Database Users

Gmail UK Change caused battery issues

I wanted to share my recent experience after I saw a massive drop in the battery life of my htc magic. (32a CM4.2.15.1).
I had initially put the battery life reduction down to an install of Swype. With it being in beta i just preusmed that a bug was eating the battery.
I even resorted to turning off Swype and going back to the standard keyboard Which for those of you who are yet to use Swype it was a struggle.
This however did not fix the problem. The issue had become such a problem that I even removed all widgets from the home screens, turned off wifi, brightness right down and was still having to charge the phone twice a day!
The penny dropped when I stopped receving mail and was unable to access the my downloads section of the market (market FC). The only other change that had happened recently was google now offering gmail addresses in the UK. I had changed my settings in googlemail to go from a @googlemail to an @gmail account.
This I presume prevented syncing of mail, contacts etc.. and access to the market.
I followed the instuctions in the link below to reset the account used by the phone and my battery problems have dissappeared!
As a new user i can post the link so use thread: 454405
Hope this helps others.

G2 email application causes inordinate battery drain

I can conclusively state that the "Email" application on our G2 is responsible for consuming an inordinate amount of battery, because it does not properly sleep. When I had my phone configured to use Exchange/Activesync via the built-in sync and Email application, it would consistently be at the top of the "partial wake" list. Generally, the partial wake breakdown is a good starting point to determine which apps may be misbehaving. The following bug appears to be what we are seeing here:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9307
To validate the battery drain, I completely deleted the account associated with Exchange and installed Touchdown (3rd party Exchange sync app). The difference is substantial. I was previously at 50% battery after just a few hours, where I can now make it easily through the entire day without charging.
Short story: If you're using the built in Email app (not Gmail, that is fine), try removing the account associated with it for a day and observe the change in battery life.

rmk40 said:
I can conclusively state that the "Email" application on our G2 is responsible for consuming an inordinate amount of battery, because it does not properly sleep. When I had my phone configured to use Exchange/Activesync via the built-in sync and Email application, it would consistently be at the top of the "partial wake" list. Generally, the partial wake breakdown is a good starting point to determine which apps may be misbehaving. The following bug appears to be what we are seeing here:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9307
To validate the battery drain, I completely deleted the account associated with Exchange and installed Touchdown (3rd party Exchange sync app). The difference is substantial. I was previously at 50% battery after just a few hours, where I can now make it easily through the entire day without charging.
Short story: If you're using the built in Email app (not Gmail, that is fine), try removing the account associated with it for a day and observe the change in battery life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've also noticed this, if you search this forum for activesync you'll find where I diagnosed it along with the facebook app as being two things that drain your battery.
My fix was to instead just forward my email to a gmail and use gmail's push functionality. Works great, and gmail lets you change your "send from" address so it's completely transparent to anyone you send mail to.
Just thought I'd let you know you're not the only one.
The "email" (NOTE: NOT GMAIL) app does seem to drain battery, at least when used with Exchange ActiveSync.

Did u guys change the check interval time? Iirc when u make an account it defaults to checking every 15 minutes. Sure way to kill the battery. Just a thought
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

The Great NY said:
Did u guys change the check interval time? Iirc when u make an account it defaults to checking every 15 minutes. Sure way to kill the battery. Just a thought
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App
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Unfortunately the interval makes no difference. The app basically does not sleep, even if I set it to never poll. In fact, I set it to not poll at all for an entire day and rebooted before writing this post.

There must be something else at play on your setup. I have zero problems with partial wake using the email app with my company's exchange server.

I have Exchange sync set on push, gmail set on push, and 2 other accounts set to 1 hour polling, and I get a full day's use out of the battery. Off the charger at 6 AM, back on around 11 PM (usually with about 25% battery remaining).

jgriff63 said:
I have Exchange sync set on push, gmail set on push, and 2 other accounts set to 1 hour polling, and I get a full day's use out of the battery. Off the charger at 6 AM, back on around 11 PM (usually with about 25% battery remaining).
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Click to collapse
Same. But 9am to 2am

My battery will drain significantly faster just by having gmail sync activated...so for me, that's just as much of a kill. I don't really need that feature for the time being so I've turned it off which doubles my usage time
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

Again syncing email with the company exchange server, syncing tweetdroid every 9 minutes after 8 hour so f very light use still at 86%

Perhaps volume of email is a factor. I get 200+ emails per day and I can imagine that having an affect on perceived battery drain
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

My Quest of finding a Solution to Battery Drain and some funny stuffs

I have got my galaxy S2 for a week now. I absolutely love the phone. Just that the battery problem is killing me. I only manage to get half day of usage for the phone. Then I started reading infinite number of threads on xda on battery issue. I basically tried every possible methods:
flashing so many roms (on decided to stay on KF2 right now),
deleting all widgets(could be),
root the phone and install titanium backup to delete a lot of software which ppl
classified as the source of the drain(could be),
disable fast dormancy(dun see the difference),
disable push email and sync(could be),
using advance task killer to kill app every hr (dun work),
juice defender(dun work)...
etc etc...
SOMEHOW, my battery drain issue STOPPED yesterday!!! I still dunno what exactly is causing it to stop draining. But I DID find out a pattern, when we go to the battery plot section, if the phone shows a solid "Awake" bar, then the battery drains very fast.
So I started trying very possible way to stop the phone being "awake", the above methods I marked as cound be are the ones that I think can actually help. Using advance task killer does make a "segmented awake bar" for a few minutes, but it becomes a solid bar soon after, so no use (i found "clean memory" function comes with the phone better than ATK). Deleting widgets wont stop the phone being awake but it certainly makes my phone feeling lighter and faster. Then I rooted the phone, and start using titanium backup to delete ( i cant just freeze with free version) the possible softwares, e.g the hubs, wifi-sharing, softwaire updates. Then all in a sudden, the phone tries to sleep!!!
For me, I think social hub could be making the phone awake (at least it must be one of them), but I NEED if I need to use the email app that come with the phone for receiving emails from hotmail.
funny stuff starts....
So solve it, I imported my hotmail account to gmail using POP so that I can use gmail app to check hotmail. But then my hotmail and gmail start going crazy...!!
Reason: I did similar setting before in my hotmail account to receive gmails in to my hotmail account. What happens next is... Yes.. I basically created a "loop function" which makes the two accounts keep exchanging emails automatically to one another.. I received 1000+ emails in just a few minutes and it keeps going faster and faster.!!! > < Therefore I wont try this again!!!!
Can someone tell me a solution of getting hotmail emails in other ways besides those stupid apps (e.g android mail) in the android market which basically acts as a bookmark to get you to the hotmail page? MANY THANKS!

One of these might help:
POP your hotmail into a new yahoo mail account and install yahoo mail client.
Set up a new gmail account and POP hotmail into it, use gmail client to read main and this new account.
Figure out whats wrong with your phone that makes samsung stock mail waste juice, I use it for exchange mail and it's just a bit more hungry than what I would have wanted, I get through a heavy usage day just fine.

JuiceDefender surely helps. I'm getting 2 days with medium usage, KE7 stock firmware. Yes, as you said if you have background tasks, that will kill the battery, but just close them if you don't need them. Also disable auto-sync, and let only your email sync.

Thank you kreo, i will try yahoo mail account with ur method!

MAJOR battery drain from Mail app

Dear all
I've only had my SGSII a week or so but have been very unimpressed with the battery life I've been achieving - not even a full working day.
I've been trying to work out what's going on, but this morning things really seemed to come to a head. I'd charge overnight but within an hour and a half of disconnecting the phone almost half the charge had gone & the back of it felt very warm to touch.
Looking at the battery stats and using the Watchdog program it looks like the Samsung Email app is to blame. I also saw the phone was marked as 'awake' much of the time, presumably due to a partial wakelock from the Mail app (battery history in Gingerbread doesn't seem to actually have partial wakelock as a category but this certainly looks like it). I've got three accounts setup in it - 2x Microsoft Exchange and 1x IMAP. Refresh times were initially push (MSEx 1)/manual (MSEx 2)/15 min (IMAP). I've tried changing them all to 15 min or to manual but it doesn't seem to improve matters. In case it is of relevance, the MSEx ones are imposing device & storage encryption as part of their policies (I've no choice in this).
Relevant screenshots below - would be grateful for any thoughts as to how and improve matters!

What firmware are you on? I believe the later ones fix the email app slightly, although I haven't seen any drain as bad as yours.
Another option, if you don't mind flashing a custom ROM, would be to install VillainROM 1.4, and use the Villain Tweaks app to get the vanilla Android e-mail app. It's what I've done, and it seems to work well!

Thanks for the reply. I'm just on the stock ROM that came with the phone (XWKE7) - both update on the phone and Kies don't report any further update being available for me (UK SIM-free unbranded).
I tried rooting this morning and used TB to freeze some of the Samsung rubbish (hubs, etc.) - however none of this made any difference to battery usage.
I wasn't sure how the stock email app handled MS Exchange accounts that required encryption? The Samsung Mail app isn't that bad, I particularly liked the split pane view - it seems really badly coded though if it's causing this!
Short of a total ROM replacement any other thoughts from anyone?

delete the data from the app
settings/applikations/all/email/ delete or wipe user data (all data).
make a new Mailaccount.

spline1 said:
delete the data from the app
settings/applikations/all/email/ delete or wipe user data (all data).
make a new Mailaccount.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks - had been looking for this but couldn't find anything under 'Mail' - found it under 'Email' as you mention As soon as I deleted the data it recognised the device encryption policy had been removed and this triggered a decryption of system and external storage. I'll monitor battery usage for a few hours then reinstate the IMAP account and monitor things again before finally restoring the ActiveSync account.

OK definitely some progress so far - only IMAP account added just after charging stopped and battery usage has dramatically improved...
Now going to try adding an MS Exchange account!

OK, so far so good - MS Exchange account added back in and left on overnight...
I wonder if the mistake was when first setting up the account picking the special Samsung 'premium account' option??

OK - I'm now suspicious that it is manual sync setting that is causing the issue - re-added a second Exchange account and put it all to manual - phone almost totally drained in a couple of hours, with the sharp drop occuring just after I added that:
Have tried removing just that account and hope that will do the trick. If so, will then try adding it again but setting a sync time rather than leaving it on manual.

I've switched to touchdown for my corporate ms exchange account (push) instead of the samsung app.
Battery life gone from 7 hours to about 16 hours. I can't believe the native app is so thirsty. (KE7 stock)
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

What's interesting was that I was getting around 16+ hours too with the stock app having an MS Exchange account (on push peak times and 15 min other times) an IMAP on 15 min and a few Gmail accounts. It seemed to be adding the 2nd Exchange account on manual sync that sucked the battery life again. Am going to try readding it but paradoxically leaving it on a more frequent sync setting to see how that does.

If i remember correctly, it was observed that the mail app (non gmail) and wifi interact to cause a lovely wakelock, and that it happens with stock and samsung.
Maybe try something like k-9 mail?

Intersting - it certainly seems to behave like a wakelock. As I say though with one account on push and one in 15 min it was working fine - it was only when I tried to add a second exchange account on manual that I started to run into problems. Pretty poor coding on Samsung's part though regardless! Does anyone know the best way to raise these sort of issues with them?

Get in touch with Seven as well they produce the email app. I have mine on push with exchange and no bad battery drains, also I run manual when in the office once again no heavy drainage. I am on VR though.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

alanjrobertson said:
Does anyone know the best way to raise these sort of issues with them?
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In USA, they just introduced this
http://www.facebook.com/SamsungMobileUSA?sk=app_158125230916392
but obviously I doubt we can use this for SGS2 that is not out in the US yet.
You can however say that you are traveling, in the States right now

Thanks for the suggestions, folks - will try them. The @SamsungUK twitter account never seems to reply to any Tweets, but will see if they have a comparable FB page. Have found Seven's website so will get in touch with them too.

Average Screen On Battery time expectations for 910C?

Hi
I own a 910C international unlocked version and I am wondering what my expectations should be as far as the screen time goes with this device. I am going to use it more like tablet than a phone. I seem to be getting close to 4 and a half hours maybe. I read some reviews etc and they were talking about 12 hours video etc which is great but mine is nowhere near 12 let alone 6 hours.
I froze most of the samsung app( including knox stuff) and all the google stuff. I am using auto brighness with Pixel filter app from Pelya. I do not have any samsung or google accounts however I am syncing to my own caldav and carddav server + firefox account sync. These are the only accounts in sync.
thanks

hajkan said:
Hi
I own a 910C international unlocked version and I am wondering what my expectations should be as far as the screen time goes with this device. I am going to use it more like tablet than a phone. I seem to be getting close to 4 and a half hours maybe. I read some reviews etc and they were talking about 12 hours video etc which is great but mine is nowhere near 12 let alone 6 hours.
I froze most of the samsung app( including knox stuff) and all the google stuff. I am using auto brighness with Pixel filter app from Pelya. I do not have any samsung or google accounts however I am syncing to my own caldav and carddav server + firefox account sync. These are the only accounts in sync.
thanks
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I have it for 1year now,and batt is old but I can get 4h10mins may be more.
Wifi alwys on,facebook+messin,viber,whatapps and chrome..samsung and google apps disabled,2emails auto sync on..
So I think it okay may be if ur batt new,u should get more but...