Thursday, June 24, 2010

Tracking myTouch 3G Battery Usage

I'm slowly but surely growing attached to my new myTouch. I love the faster processor on the phone, and continue to adapt to the keyboardless design (love that voice dialer!). But, I'm unimpressed with the battery life. After 11 hours of being unplugged, the battery was just about dead.

Compare that to Shira's BlackBerry which goes days and days on a single charge.

Rather than just kvetch about this problem (or buy an extended battery - which I'll no doubt eventually do), I was surprised to learn that I can actually diagnose what's chewing up my battery life.

From the home screen, I accidentally found that I can do:

  • Settings
  • About Phone
  • Battery use

I then see a breakdown of how the battery's being used. In my case, I was surprised to learn that 28% of my battery was being sucked up by the Weather.com Weather Widget. Now I love knowing the weather as much as the next guy, but it's certainly not worth sacrificing battery life over.

Checking it just now shows that Scanner Radio has used 19% of the batter life since my last plug-in. Thing is, I'm not currently running the Scanner Radio app - or at least I don't intend to. It must be still running as a background job.

Perhaps it's time to install an app to monitor and kill unneeded processes.

Even if the battery life isn't great -- being able to explain why is just huge.

1 comment:

  1. I was really surprised by how much battery the weather apps use myself. it wasn't as much a problem with 1.6, but with 2.1 it just seems to eat the battery. My initial thought was that it was due to the GPS being on and the weather app wanting to know where you were to give you the proper weather, but even with the GPS turned off it sucked my battery down. I tried a number of different weather widget apps (free and not) and they all seem to have the similar battery problem. If you find a weather widget that works without draining the battery please let me know and I'll do the same... maybe we should just write one.

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