[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] dpawl31:
Horrendous battery, terrible signal, horrible speeds

Bare with me, this is kind of a winded post. Anyone that has time to read/help it would be MUCH appreciated.

So I absolutely loved the phone and rooted it within a month of buying it, around October 2011.

I went to a Strong Steve rom, and ran great. Battery life awesome, decent signal in 3G and was getting 0.5~1.2mbps 3G.

The 4G is not close enough to home but when I used it, it was phenomenal. Wifi fast.

Fast forward to a few weeks after ICS release. My battery had started dropping too fast.

To the point of having to top off mid-afternoon to make it through the night. This is with MODERATE usage mostly.

So i ordered a new one. Two actually.

Factory battery from EBAY, direct from Japan. Bought a cheap charger too.

It got to the point where I had to swap in the other battery around 5 and start charging the other one.

Figured it had to be due to ROM, decided to allow the ICS update OTA.

Still terrible. Signal got BAD. Spots that used to be marginal went to roaming on 1x data.

Did a full factory reset which put me in a stock ICS setup.

Same problems.

So I finally got around to flashing a custom rom, went with Blu Kuban since it seemed pretty solid.

Love it, by the way. Except the Apex launcher keeps crashing / locking the lock screen randomly.

Switching back to my ADW EX when I get time to go through it.

Anyway, I did that. I wiped battery stats, installed an app to do that without going to recovery.

Tried through recovery. Tried charging full with phone off, wipe stats, reboot.

Then I find online someone saying battery stats bin only deals with the programs using battery, nothing to do with % indicator... O_O

I am so sick of it. The batteries do not spin on a table (no bubble/bad cell)

They go from 0% charge, to 100% charge on the fast charge USB (stock charger) in 2 hours.

I lose 5-10% with no usage in half an hour on the way to work.

So basically start my day at around 89%. I work for 4 hours, then get back to my phone. It's now down to 60%. Without touching it!

I can open facebook at, let's say, 55%. Scroll through for about 5 minutes. Back out of FB, I am at 49%.

6% drop, in 5 minutes? C'mon!

Last night, I tried something. I charged to 100% with phone off.

Wiped stats. Booted up, 95%. Shut down, charged to 100%.

Wiped stats. Booted up, 85%. Shut down. Charged to 100%.

Wiped stats, booted up, 75%. Shut down. Charged to 100%.

Wiped stats, booted up, 97%. Topped off with phone ON.

It seems to be a BIT better today. It's hitting sleep mode.

Better battery stats shows minimal partial wake locks, 2minutes from Audio guru and that's been there since boot.

The rest are all in the seconds. 3, 4, 5 seconds.

As of RIGHT NOW:

Been unplugged since 97% charge. since 4:43pm (state time in CPU spy: 3:20:24)

Minimal usage, 2 youtube videos at 1 minute each, and a facebook video for about 2 minutes.

Facebook checked about 3 times, less than a minute each.

Turned screen on and checked battery stats and cpu spy maybe 5 times.

Out of 3hrs 20 minuts, 2hr 45 were deep sleep. 82%

3% @ 500mhz, 4% @ 800mhz, 3% @ 1200mhz.

Audioout_1 for 7m44s in partial wakelocks.

As much as it seems it's gotten better, 8% per hour seems pretty high.

But it's not just that. When I start using it, it drops FAST.

On a side note - what is the best reception modem out there? Or the best ones to test?

My reception has dropped quite a bit. Before I did the battery cycling thing I did last night, I also swapped the modem.

Blu Kuban has quite a few to choose from built into rom updater. I wonder if the signal change may have helped?

I read somewhere about this phone having massive battery drain due to little/no signal. So a better modem would help.

Suggestions?

---------- Post added at 08:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:10 PM ----------

New update to my post above... didn't realize I had options to allow BBS su priveledges.

Just set them, and it crashed SU after approving.

Rebooted phone, power dropped from mid 60% to low 30%

WTF is wrong with this!?