On the whole, most smartphones only give you a day’s usage before the battery fizzles up – but Androids seem to be particularly juice-sucking. According to Larry Page however, if you’re not getting a full day’s use, there’s “something wrong.”
Page was speaking at the Google Zeitgeist forum yesterday in London, when he was asked about battery life. Throwing the blame on third-party developers, he said that apps are the reason people may not be getting a full 24 hours of battery life. Twitter and other social networking sites constantly connecting to draw new tweets or status updates are battery-draining for sure, but even without these apps running there are still problems.
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was on hand to chip in that “the primary consumer of the battery life on these phones is the transmit/receive circuit. So tuning that and obviously figuring out a way to not use too much of that extends your battery life…and people bring in applications that are not particularly smart about that, which is what Larry is trying to get at.” [TechRadar]
matt
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 9:07 AMso true… might also not help that you use java, and a virtual machine for all of your applications…
but yeah, a phone playing a full 3D game maxing out the cpu and gpu will use less power than something communicating over 3G…
blot0
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:47 AMi dont know what people do to kill there battery that much, i check my twitter and facebook, emails and sms all day.. as well as listen for music on the 2 hour trip to and from work each day.
My HTC Desire lasts a good 2 days before it runs out of juice.
Bern
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 1:06 PMI’m with blot0 – it takes some seriously heavy usage to flatten the Desire’s battery in a day. I’ve gotten it low over a 10-12hr period, but never flat.
Ron
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:58 PMWhich battery app is shown in the picture. I want to give that one a go.
tim
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 6:19 PMits part of the 2.1 update isnt it? what phone are you using?
Ron
Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 8:21 AMThanks Tim, found it. Only got my Desire recently, still learning…
Adin Knight
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 6:46 PMRon: That’s included as part of Android 2.0 and above. From memory via About Phone -> Battery Usage or some such.
Sean
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 8:00 PMmust be something wrong with my desire then….
after 6 hours, my battery is going flat.
most of it has been used by the android OS
Fix it HTC
Friday, May 21, 2010 at 1:29 PMMy Desire was killing the battery until i removed the HTC clock app. It’s buggy and in major need of an update. I have read on different Android forms that the app can poll for your location up to 5 times a second – so there’e your battery problem.