yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Desire General] andycted:
But that's actually good battery life. Futurama on wireless flash ? That alone should drain quite a bit !

The other thing that could change is 3G vs 2G and the quality of it.
[Desire General] doinbox:
Battery life is just the same as 2.1 if u ask me. Don't see any improvement at all.
[Desire General] th3:
Just a note: on this OD ROM, screen off is activating the SoC deep power down and not just the display turning off. I can't find any option to change it to test just what the display on/off delta is.

Very minimal usage so far and battery seems to be draining quite fast. 18% lost in 3.5 hours. I'm thinking by 10 hours it'll be dead once I up the usage.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] andycted:
Did you wipe battery stats ?
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
A while ago... but what's the proper procedure? Discharge, wipe, recharge? Wipe, discharge, recharge? Wipe, charge, discharge, recharge? :p

I'm used to Thinkpad battery gauge recalibration - click a button and 10-20 hours later it's done (does a full charge-discharge-charge cycle).
[Desire General] andycted:
I was actually suggesting th3 because it's recommended when you change rom, but that may be the usual inexplicable voodoo.

They say charge to 100%, recovery, wipe battery stats, discharge to shut off, recharge and that should be the good run

Edit: just found out, the led at full brightness drains about the same as the screen at full brightness when completely white (390)
[Desire General] th3:
It was full wipe (incl. Batt stats) > flash ROM > full discharge > full charge, and testing after that.

Many of the widgets I had on HTC 2.2 either don't work or are not available so I've set the homescreens up as close as possible but not exact.

The idle power on this ROM looks amazing. HTC 2.2 doesn't put the WiFi to sleep on standby. This ROM does. Note the "looks" rather than "is". I need to finish a few lengthier testing before I can be certain. I fell asleep texting and woke up about 40m back. It's still at 75% after some 9h47m. Don't be alarmed; the display has only been on for 2h12m yet.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] th3:
How are you manipulating the LED light setting?

Bemymonkey mentioned earlier that this ROM allows you to shut off the button backlight... where?

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] andycted:
Teslacoil led application or another similar on the market.

I think your average load on the device with screen on is way lower than miner, i.e. you are doing lighter activities.

Are you on 3G ? If not, can you repeat my tests to see how much it changes ?
[Desire General] th3:
Thanks.

I've been noting all of your results keenly, worry not. I wanted to try to replicate some of your tests, but it'll take time for reliable data. I always monitor my CPU and network usage through the notification to make sure the current values stated in idle are actually idle and so can be cross-compared. Since the Core usage fluctuates heavily per second which directly corresponds to the device power draw.

- I rarely use 3G simply because where I'm at, I get 0-2 bar reception at most and mobile data is too slow. Almost broken and inconsistent. I download/upload 1-4GB through the phone pretty much daily and 3G can't cope with that (nor my plan). It's not part of my usage pattern. When I'm at work - which is two blocks away from where I'm staying - working out, or at home, 99% of the time WiFi is left on, 3G disabled. The net at home is work provided; same setup, same pass, so I tend to have WiFi on for most of my usage. SO when my cell is on (not data), it is 2G only. But I'll be testing 3G too just for a comparison and extra data.

- The current widget values tend to fluctuate much almost as if they are time-averaged as bemymonkey assumed. I say that because taking samples after 60s but loading the Core for only the first 5s of that period still returns high 250-300 mA values where everything else is idle so the expected value should be 120-130 mA. And we know it isn't just the first 5s of power draw being shown to us because when the Core is loaded 80-95%, the device current draw is far higher. In many cases, you can get consistent data though. I've took 5 readings for each state. 30s, 60s, 90s readings made no difference in the outcome. Most of your current widget values are not surprisingly similar to mine. There's only one that seems very different but I need to replicate that a few times more for better reliability.

- In terms of daily battery life; I don't stream music, which is a major difference in my usage and yours. Streaming videos, yes, if online Flash and YouTube counts, but not hours (unless mentioned). Secondly, I tend to have eBuddy connected and polling at least 25% of the awake time and I SMS using Handcent fair heavy, 50-150 incoming, 70-150 outgoing per day.

- Network location and automatic time are known power hogs. They just keep running returning errors in logcat. They keep the device from sleeping and I have them disabled.

- The "Always on" mobile data option doesn't exist on this ROM in my installation. There's just data on or off.

EDIT: I see those nifty options like disable button backlight are in the Settings > OpenDesire section which just FCs for me each time. Alas!
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
Sounds like a wipe problem. AFAIR wiping _after_ flashing the ROM helps in this case...

Or did you restore a backup of system settings from a different, like with Titanium Backup? That can cause stuff like this...

And by the way: You can keep WiFi on permanently (in standby) by setting the WiFi sleep policy to "Never" in the advanced WiFi menu...

Can't wait to hear the full results of your testing ;)
[Desire General] th3:
Restored only most apps+data, contacts and messages using MyBackupPro. All the widgets had to be setup again since their data wasn't transferred.

Won't be re-wiping and setting up everything again. Don't have that much free time. I want to get back to my daily setup ROM ASAP for everyday usage needs. There's too much about this ROM missing and things I can't stand.

Yep, WiFi can be set to always enabled but that option is counterproductive to a better battery life so it would never be always enabled in my usage.

Just sync'd 37 RSS feeds in NewsRoom through WiFi and reading them. 5h20m with display on already. 30% left.
[Desire General] andycted:
Good information, we might publish it, hehe.

Regarding 2G, I would really like to know how much it saves battery compared to 3G, since I'm on a 3G network only.

When at home, my wifi is sometimes less reliable and slow than my 3G network (yeah, I know, buy another router). So I keep it on 50% of the time.

Last thing is about the moment/average the current draw is reported. I really have the impression that it's not a big average, almost momentary, since with similar keyboard typing I got very different results by slowing down a bit the moment the reading is supposed to appear, to the point that it gave me the idle value once when I paused hapless because I was out of longish english words.

I will also try a keyboard test in italian to see if the more complex language has a hit on battery.
[Desire General] andycted:
Quick update:

- added Bezier live wallpaper to the live wallpaper tests a bit before. Interested in this since it's an all-black wallpaper with two tiny lines moving. Guess what ? It's the most battery intensive at 305mAh ! That alone explains a lot of "my battery is crap", since sometimes it's not obvious what drains it.

- A quick test with cyanogenmod nightly video recording at 720p at the cloudy sunset, medium brightness, revealed about 386mAh
[Desire General] th3:
I use an app for power testing and profiling since late April that I'm still surprised nobody is mentioning here... I think people are going to love it.

The problems we have are limitations in data. I have used the words power/energy loosely in this thread because that's all we had as indications of power, but from the current widget we don't yet know the energy AKA power usage of anything; just the charge/discharge. We also only have the cumulative current but the critical info we're missing is individual voltages. Without this metric, telling the difference in power between 2G/3G is almost impossible.

Oh, about the 2G/3G setting: It's well known in engineering since the beginning PR that 3G consumes more power. It remains true with the current research too. This is why GSM talktime is universally given as much longer than 3G. If you want to read engineering research studies and papers, I can link you to them which provide much more details. I think the last paper I read ran tests on the Nexus One. Basically, 3G network has higher power (as in Watts) idling, sending SMS, using data, voice calls (etc) but it's far quicker than 2G. Even lengthy SMS go through faster than on 2G.

And BTW, the biggest power consumers when playing typical MP3 on smartphones are the amplifier and codec.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] andycted:
Thanks, you probably know a lot more than me, but I was a bit curious about where is the biggest difference: in idle (doesn't seem to me), in talking time (seems reported so), in data (that is probably true as well).

I remember actually reading that 3G consumed less on idle, but more on talking, or actually... the opposite ! can't remember !!

I have no choice because I'm on 3G only network, but I'm interested in knowing if my battery life is influenced compared to other people on 2G.
[Desire General] th3:
Meanwhile, Google "Power Tutor" and enjoy ;)

3G data probably has lower idle than WiFi you know. Because the power for 3G data only ramps on-demand whilst WiFi on adds a little even at idle.

I consider everyone more knowledgeable than me BTW. I like it this way.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] andycted:
I was going to try to play with the new voice search (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGbYVvU0Z5s&feature=player_embedded, I'm still speachless by that stuff) but I will just try this in the meantime hehe

Since you can't fool me in saying that you are less knowledgeable, can you give me a quick run-down on how we would compare the data in mAh with that in mW ?
[Desire General] th3:
In your context, the stock battery is rated at;

1.40Ah × 3.7v = 5.18Wh

That means, this battery is rated to supply 5.18W for one hour, or any Power × time combination which leads to the final 5.18Wh.

Current × Voltage = Power, so we can re-arrange as;

Power (mW) / Current (instantaneous mA) = Voltage (instantaneous V at battery terminal)

mAh is electric charge for an hour whilst mW is power.

Here's some papers that run pretty in-depth power measurements on smartphones in various usages. Some also compare 2G to 3G:

http://www.option.com/Upload/main/White papers/Option White Paper - Power Considerations.pdf

http://www.usenix.org/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/Carroll.pdf

http://kom.aau.dk/~ff/documents/1569188609.pdf

http://www.pasieronen.com/publications/haverinen_siren_eronen_vtc2007.pdf

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ph315/publications/held03k-vallinarodriguez.pdf

If you want more technical info on 3G: http://www.nmscommunications.com/file/3G_Tutorial.pdf
[Desire General] andycted:
Thanks a lot, good to hear it's basically directly proportional so that the calculation is easy

Sent from my bike while riding drunk to home
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
I just found something interesting about our Desire's AMOLED display:

Guess that negates all real-world (web browsing etc) power consumption myths about AMOLED ("It uses practically no power compared to LCD! My hairdresser also told me that if I eat uranium, I'll be able to see in the dark!"). Looks like a good reason to keep the screen as black as possible :p... or upgrade to sLCD.
[Desire General] th3:
Yep: http://data.4dsystems.com.au/downloads/micro-OLED/Docs/4D_AMOLED_Presentation.pdf

As I mentioned in the thread where people were complaining of LCD vs OLED displays. Anything with moving images, videos/pics/apps that aren't predominately blue or white is a major win for OLED in power.

You can see a variety of research papers where this is covered in-depth for years:

http://research.nokia.com/files/bergquist_johan_seminar_kyunghee_070222.pdf

http://smdl.snu.ac.kr/Lecture/display1/OLED-CHLee1.pdf

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2003/HPL-2003-91.pdf

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~mobile/publications/dong09dac.pdf

That's why app devs are encouraged to develop in as much black/dark as possible in area's not needed.
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
Thanks for all the links!
[Desire General] th3:
Just to expand; this tool is developed by some Ph.D students in conjunction with Google and based on actual hardware specs and measurements for a few phones including the Nexus One, which is basically the same as what we have. The display part doesn't work as accurately on the OD 3.1.0 ROM though.
[Desire General] andycted:
That's not entirely surprising after those tests with an all white screen at full brightness, compared to my old lcd phone. However for anything real use and/or mid brightness there is some advantage.

This without taking into account that contrast on the Amoled blows away slcd and I actually can read it better in bright sunlight, compared to old lcd.

Sent from my HTC Desire while having breakfast
[Desire General] th3:
Test: Part 1 (verbose read warning)

I've finished my complete testing yesterday but we're talking 450 odd screenshots and the Android Gallery can't load them. It pegs the CPU to 100% forever until it FCs and when it doesn't, you can't make out a single thing on the image. So for pic management, I have to transfer to some other device (laptop/AIO) which usually never happens until very late in the night when I have next to no time. At least I'm on the PC for once now but I really didn't want to get technical and long-winded, and still don't. I've done it before and you just lose 99.9% of the readers :p

Some important things I want to re-iterate:

As is obvious but all the research papers also highlight, power and hence battery-life can not be similar across users unless you keep the major consumers fixed. Usage scenarios differ too vastly. In fact, it is spelt out no more clearly than in the display power draw image comparison bemymonkey linked. One user with the exact same ROM/settings/usage, browsing a web page, except a white-ish image being displayed due to say changing a forum theme compared to another who keeps a black-ish theme equals 3-8x power draw difference for the display alone with OLED tech ;)

If you read just one of the papers I linked, you'd find much better details i.e. in [1] discussing Fig. 14 and later under 5.1:

So yes, where one can have 10% display power usage, another can easily have 5x as much.

The Nexus One OLED display power has also been measured under a few cases. Refer to Table 10:

Claiming without specifics that the display is the biggest power consumer is not really correct. It can be, but only in some limited cases which need to be defined. The Snapdragon SoC has been benched and measured to increase device power upto 650-900mW under load, even with purely memory intensive loads. Refer to Fig. 15:

As for 2G/3G power difference; it is well established. I've provided some papers but if you don't like reading science papers, don't understand them or aren't too technical, this paper is an easy summary where tests were conducted on a Nokia N95 [2] i.e. Fig. 9

Additional notes:

* 3G (good, stable connection) and GPS in idle add negligible to no power; confirmed by PowerTutor readings, CurrentWidget readings and the developer of PowerTutor.

* 2G to 3G and 3G to 2G handoff is known to cause large fluctuations in power i.e. TABLE III in [2]:
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
th3, Thank you for the great data! I'm surprised that you got such good battery life from OpenDesire - that's going to inspire me to tweak a little more (2G/3G settings etc.)... One question though: You have data turned off completely, but many syncing widgets - do you usually only use data via WiFi unless you actively need to look something up?

The previous post is also very interesing. Especially the parts about GPS idle and 2G/3G handoff are things I didn't know at all... :)
[Desire General] th3:
Yes, exactly. I switch data on only when required but mostly WiFi.

In a given 8 hours working day, if I leave the cell on always, I have 0 reception for 3.25-4 hours of it with the cell standby listed as 45-55% of the battery usage. I see my phone switching between 2G/3G every other second and having no reception for far too long which is known to increase power substantially as well as add 2-3s delay to each network fix. This is what made me optimise per my usage.

I've done a continuous use, max brightness, always screen/WiFi/GPS/3G cell/auto-rotate comparison too. Will post as soon as I can manage the pics basically.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
Very impressive. You've inspired me to experiment with 2G a little more... got Locale set up to switch to 2G Only whenever in a location with known WiFi now.

Signal strength has already jumped up by about 20 dB... should help a lot :)
[Desire General] th3:
Test: Part 3

Max settings, using OD 3.1.0 with the same usage pattern as above (mainly 3.5h of browser usage) but with these differences:-

GPS on

WiFi on

Cell on (WCDMA preferred)

Display 100% brightness

Auto sync enabled

Auto-rotate on

Whenever the WiFi was off, data was automatically being used

OD 3.1.0: http://img17.imageshack.us/i/screenshot134s.png/

Total unplugged runtime: 7h55m3s

Display on runtime: 4h32m35s

Display total battery usage: 16%

Cell standby: 7h55m3s

WiFi on: 6h5m

Which IMHO is amazing. There's 17mins of GPS with Compass, Maps, HereIAm2 and Earth usage in there and 19mins of HD YouTube over HSPDA and WiFi.

The HTC 2.2 runtime is basically the same. If I leave the screen always on and do not stop using the phone any second, I get 5h battery-life minimum.
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
Sounds about right to me :)
[Desire General] andycted:
Very nice in-depth tests ! Puts mine to shame hehe. Out of curiosity you said before that your mAh tests were similar to mine, except for one. which one ?

I think the results are consistent with my day to day experience, however sometimes I get less battery life when I'm heavily using 3G, which is actually quite often. As already mentioned I'm on a 3G network only.

By the way, playing robo-defence on low brightness = 389 mAh

I've also found a nice live wallpaper that drains still quite a bit, but less than others. It's the 'particle something' live wallpaper in the market, just tune the particles to minimum.
[Desire General] kmetek:
so which ROM has best battery ?
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
I think we can safely conclude that, unless they have horrible bugs that drain battery, they're all the same, and optimizing battery life comes down to a bunch of settings that the user needs to set himself, regardless of the ROM.
[Desire General] andycted:
As I suspected, none !

It comes down to usage pattern and settings. Of course if you have cyanogen autobrightness settings you can tune that to your liking potentially saving battery, and so on for other things.

This probably is due to the fact that big battery drain is caused mainly by the display and the network, which are two things that no matter which rom you use, will stay the same. CPU cycles do eat some battery, but I suspect it will be hard to tune those better than they are. The same goes for other pieces of hardware (gps is huge, for example) and there is no way (I think) that a rom can optimize so much those, compared to HTC, that you will notice any change without loss of functionality.
[Desire General] bemymonkey:
Hi Andycted and th3,

If the two of you find the time, I'd love some input on/in this thread: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=753382

I've been trying to figure out why Sense ROMs (and the latest OpenDesire) show such completely different battery usage statistics for the AMOLED display, as th3 made me aware of the fact that his Diplay Battery Usage was practically never over 20% a few pages ago here in this thread, while mine was constantly over 60%.

It's more or less related to this topic, but I felt it was important not to clutter up this thread. However, I feel the two of you would be a great help in either supporting my argumentation, or explaining to me how it's flawed. So far I feel my findings are very important, as they, if correct, would mean that the power usage statistics in Android are relatively arbitrarily set by the phone manufacturers, meaning that they could be tweaking the statistics to make it seem like certain components on their phones are more efficient than on others.
[Desire General] th3:
It's a cumulative effort - any of our data and input missing would render the tests and data incomplete. In fact, you initiated this ;)

I'll be posting that Current widget comparison data soon. At first, there was only one value 200-300mA different to yours so I suspected maybe my values are wrong and being influenced by extraneous variables. Upon further testing I found approx the same power as you except there are real, consistent, large fluctuations in power (spikes). This mainly involved cell and cell data. It seems there are some cases where the power fluctuations seen by the Current widget - which we might write off as momentary errors - are real fluctuations caused by background tasks initiated by the hardware that we can't see; like network signal, change, search and registration (etc). So I'm trying to repeat some tests to make sure I can get CPU usage monitored at those spike intervals to better eliminate the power change to just the hardware setting we're testing (say, 3G).

BTW, WiFi on this phone idled at 39mW consistent. Unlike cell power, it didn't change consumption on signal strength (which is also what is found in the papers linked earlier).

The audio devices on this phone use about 300-450mW under load depending on the volume (ignoring the CPU usage they cause).

PowerTutor has the data for each hardware correct except it isn't recognizing the device being used yet to poll the display. An update very soon to resolve this is coming according to the devs.

Your data for games/wallpapers is solid enough with my quick tests to not need additional repeats.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -
[Desire General] kmetek:
I just setup in SETCPU a profile for SCREEN OFF:

lowest speed, and increased priority 50 to 60%....

And the battery drain dropped a little.....draing around 2-3% per hour......
[Desire General] andycted:
While reading this I skipped the part about 100% brightness. Taking that into account, i don't think the difference is so amazing, especially if you use it with bright stuff. But of course 3G video streaming + gps is something to take into account.

In my experience however, I sometimes manage to go for a run with my bike for about 3/4 of an hour, listening to mp3s, with a GPS sport tracking program in the background, and end up draining about 20-25%, which is way less than what I drain with GPS navigation. Probably due to more aggressive gps, screen on and cpu processing.

By the way I tried HereIAm2, but it crashed badly. My bad luck ? I went back to glympse.
[Desire General] kmetek:
updates

thanks to setcpu profile i lost over night in 8hours only 4-5% battery :PPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
[Desire General] andycted:
That's what I've always lost at night, without setcpu
[Desire General] th3:
Yep. I've been using it across a few ROMs for a while (months) without any glitch.

I've just noticed after some polling over the past 8 hours that on OD 3.1.0 I've never seen it fall below 309MHz, and I have the frequencies logged. Same setup on HTC 2.2 falls to 245MHz very regularly.

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- Sent via my HTC Desire -