Battery life went from good to BAD

[gator352]

Yeah, I still have my touch pro. I know all to well!! LOL. Your right though. But, it's still the music widget that keeps the media running at all times if you have music loaded up. It polls the SD card for the current playing and keeps it active which uses more battery juice than if it were closed out, but you can't just close the widget like you can the actual music app. My point being is that formatting an SD card has nothing to do with batt life. It's an app polling for something on that SD card. When you take it out, it breaks the link thus killing it's active polling till you load it up again. Try it out and you'll see what I'm saying.

[biscodude]

I was reading another theory about the 10% battery loss that made sense to me. When the phone decides the battery is full it will stop charging the battery. So, once it's fully charged it will could start running off battery power again. When you first take it off the charger it assumes it's still 100% and then shortly thereafter realizes that it is not actually at a 100% and adjust accordingly. He seemed to prove this theory by putting a fully charged battery into his evo he didn't lose the 10% right away.

[neuteboomt]

Originally Posted by gator352

Yeah, I still have my touch pro. I know all to well!! LOL. Your right though. But, it's still the music widget that keeps the media running at all times if you have music loaded up. It polls the SD card for the current playing and keeps it active which uses more battery juice than if it were closed out, but you can't just close the widget like you can the actual music app. My point being is that formatting an SD card has nothing to do with batt life. It's an app polling for something on that SD card. When you take it out, it breaks the link thus killing it's active polling till you load it up again. Try it out and you'll see what I'm saying.

Again the HTC music widget is not running at 100% when not using it. I have attached cheap pic confirming.

Now I can confirm that reformatting the memory card did fix the phone from not sleeping and I went from 6 hours of battery life to a day in a half.

[MadSquabbles]

Originally Posted by biscodude

I was reading another theory about the 10% battery loss that made sense to me. When the phone decides the battery is full it will stop charging the battery. So, once it's fully charged it will could start running off battery power again. When you first take it off the charger it assumes it's still 100% and then shortly thereafter realizes that it is not actually at a 100% and adjust accordingly. He seemed to prove this theory by putting a fully charged battery into his evo he didn't lose the 10% right away.

my laptops won't charge until they hit around 95% or so. only difference is that they report they're at 95%.

but i do agree with you. it discharges once it gets to 100% but it's not registering that it's discharging.

[MBC1965]

One thing that I did which really improved my battery life was to uncheck the box that says Enable always on data. I still got my push mail which is most important to me, and I could use any app as I needed it. Now I would prefer to have all of that running in the background, but I found I didn't need all of it. It was too difficult to manage individual apps, and unchecking that box was a true game changer for me. I was going to take the Evo back because of the poor battery life, but now it's a keeper and I couldn't be happier. Same battery life as the TP2 that I had.

[gator352]

Originally Posted by neuteboomt

Again the HTC music widget is not running at 100% when not using it. I have attached cheap pic confirming.

Now I can confirm that reformatting the memory card did fix the phone from not sleeping and I went from 6 hours of battery life to a day in a half.

I digress and let me rephrase. The widget isn't using 100% cpu ( I should have stated that), but it makes it run 100% of the time and never sleeps. As long as the widget is polling from the SD card, not only is the music app running, the power for the SD card is running as well. Which is kinda a double whammy. But I had good batt life before losing the widget and now it's even better. Formatting an empty SD card, HDD, etc., does nothing except wipe it to a clean state (or make it bootable for an HDD). But if the card is empty before wiping it, what exactly are you clearing? Your not fixing bad sectors. Your not aligning the boot blocks. Your just clearing it and if there's nothing to clear, it's really pointless.

[neuteboomt]

My theory is that when Sprint pushed the hot fix (to fix the memory card) it changed something to how the processor communicate with the memory card. My EVO would never sleep even when you pressed the power button to turn off the screen. In the screen shot above instead of Music it displayed media but the blue line was all the way across the screen. My first step was to hard reset (coming from windows) but that did not work. Since the EVO saves everything on the memory card I started pulling media files off the card. That did not work. So I pulled everything off reformated the card and placed all my files back on the card and have not had a issue since. So the only thing I can think of is Sprint sending the hot fix for the memory card messed something up.

[gator352]

Yeah it's a possibilty the update screwed us! Go figure right? But since everything IS tied to the SD card, removing the files from it breaks the link to whatever app is accessing it. When you put those files back on the SD card, the links between apps and SD card are not present till that particular app is used again. Then and only then does it reestablish the link. So it will give you better battery life cause most apps haven't reestablished the link to stay active causing battery drain.

In the case of the music widget, when you load up a song and listen to it from the actual music app in "all apps" then exit when finished, that song is still active in the widget so you can listen to music while doing other things. That widget maintains connection to that song on the SD card....all the time....using precious battery life. If you go into settings/applications/running services, the media app is running. Stop it. Then go back to the widget. The widget will be clear and it will say "tap to go back to music player". Sometimes it will stay clear (not polling for music), and other times it will automatically (within 5 seconds) poll, find, and display music without tapping. Meaning it started by itself and continues running as if you had never stopped it. It doesn't happen every time, but enough to make it a pain. Just browsing by the page with the widget can reactivate it. "Talk" is another big culprit. Even though you tell it to not load on startup, it does. So I ax'd it into oblivion.

My point though to formatting is this: When you format, all your doing is telling it how to allocate the unit size and what file structure to use. File structure is either FAT, FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS and each has a specific unit size you can allocate. When setting this and hit format, it erases all data to make this happen. FAT32 (which is more efficient than the others except NTFS but FAT32 is used primarily for winXP) uses 4096Kb by default all the way upto 8192 for each blocks unit size. NTFS uses 8192 by default. All this does is make the files stored on the media more efficient when called up to display. Example: a video that's 3.5MB in size will fit on one block formatted to use FAT32 @ 4096Kb. So if your media gets fragged, that files stays together for faster call up time. If the video is 4.5MB in size, it will take up 2 blocks....4.1MB in first block and 0.4MB in the second but the rest of block 2 can be filled with other data from another application. If your media gets fragged, that second block can be thrown elswhere on the disk causing fragmentation and making it slower to access that video. That's why we "Defrag"...to keep it all together.

So formatting that SD card (a clean SD card at that) does nothing in retrospect cause Android doesn't use FAT or NTFS as a file structure making it a moot point. All it did was break the links to apps that were accessing it resulting in better battery life. I was getting 10 to 12 hours from the EVO till I got rid of the music widget. Then I was getting 13 to 14 hours. Now I get 14 to 16 (with moderate use) but I also disabled a whole bunch of crap apps that were constantly running. Up time is always going to be different per user as we all have different ways we use our phones.

[bigdaddie]

Thanks for all the information people. It gives me a lot of things to try.
BD

[gator352]

OK, I said hell wid it and that it can't hurt so I formatted my card using FAT32 just to see if it would make any difference. I'll post back and let ya know.