After having Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.1, the first and foremost thing I’ve struggled to grasp on was the battery life.
Honestly, not even a half day of use for music player, 3G internet browsing to occasionally check public transport timetables, news, twitter and do some short email replies and phone calls…?
What’s going on? My Nokia E66 lasted for 3+ days under similar usage conditions!?
So I went ahead to find the cure. I’ve used juice defender app. I read article about calibrating the battery by discharging fully then resetting the battery stats in boot loader menu and charging fully again. Then I read another article about lithium batteries and how they shouldn’t be discharged less than 30% (< slovak article, try google translator ;). The article talks how full discharge is actually killing the batteries lifespan due to their no-memory effect and other parameters. So I even purchased a new original Samsung battery!
But no, nothing of above worked, still only a few hours of battery life.
Then, not sure if accidentally or how, I started experimenting on my own. Actually those experiments were promoted by tweets of people claiming extraordinary improvement in their battery life after upgrading to Darky’s ROM 10.x. I upgraded to that custom ROM too but experienced the opposite, battery life decrease. (But I have to say it is a great custom ROM, based on Android Gingerbread 2.3.x resulting in a lot of improvement in speed and responsiveness).
So I started own experiments by leaving the phone in the flight mode. And then I wasn’t too far away from finding what caused the issues.
Background data sync ON vs OFF! Be it Google accounts like Gmail, Yahoo mail, Twitter or POP3 mail… Not sure how often they sync, push or whatever they do but they do it so often and so power hungry that since I’ve turned it off I got 4-5x battery life. In other words, before I had 3-6 hour battery life with Background data sync on. When turned off, I get 2+ days.
When you turn it off, even the android pops a notification message mentioning battery saving.
Ok but what about getting notifications of new email, tweet or app updates?
Simple, I manually manage it now. When I feel like it, I turn the Background data sync to ON couple times a day for a few minutes. It’s not that hard nor annoying and I don’t need any app to manage it either (I searched a few to auto manage this but they failed to achieve the same result).
I tap the menu button, go straight to Settings > Accounts and sync > Background data [checkbox]. I check it, let the phone sync (wait for the sync icon to disappear from the top notification bar). Then uncheck it and come back to home screen to see updated Gmail and other sync update depended apps.
This way I even get less distractions, dependency on pulling the phone out of pants and pausing my chillax music as I used to before when beeps and rings came whenever and whenever.
Try it for yourself ;)
(I don’t care about Auto-sync below Background data, it didn’t stop my apps from auto sync. I really just manually turn on & off the whole Background data a 2-3 times a day.)
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