Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

It may just be me, but has anyone with a captivate felt that the battery life is not as good as it should be? I get roughly 1 percent per minute surfing on 3g. I have background data turned off, the brightness all the way down and nothing auto updating. I thought maybe it was due to getting poor reception at work, but it happens at home where I get good reception. Furthermore, I only get about .6 percent battery power per minute talking (6 percent every 10 minutes) that's only 2.7 hours, which is exactly half of the 5.5 that the box says. So to reiterate, I'm seeing 100 minutes of web surfing and 2.7 hours of talk time, with brightness all the way down, background data off, nothing syncing. Has anyone else experienced this or have any thoughts?

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

I forgot to mention, I lose only 1% an hour when the phone is sitting with the screen off, that's fine with me because I charge it once a day anyway.The phone also gets a bit warm to the touch while browsing.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Since it is the first 30 days I would get it replaced by AT&T and see if the issue improves.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

I'm going to, but I was curious to see if anyone else is having the same issues or if their batteries were lasting much longer than mine.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

I'm hogging my own thread but oh well. After some more creative searching I found this. http://androidforums.com/samsung-cap...ease-help.html

If you're too lazy to read I'll summarize for you. People are saying that after a few days the battery life improves, so I guess I'll be patient for a few more days and see what happens....

I'll leave it open for discussion though, has anyone else had these issues?

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Actually It may be possible.. I hear there are 2 types of different batteries used....maybe one of the times requires training :/

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

I agree with the poor battery life. Supposedly, the display is responsible for 84% of the usage (no surprise there) but I turned the brightness way down with little or no improvement. I'm having to charge it at around 4-5pm daily.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Well I am happy to report that my battery life seems to have improved slightly, I've been getting about 1 percent for about 3 minutes surfing on 3g as of this morning.I've been using the phone as much as I have been the last few days and I've only gone though about 25 percent in the last 2.5 hours. So that's 10 hours of semi unrealistic heavy use from one charge. I have not had an opportunity to test talk time yet, Ill update when I do.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

not really because the icons would pop even more.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.
http://blog.gsmarena.com/pics/10/06/...marena_001.jpg
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?

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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!

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

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.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

There will always be a few issues here and there with every phone...I don't have a captivate but have an Epic which is similar..and its pretty much the best phone I've ever used...I'm personally coming from a WM background so was a bit sketchy on the switch as well..but once I saw the awesome hardware in these phones I couldn't resist :P

Doesn't AT&T give you a 14 day period to return? if so I would use it to play around with the phone and see how it fits your taste..

IF you want to get into specifics, tell me your primary concerns and I'll try to answer them the best I can.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Having TERRIBLE time with battery on my Captivate.
I followed the instructions on how to "calibrate" the battery (draining, charging, charging again, etc.) but it seems to be WORSE than before.

For example, last night prior to going to sleep, the battery was charged to 100%. I turned the power completely off (shut down the phone), and 8 hours later when I woke up this morning, the phone was COMPLETELY DEAD.

Obviously something is wrong. Is it a bad battery, phone or both, any thoughts? Rogers, my carrier here in Toronto, isn't all that knowledgeable on this phone since it's relatively new and since I've had it more than the 30 day tryout period, they won't give me a new one.

Also, when using the phone, as I send or read an email, for example, I watch the battery meter go down with every touch of the screen. I have turned automatic brightness down as far as I can and still be able to see the screen. I have tried disabling WiFi and GPS (but doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of having a powerful phone like this?), have made sure no unnecessary apps or processes are running in the background, etc.


Thank you.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Well first of all did you disable DRM running at startup?

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Hi gTen, thanks for replying (I presume you're replying to me?). I am not familiar with what you are referring to, can you provide more info?

Thanks.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

There is a DRM service that starts up which is known to drain a lot of battery...if you have/get an app that blocks the DRM services it helps improve battery life..some people got improvements up to 5x fold lol

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Still doesn't answer the burning question: if the battery was at 100% before going to sleep and the phone turned completely off all night, why was it completely dead when I woke up this morning?

Anyway, so next (dumb) question: how do I do that?

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

Simple, the DRM service keeps the phone awake and prevents it from idling..thus would drain a lot of battery...

There are a few apps on the market such as startup auditor, startup cleaner and etc that can do it.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

That's crazy. I have a BlackBerry that I leave ON for 4-5 DAYS, with heavy email and phone usage and I still have approximately 30-40% batterly left at that point, and that's with a bright screen, WiFi, GPS, 3G all turned on.

Re: Poor battery life Samsung Captivate
 

I dont think you can get 4 days while using wifi none stop, even on a blackberry....but overall backberry is much lighter, less services running, more locked down, weaker processors and none touch screen(unless its a storm or a torch)..hence less battery usage

Thing about emails and blackberry is it uses GPRS or 1x push which works similar to text messages..if you use an email that utilizes 3g for push or pull it will sue up a lot more energy.


I have heard people getting 84 hours or so battery life with Galaxy S phones though...