[Desire General] bemymonkey:
I was surprised too, but 10-12mA difference is what my measurements led to as well. Insane, huh?

What are you trying to say? If the sytem weren't able to weren't able to "monitor and gather electrical data", where would it get the system? I don't think there was ever any doubt that the values in current_now are real - although it would be interesting to know how they are averaged, and how accurate the measurements are ;)

You're forgetting things like the display and the radios, which are included in the measurement in current_now as well. Since current_now is in .../battery/, I'm assuming the measurement is taken right at/before the battery, meaning you won't really be able to single out measurements for the SoC or other, even more discrete, components.

One should also add that the measurements are already averaged, apparently over the space of roughly one minute.

And 4-7 battery hours are actually quite the norm for heavy use of the Desire, which fits with the testing results..

Not quite - the figures you've put together there are, unfortunately, wrong. The measurements in battery usage info are based on the amount of power used during the last discharge, meaning that your compass used only 11% of the xx% your battery had drained at the point of measurement.

Say your battery was at 40% at the point of measurement and had started at 100% (without being connected to a charger in between, which would have caused the battery usage info to reset!) => 11% of 60% of 1400mAh = 92.4mAh used total by the Compass app. If you want to know the current that the Compass app draws on average (!!), you can divide the 92.4mAh by the time the Compass was running, in hours.

In my example, this would be 92.4mAh/0.04638888 hours=1991.856mA

This figure is, obviously, pretty high, but that's because I picked 40% battery as an arbitrary starting point. If your battery had drained to only 90% from 100%, you'd get a sixth of that current ;)

As you can see, the remaining battery is very important when trying to figure this stuff out, because the battery usage info is, as mentioned before, reset every discharge cycle.

Also, it's inherently inaccurate, precisely because the "remaining battery percentage" can't be measured all too accurately. IIRC Android (as most other systems do, I suppose) measures the remaining battery percentage based on the battery voltage. However, if you draw a high current, the voltage will dip disproportionately, leaving you with a battery percentage that's lower than the battery actually has remaining. When the voltage returns to normal after the current draw is lessened/stopped, the percentage meter obviously doesn't change back again - that would confuse a lot of people ("Hey, my phone is magically recharging itself!") :p

Uh... yah. But you can't "use 110-120mA total after 10 hours with backlight on". Current draw in Amperes is an instantaneous, momentary value - if you're drawing 120mA, you're drawing 120mC/s, which is, as you can tell by the units, a time-sensitive value, and doesn't tell you anything about the actual power used.

If you draw a constant 120mA for 10 hours (i.e. backlight on, display dimmed, CPU idle), you'll draw 1200mAh, which is a unit of power drawn at a certain voltage.

I'm in complete agreement here - the figures are plausible, and work well in conjunction with the battery life I've been getting.

LOL, you really need to get sober ;) :D. You can't "lose" 11mA, because as I explained above, mA are a unit of current... which is at one point in time. You can draw 11mA for a whole hour (which would be 11mAh=11mCh/s=3600*11mC~=40C), of course.

If we continue with 11mA backlight draw, that would mean 10 hours of having the backlight on would drain 110mAh out of the battery - which really is 7.85% of the entire battery capacity! :eek:

I'm definitely going to keep turning mine off for longer sessions :p