(2010-07-28) Nexus One Battery Life

Jihi's not satisfied with Battery Life on her Nexus One. She hardly uses it, so she expects it to last 4 days between charges. (I use mine a lot, so assume I have to charge it every night.) So I decided to assemble some notes:

• Jan'2010 Tech Crunch review - Officially the phone has up to 7 hours talk time, 250 hours standby, 5 hours of 3G Internet use, 7 hours of video playback and 20 hours of audio playback. Unofficially, I was able to kill the fully charged battery with 1.5 hours of continuous gameplay (Robo Defense) on the full-brightness screen.

• I see huge variation in people's claims of battery life. And, of course, there's no objective/precise way for people to describe their usage level/mix.

• One comparison between the Nexus One and IPhone found similar Battery Life.

• There's some debate as to whether to use Task Killer.

  • I've also been testing Number One Son's HTC MyTouch - the first time I left it unplugged it drained really fast. But once I rebooted it (killing any apps sitting around) and tried again, the battery didn't drain at all over 12hrs in standby.

• I just read that drawing the battery level all the way down is a good idea 1/month - not because of the "memory" issue that nickel batteries have, but to re-calibrate the guage.

• This Video discusses how to lengthen

  • Use Set Cpu to take more control over CPU speed - it has a bunch of profiles you can define.

    • ugh, you have to Root your phone to use that.

  • Power Manager Full - can have it auto-adjust things like screen brightness and turn off WiFi when you get to low battery, etc.

  • Process Manager - like Task Killer, but with a bit more automation - has nice feature that can auto-kill tasks that haven't been active for some number of hours.

• could add extended battery if wiling to add thickness (and pay $65).

  • Sept'2011 - ordered 1 of these.