Poor battery life Samsung Captivate

[Scientific]

Originally Posted by ppcgpirate

also use solid black wallpaper. the screen supposedly uses very little power when displaying black, it's almost like the pixels are turned off.

LOL...kinda takes away from that amazing screen though doesn't it?

[potatoofdoom]

Originally Posted by magicdanw

I'm in the same situation as you were, potato. Did you do anything that improved the battery life, or did it just improve on it's own? I'm trying to strip out all the widgets and things that may run in the background, so I'll see how it goes tomorrow, but I'm really thinking about bringing it back to AT&T and seeing if they'd replace it to let me find out if it's a bad battery or something.

The most important thing that you can turn off is automatic brightness, I think. It seems to kill the battery very quickly. Just set it to the lowest, its still plenty bright. I also turned off both location settings gps and network location. I also turned background data off.

But, I did all those things the day I bought the phone, so I actually think the battery life did improve on its own. I talked on it for awhile earlier and I got about onepercent per three minutes of talk.which is pretty decent for a low signal area in an old building.

[potatoofdoom]

Originally Posted by ppcgpirate

also use solid black wallpaper. the screen supposedly uses very little power when displaying black, it's almost like the pixels are turned off.

Fromwhat I've read, when the display is showing black the pixels actually are off, so you're 100% right.

[ppcgpirate]

Originally Posted by Scientific

LOL...kinda takes away from that amazing screen though doesn't it?

not really because the icons would pop even more.

[ppcgpirate]

i'm surprised the battery life isn't better, when GSM Arena conducted a battery test on the samsung galaxy s, they got impressive results,

Samsung I9000 Galaxy S full battery test ready – up with the best

June 28th, 2010 byChip
GSMArena.com, Mobile phones

Those SuperAMOLED smartphones can certainly take quite a lot of abuse before their batteries die. Even the Android-powered Samsung I9000 Galaxy S managed to live through good three and a half days of standby and some pretty extensive usage before it switched off. Yeap, the notoriously hard on the batteries Android might not be as bad as it is made out to be.

It didn’t manage to beat the S8500 Wave but the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S certainly managed to push a lot of work on a single charge. Here is what we did with it over the 84 hours from its full charge to its battery going flat.

• 90 minutes video playback
• 2 hours music playback
• 40 minutes voice calls
• 30 minutes navigation
• 30 minutes general usage
• 10 minutes browsing
• 10 minutes shooting photo and video

You should also keep in mind that the Galaxy S was hooked to a 3G network at all times so stand-by also took its toll on the battery.
The numbers are pretty impressive indeed and even if they fall slightly short of the ones achieved by the Samsung S8500 Wave, the battery life of the Galaxy S shouldn’t be something to worry about. In fact it seems that you will need to try really hard if you are to drain your Galaxy S battery in a single day.



You might also remember that we did a dedicated video playback test with the Galaxy S – it endured nearly 7 hours and a half straight before its battery level dropped below the critical 10 percent. Nice, eh?

[zj4x4]

I just posted about this on the AT&T forums with the hope of gathering specific data around people's battery life. I'm getting way less than I expect. Details are here: http://forums.wireless.att.com/t5/Sa...e/td-p/1992724

Please post your specific experience as well.

[diablo09]

Mine used to give me like a day's battery with average use. Ok, here's what i did.

I have rooted my phone, and have:
1. task manager,
2. battery monitor in status to show battery percentage,
3. start up auditor,
4. cpu info widget (with temp and speed and cpu usage),
5. app protector, and
6. 3G data usage monitor
These are always on, except for the cpu info widget that's turned occasionally on and off.
Apart from this,
1. static wallpaper (not black screen)
2. use wifi all time at home, and bluetooth when outside.
3. have brightness set to 0 when not in sun, and to about 50% when outside.
4. screen auto-rotation turned off, since i hardly use this

i installed "SetCPU" app, and here are my settings of the app:
1. when display is turned off, auto set the phone to 400 MHz speed with "conservative" mode on.
2. all other times, set the speed to 400 MHz with "on demand" mode.

i don't notice any noticeable lag for my day to day tasks, and my battery life has more than doubled.

EDIT: This is my second Captivate. I exchanged my first Captivate after about 10 days for its horrible battery life.

[Black Google Mobile]

If you are careful with how you use the Captivate then you actually can get a pretty good life out of each charge. And because of the AMOLED display you definitely can save a lot of battery power by using black backgrounds as much as possible. You can also check out the new Black Google Mobile that let's you Google in black on your phone and it even loads faster too!

[blackberryandy]

Originally Posted by potatoofdoom

It may just be me, but has anyone with a captivate felt that the battery life is not as good as it should be?

FWIW, I think the battery life on the Captivate leaves much to be desired. I just got my phone (Rogers Wireless in Canada, the i896 model) and I am finding that if I leave the phone on for a day, without using it, it is completely dead the next morning. If I try to turn the phone on, I get the i896 splash screen momentarily and then the phone shuts off, but the 4 soft keys stay lit for some reason. Being a BlackBerry user (primarily) but wanting to use the Samsung for other purposes (I find the Navigation app terrific, so much so that I have gotten rid of my TomTom) but this is a major concern to me.

[JunkionMarnot]

I'm so glad i came back to PPCG Forums, this one in particular. I'm up for an upgrade in January, and was considering a Captivate or other Android (most likely the X10 if not the Captivate) instead of the iPhone 4. Now that I'm seeing issues some of you are having with your Captivates, I'm reconsidering. But overall, do you guys love your Androids? Would you switch or keep the Captivate? I'm thinking about getting a Captivate as a test phone/standby. I've never HAD a Android before so I'd like to experience one on my own (i.e. not in a store). Like to hear your thoughts.