable to shut parts of itself off. I haven't checked this conclusively, but it'll be interesting to see.

So, how can you tell what application is at fault? In the "Battery history" screen, select "Partial wake usage" instead of "Other usage". You'll see which apps have officially registered with the OS for partial Wake Locks. But not all. In my case, "Android System" was the one which was responsible. Hardly helpful.

What then? I don't yet know of any particularly good way of figuring it out. Hopefully Android 2.2 (FroYo) will provide some additional end-user-accessible tools in this regard. If not, it's theoretically possible to write an app which does all the grunt-work :)

So, I've been carefully monitoring which processes were running using ES Task Manager (also in the Market). I manually kept a log of:

* Time of check

* How long since the phone was rebooted

* How long the phone has been "Running" for

Each time I checked, about once an hour, I added a line. I calculated out how long between checks, and how long in that time the phone was running for. I've come to expect about 6 minutes of "Running" time no matter what. I suspect the phone doesn't power itself down, for the most part, until six minutes after I turn off the screen.

If I saw that the phone had been running continuously since I had turned it off, I looked into the process list (using ES Task Manager) and recorded some likely suspects. Eventually I narrowed it down to TuneWiki and ShoppSavvy.

About my usage:

I'm a heavy user of apps which run in the background. The majority of them are harmless, and don't cause major battery usage. In particular, I _do_ have Email running, GTalk running, GMail running, RemindMe, Beem (an IM client), BBC News, NPR News, Paperdroid, and similar such things. Don't assume that something's causing a problem because you see it in the list every time. Most of them are very well-behaved. And try not to get angry at the application developers if you do find a culprit - it could just be that they're exposing a bug in Android or - worse yet - some manufacturer-provided code.

10. put dynamo in your shoes and power your Android wireless & batteryless.

You just need to keep walking (talking or not) while using your Android.

9. Google should invest in Witricity ... no bigger battery needed, no battery at all ! Yay !

8. We just need electricity generating shoes.

7. The trouble is, bigger batteries make the phone ugly, bigger and heavier.

6. Why not just add a bigger battery? I would gladly tote around another couple of ounces if it gave me a couple more hours.

5. Things are just going to get worse with video chat coming and flash etc.

Its a shame but the sad fact is, battery technology is just not up to the tech we are trying to cram into these devices.

Users will never be satisfied, they cry when there's no multitasking, flash, camera led flashes , this-that and the other, when the companies start to add these things, they cry about the battery life.

Android and HTC are storming along at 100 miles an hour to release o/s features and greater spec handsets because that's their best advantage over Apples immense marketing machine and we are all guilty for clammering for these features and specs without considering the real consequences!

We will end up having some impressive handsets on paper but completely ridiculous in practice.

It will be like:

Person 1: "wow I can record in 720p, look my phone has an hdmi connector, I have a fancy touch responsive background, look I can video chat"

Person 2: "cool, show me"

Person 1: "I would, but I have it all turned off at the moment to preserve battery life"

Person 2: "but it's only 11am"

:-)

4. i dont know if these phones are the same but on my xperia x1 the battery usuage was massively improved by turning off "auto brightness". The constant adjustment was more juicy than just leaving it at a set level.

3. 3 things you can do which really help

1. Get a task killer from the market (search for "ATK")

2. Kill apps when you're not using them - don't just let them run in the background

3. Realize that you don't need max brightness all (or any of) the time - powering the high res display is what takes most of the battery power on newer android phones (Milestone, Desire, Nexus One). By the same note, lock the phone when you're not using it - this turns the screen off and reduces battery usage.

I do all of the above and my Milestone can last 3-4 days if I turn it off overnight.

2. I'm lucky if my old 2G iPhone lasts half a day :(

1. "Your Android battery should last a day"

No it "should" last 2-3 days but no Smartphone seems able to do that. A day is a joke. Now I've tweaked it, I get 1.5 days but I'd prefer 2-3 days (like my old phone). It's not very smart if you have to turn off the whizzy sync features.

I'm sure there's more Google could be doing. A day simply isn't good enough! It's literally my biggest annoyance with my HTC Desire. JuiceDefender helps but it's not the answer.

Is there a list somewhere of particularly badly written apps?

One thing about the iPhone App Store, is Apple seem much better at enforcing well written apps.