Battery Power Saving tips for Vibrant!!!

My biggest issue with this phone is battery life.  I haven't had a full battery charge last more than a day.  I dont play games on this neither have I installed one.   Usually I run out of battery power before the day ends (9/10 pm).   I understand its a powerful device with multiple processes running at the same time  which drains the battery quickly.   


I am listing a few things/modifications I have tried to save battery power below.  I am hoping other members could post the battery saving tips they had adopted. 


So here goes:
* turned off auto brightness and set the brightness to the minimum level or zero. 
* turned off auto sync.  I have the email accounts on manual syncs now to save more battery.
* background sync is off as well.
* wall paper is set to 'kind of' dark color.  Live wall paper uses alot of battery.  However, I am not sure if dark colors save battery or not.  Please correct me on this if I am wrong.
* screen time out is set to 1 minute.
* wifi, bluetooth, and gps is set to off.  I only turn  these features on when I need them. 

You can just leave GPS on all the time. Yes, it's off in the power control widget. But the GPS is only used when apps actually need the GPS. When an application requests the GPS, you will see it as a satellite in your notification bar.

Live wallpapers will always drain battery and be a performance drain. Darker colors might help the Super AMOLED screen but it doesn't really matter.

Sync doesn't matter either. It's a very small battery drain. The only thing to really worry about with sync is if it's on all the time, which happened to me on a ROM I was using. By on all the time I mean if you see the sync icon in your notification bar 100% of the time, despite nothing actually syncing.

Also, if you have had the phone for less than a week, the battery life will even out. Weak cell signal will also drain your battery quickly.

I didn't take the time to quantify how much, but setting Gtalk to not automatically sign-on also seemed to improve battery life for me.

dark wall-papers don't help as much...but a solid black wall paper does.  I actually tested it and with it set to full brightness and a screen timeout of 30 mins, it more than doubled the battery drain by having a solid black background vs live wall papers.  Since it's an AMOLED screen, where ever you see black, that means there is no power going to that portion of the screen.  So a pitch black homescreen with just icons on it will give you better battery life than running a live wall paper or something

Does anyone know if there's a correlation between how large widgets are (say between the Beautiful Widget Home Weather and the BW Home Weather Small) and battery life? In other words, if the larger the widget (font sizes, more elaborate fonts, etc), the more drain on the battery?

Ditto for say custom icons and custom docks. What does changes them do to the battery usage? I notice battery drop when customizing to a larger and more stylized font for my BW Home Weather widget, and for changing the background to something more beautiful (though it's still fairly dark - it's of space). I also changed my batt. stat from a small numbers display ("78 percent") to a medium size letter display ("Seventy eight percent"). How do these changes affect the battery, if at all? Anyone know?

Thanks.

Sometimes after an evening of full charge, I unplug it and leave the phone on overnight, and in the morning, I'll find it went from 100% to 77%. The culprit, once again, phone idle and cell standby. This is very disappointing for not even 'using' the phone. Before I let it be, I make sure to Task Kill anything that isn't necessary (it leaves gmail, battstatt, no lock, kik messenger, android agenda widget - which I've set to only refresh once every 12 hours - and SMS messaging). Everything else is killed off. Beauty Weather widget only updates at intervals of 16 hours (the longest setting they have), and refreshes only after I unlock my device. What could be using so much "phone idle" and "Cell standby"? If I turn off 3G over night, will this make the Cell Standby eat up less juice?

Do not use a task killer. Do not use a task killer. Task killers do weird things to Android. There is no point to using a task killer on a phone like the Vibrant. Nothing is magically sipping your battery, or at least it shouldn't be. A properly-written app (apps that don't suck) shouldn't be hogging CPU away in the background and if it is doing something in the background, you should see it as an ongoing process in the status bar.

Cell standby is the cell radio. It sounds normal to have your battery down to 77% after about 8 hours.

The Vibrant, like any modern smartphone (BlackBerrys don't count), takes up battery. You're not going to get 6 days out of the Vibrant like you could with your old dumbphone. Charge it every night. I don't see the problem. If you've had the phone for less than a week, battery life sucks the first week then gets drastically better.

Godzilla, thanks for the response. I'm doing some research, and like you said, am finding that Task Killers may drain more battery than they supposedly save. I will experiment and uninstall my Task Killer apps and see how the battery fairs.

EDIT: I'm also reading that, sure, while it may not save battery life, it hurts memory usage, and in some cases, will cause lag. THe Vibrant can once in a while be laggy already (especially when typing), so if this is the case, perhaps Task Killer apps are worth it?

The lag is attributed to Samsung's way of storage on the Galaxy S from what I remember. It's not as bad as the international version but it's still there. Task killers won't do anything about that.

Sometimes after an evening of full charge, I unplug it and leave the phone on overnight, and in the morning, I'll find it went from 100% to 77%. The culprit, once again, phone idle and cell standby. This is very disappointing for not even 'using' the phone.

I notice the exact same thing on my vibrant. Having fully charged the phone at some point at night, When I look at the phone in the morning...the battery is drained from 100% to 77%.     I use advance taks killer and regularly kill all apps running if im not using the phone.  Should I uninstall the advance task killer and not use it if it hurts the phone memory?

You do not need a task killer. You do not need a task killer. You do not need a task killer.

Read that. To sum it up, Android manages applications on its own. Yes, you might see "30 MB free" but you don't have to care. Android will automatically kill apps that haven't been loaded in a while to make way for new ones. Android is not like your old Windows Mobile phone or BlackBerry, where you had to carefully watch your memory and kill every app after usage. It does the killing for you if it needs to make room for a new app. The Vibrant has more than enough RAM. Also what can happen is that task killers screw around with your alarms. Set it to auto-kill, set an alarm in the morning and it doesn't go off.

Task killers also will not work in 2.2. So when the Vibrant gets its 2.2 update, and you wonder why ATK doesn't work, that's because Google specifically broke it. Here's the method that task killers in 2.1 and below used.

This method is deprecated.
This is now just a wrapper for killBackgroundProcesses(String); the previous behavior here is no longer available to applications because it allows them to break other applications by removing their alarms, stopping their services, etc.

If you need to "kill" an application because it's being malevolent, go to Manage Applications. Even then you will not have to do very often at all if the application is written decently.

Things that will actually help your battery life: decrease screen backlight time, turn off Wi-Fi when unneeded, turn off Bluetooth when unneeded. If you live in an area with a poor signal, that will burn through your battery no matter what you do because the radio has to work a lot harder to get that signal versus a strong one. If you have had your phone for less than a week, the battery life will suck then and then drastically pick up. This also isn't like your Razr which could get a week on a charge. You have to charge it every night.

ya'll should check out Auto Memory Manager.. its a threshold app that will threshold certain categories like background, unused, etc.. i use the preset "Aggressive" so it can really close those unneeded apps in the background.. i always stay around 70-100MB.. u guys should test it out, and come back with your results.. i know i like it.

I just downloaded it, so I will give it a try.  I took off my task killer to find out if I would see a difference..

J Hop, how is Auto Memory Manager on the batteries? Do you see it effecting the batteries a lot?

I've been running without a task killer, and let me tell you, my Vibrant runs much much faster and battery life has also improved.

I've deleted my task killers/managers as well, and am using Auto Memory Manager. I have noticed a bit of a speed boost - everything seems to run smoother, including typing. So far, it's a good app. Not sure what it does to the battery life yet. Will try to test and find out.

I've deleted my task killers/managers as well, and am using Auto Memory Manager. I have noticed a bit of a speed boost - everything seems to run smoother, including typing. So far, it's a good app. Not sure what it does to the battery life yet. Will try to test and find out.

nice! are u using the "Aggressive" pre-set? and have u noticed more free RAM? i know i have after hours of use.. i don't know about have battery life is.. but my battery life sucks anyways since im using Android on my TP2 via SD card (~5 hrs of moderate use [games/apps use, some web browsing]).

after deleting my task killer, and installing the auto memory manager...my phone drained over half the battery in just 6 hours.  HORRIBLE.  I took it off and put my task killer back on, and just turned off auto sync.  My batter is still at more than half...so there is no real proof that task killers hurt your battery...I've used them on every android phone.  No issues ever, so I will continue to do so.  But just turning off sync in the backgrounds, saved the battery by far the most.  all the talk about having a dark wallpaper...I don't think it matters.  I have a default wallpaper, and my battery is fine.  I'm getting about a day and half on one charge.  That's with background sync off; no live wallpaper; and auto brightness off.  That works fine on my Vibrant.

There is nothing wrong with using a task killer...it does help, and does nothing to the battery from all the test I have done. I just want to add, I'm a heavy text messenger; heavy internet; and light use of YouTube.

Task killers don't matter either. Android handles everything for you and kills unused apps if it needs memory. This doesn't happen often at all on high-memory phones such as the Vibrant. Note how you will never run into a low RAM situation with Android like you would on Windows Mobile or webOS. Anyways, your task killer will be broken in Android 2.2 when the Galaxy S gets that update.

after deleting my task killer, and installing the auto memory manager...my phone drained over half the battery in just 6 hours.  HORRIBLE.  I took it off and put my task killer back on, and just turned off auto sync.  My batter is still at more than half...so there is no real proof that task killers hurt your battery...I've used them on every android phone.  No issues ever, so I will continue to do so.  But just turning off sync in the backgrounds, saved the battery by far the most.  all the talk about having a dark wallpaper...I don't think it matters.  I have a default wallpaper, and my battery is fine.  I'm getting about a day and half on one charge.  That's with background sync off; no live wallpaper; and auto brightness off.  That works fine on my Vibrant.

There is nothing wrong with using a task killer...it does help, and does nothing to the battery from all the test I have done. I just want to add, I'm a heavy text messenger; heavy internet; and light use of YouTube.

But won't you miss alot of e-mails (gmail) if you turn off sync?