[Nexus S General] suomaf:
TLDR: Comparing KD1 vs KB3 radio and see if that is the real cause of my battery drain

So a few days back, I got myself onto 2.3.4 and found something weird going on with the battery. Overnight it seem to lose significant amount of battery. I looked through this thread. Some people seems to have no problems with the new radio whereas others like robstunner seem to have better results using the radio kb3.

I found the radio on one of the other threads and flashed mine also back to kb3. It seems that the battery consumption was "fixed". I am in Brunei Darussalam and am using a telco called DST Communications, I do not know whether that matters, but I do know that radio consuming battery depends on so many factors, some of which that I can think of is distance to cell tower, whether you are on 3G, the number of things that needs to be updated, etc.

The question that was nagging at the back of my mind was "Is the radio KD1 the real reason I am seeing difference in battery consumption." As an experiment last night, I turned the phone uncharged to airplane mode and after 6 hours of sleep woke up to see that battery percentage had not drop a single point. ** weird **

So today after finding that someone had put up the KD1 radio in a flashable zipfile, http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=13315514&postcount=122 I dropped that into the sdcard, flashed it, wiped cache (dont know why, but thought it would be a good thing to do), deleted the /data/system/battery.bin and decided to test it on standby for 2 hours. I dropped 1% from 11:09 to 13:09. This seems to tell me that I drop a 0.5% battery point every hour, which means that overnight if I get to sleep 8 hours, I should only lose 4% battery point, which to me is more than acceptable. This is completely different from when I first flashed it, where I had about 30% battery left and in the morning the phone got switched off completely.

Anyways I am now going to flash KB3 and test it for 2 hours using exactly the same method and see if there is any difference. There is not going to be any change in the widgets running or position where the phone is resting. I apologise for this long reply. You dont have to read it if you find it boring. I thought that I should share the results of my experiment seeing as this is a "battery drain" thread.

*** update 1

So I spent 2 hours having my screen turned off on KB3 radio

13:08 81%

14:08 78%

15:08 77% This means that 2 hours I dropped 4% .. not what I thought would happen. Each hour is 2% on average on the KB3. So again assuming if I sleep 8 hours I am now looking at 16% battery points which is closer to what I noticed on the KD1 when I flashed it?

Going to reflash the KD1 and test it again keeping all the widgets and settings the same... and see whats happening

*** update 2

Spent another 2 hours same conditions as before screen turned off on KD1 radio

15:20 72%

16:20 72%

17:20 71% This is the same as the first experiment. This means on average I will lose 0.5% battery each hour and about 4% per night.

All conditions are exactly the same

Location is the same, all were flashed with the radio, then cache wiped, switched on the phone, adb shell and rm the /data/system/batterystats.bin and screen turned off for 2 hours, only checking at the 1 hour mark.

Hell if I know what is happening here, but I think I am going to stay with KD1 tonight and see what is what.

Pictures were tagged with gimp

Would appreciate if anyone with better skills can figure out what is happening with each radio.