[Android] thread. Droid up in here, yo.

I have a galaxy S 3 and an iphone 4 work phone, and my battery experiences are pretty much the same as yours.

Thanks to both for your responses. While I'd prefer super-great and awesome battery life it's fine as is and I imagine the much larger display demands a fair bit more juice than the iPhone 4's does. And I'm okay with that.

well, iphone 4 screen = 960x640 @ 3.5"
galaxy s3 screen = 1280x720 @ 4.8"

so that's definitely part of it

But I find the iphone standby time is much better when not in use, too.

Really, it's the one area I find the iphone superior to any android I've used.

I recently upgraded to a Galaxy Note 2, and it's my first Android phone with a battery that makes it through the day no matter how much I use it.

I've been having problems with links from the twitter app on my Nexus 7 for a while now. I think its been since the 4.2 update.

Every time I open a link from twitter, it sends the t.co link to chrome, but then chrome just sits there with the t.co link in the address bar and a white page, and does nothing. Refreshing does nothing. If I go back to twitter and open the link again, sometimes it will work, and properly redirect to the actual address. Sometimes it won't.

I've been googling, but haven't been able to find any other mention of someone having this problem.

Okay, I am less okay with the battery life now.

Tell me if this is normal:

Last night the USB cable apparently did not fully connect and my phone was only at 50% charge when I left for work at 8 a.m. I listened to music on the way in (about 40 minutes) and made two phone calls that totaled 30 seconds combined. When I got home at 6 p.m. the battery was down to 2%. That doesn't seem right. Is that right? Tell me it's not right.

Note: I had GPS off, wifi off, notifications off, all apps closed and power-saving mode on.

Do you mean that you literally did not use the phone except for that usage? You didn't check your email or twitter or anything? If so, then I really have no idea what's normal; but if you did use it regularly plus the music, then yeah, 50% usage in a day still seems pretty typical.

To put it another way:

8 a.m. 50% battery charge.
- listen to music for 40 minutes
- make one call phone ~15 seconds long
- make second phone call ~15 seconds long
6 p.m. 2% battery charge.

No apps, no Tweeting, no checking Facebook, no surfing or anything else, just the three bullet items listed above. The phone was otherwise off during the day.

Yeah, that seems like a lot of battery drain for no real usage (assuming that music was stored locally and not like 3G-streamed Pandora or something), but I honestly have no frame of reference for how much an unused phone drains in a day, due to pretty much always using mine.

It's too late for this time, but if you go into the Control Panel and choose Battery, you can see what's draining the battery. Almost always on my phone the big drainer is the display. But if you had the display off that whole time, then that shouldn't be there -- it'd be interesting, and possibly useful, to take a look at that and see if there's anything weird listed.

(For comparison: My phone was at 100% when I took it off the charger this morning, and I haven't charged it all day; after 15 hours it's at 27%. The screen is responsible for 30% of the battery usage; Google+ is responsible for 30% (which seems really, really high and unusual -- I wonder if that's related to the problems it was having yesterday?); Wifi is 10%, cell standby 8%, "phone idle" at 7%, Android 6%, Maps 5%, and then a couple of minor apps fill up the last 5%.)

Thinking about it some more and chatting with others (like MrPants, who has some old-timey smartphone) it may be related to the phone polling frequently. There are some bad coverage spots for my provider (apparently) and where I work is one of them. It may be that the phone is draining itself some days as it desperately tries to find a signal.

Do you have Wifi at work? If so (and if you're not hideously tracked and blocked when using it such that you're afraid to), you could probably save significant battery by turning your Wifi on and connecting to it.

Yeah, we have wifi at work. Part of my job is helping students and staff connect to it. :)

I understand your tip and it's what I normally would do, though I don't actually need Wifi at work much, since I'm at or near Internet-capable PCs most of the day.

I've also adjusted more settings on the S3 to see if that helps and will be monitoring it for heat to see if it may be some funky battery issue.

Sometimes technology is grand and sometimes it ain't.

I have an S3 and I haven't noticed that bad of a battery drain like you have. Have you looked at your Task Manager to see if there are unnecessary apps running the background?

Constant polling has murdered my battery on several occasions.

It is definitely not background apps because a) I hardly ever use any, anyway and b) I have regularly checked and shut down apps I wasn't actively using just in case. I think it may be a possible defect with the phone, coupled with crappy coverage from my provider.

I'm doing an experiment today. The S3 is fully charged right now and I'm only going to use it to make one phone call at lunch which will be no more than a few minutes long. I'll see what the battery is down to at 6 p.m. What would seem a reasonable amount of discharge over ten hours of non-use (less the one call)?

Even if you don't use it, it can still help -- because your phone doesn't need to make a data connection over 3G (which it sounds like is a struggle for it in your environment) to do things like check for mail/twitter/facebook/etc, and can just use the ambient Wifi connection.

If weak coverage is the root of your problem, I think connecting to wifi could be a huge help, even if you just sit there and don't touch it.

Just put your phone in airplane mode and don't touch it for a few hours.

Even my crappiest Android phone (cough, Captivate, cough) had <5% battery loss when stowed for a flight. If you lose more than that, I bet it's defective.

EDIT:

Before running this test, consider installing Watchdog just in case. It will look for poorly-coded apps that are needlessly sucking up CPU cycles, which is another common reason for poor battery life.

Finally, newer versions of Google Maps can be very hard on your battery, since Maps constantly reports your location to the mothership. Consider disabling location reporting. If you don't want to give up Google Now or Latitude, you can install Backitude and set up a more reasonable polling schedule.

Thanks for the tips! I could try airplane mode but I'm curious to see what happens when conditions are as close to normal as possible. After six hours of non-use the battery is at 90%. Five hours to go!

And yeah, I turned location services off. I only enable them on an as-needed basis which is not very often for my usage.

After 11.5 hours off the charger (6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and having used the phone for two calls totaling about three minutes combined, my S3's battery was at 81%. I can't in good conscience nerd rage over a battery drain of approximately 2% per hour. I'll probably never figure out what caused the MegaDrain® yesterday but if it doesn't happen again I'm fine with that.

Now I can return to perusing the selection of horrible, awful apps in the Google Play store!

Wife's Incredible 2 is messing up now. It's only taking a charge when the cable is plugged in at an odd angle just so and sometimes the battery is discharging very quickly. To me the charger port feels loose so I have concerns it's shorting. It's out of warranty, so no easy fix. I could buy an extra battery or an external battery charger but I don't know if that will solve the problem. She's not up for an upgrade for about 8 weeks but is no longer under contract on this phone.

I chatted with a verizon rep online who said that I could add a new line to the family plan, swap the phone number with the new plan and my wife's so she'd be using the new phone with her existing TN, and then disconnect the line associated with the incredible 2. This sounds like a good way to get around waiting until February, but I'm concerned that the rep may not know what they're talking about and I don't want to get screwed over.

Anyone have experience with this phone problem and/or using this kind of chicanery to get phone upgrades faster?

I just want to say again how amazingly bad the Google Play Music app is.

Is it because you're in Canada and can't buy any digital music?

No, it's because it regularly freezes up, has the worst 'gapless playback' I've ever heard, can't find album art for the majority of my (very mainstream) music collection and has lots of other small annoyances as well.

Since listening to music is one of my main uses for a smartphone, this is a major drawback for me. The included player with the Galaxy S3 is okay but only okay and I'm not especially motivated to comb through a bunch of mostly pay apps on the Google Play store to try to find one that suits my apparently crazy needs (which is not to say I wouldn't pay for a good music app if the ideal one magically presented itself).

I use DoubleTwist as my music player app.

So I have a Galaxy Nexus and while I love it, the large size and weight are starting to get to me. Does anyone still make phones that are the size of smartphones two years ago but modern hardware inside?

I realize I shouldn't be quite this happy, but my Atrix HD got the Jelly Bean update yesterday.

Unfortunately, it seems like the biggest addition (Google Now) isnt as useful for someone who doesn't live in a major city. There are no events near me, my estimated commute was 5 minutes. I dont think there is a card that is that useful for me.

I decided since it was a good refresh point to try out nova launcher and some new widgets, and I came up with what I think is a pretty nice looking home screen arrangement. Unfortunately, it all falls apart when you go left or right, as most widgets dont match the theme I created.

The cards aren't super-useful (I mostly get the weather from it, and football scores), but what's useful about it is using it as a search tool. Basically any time you would bring up Chrome and search for something, it's better to bring up Now and search for it there. Also, it's a replacement for the old Voice Command stuff, so if you want to send a quick text to someone without typing, you can do that easily (esp. since you can get to Now by holding down the home button, or swiping up from it if you have soft buttons).

I'll have a look at this, thanks.

I'm temporarily back to my iPhone in the interim (I have a one hour commute so decent music playback is an unusually high priority for me). It's funny how much smaller the display looks now compared to the S3. Not uncomfortably small but definitely cozy.

Thanks, thats good advice.

Especially since I removed the google search bar from the top of my screen when I was trying out a new view in Nova Launcher.

Speaking of which, there are a ton of highly recommended launchers out there, and while I probably don't have the mind to try them all, it might be interesting to see some differences. Does anyone have any they think are especially useful/interesting? Nova is pretty slick, and I like a lot of parts of it. I have also heard that Go Launcher is the most customizable, but I have no idea about its speed, and I have heard that it tends to drain batteries.

Any others that people like?

Apex launcher is also good, but it's very similar to Nova. You might also want to look at Trebuchet.

Go Launcher is a resource pig. Only use it if you can't run Apex or Nova (i.e. pre-ICS phones). Likewise, LauncherPro and ADW are basically obsolete.

For something completely different, try Launcher7 (Windows Phone copycat).

This is a nice player. Without gapless playback.

Why do you hate me, Eric? Why?!

I use poweramp which does have gapless. It even tries to remove silence from tracks to improve the gapless.

Poweramp's gapless playback works well, hooray!

Playback is very glitchy for me, though. Boo. Maybe I'll try restarting the phone to see if that helps.

I find it can glitch if there is heavy contention for CPU or i/o but haven't seen that kind of behaviour otherwise.

More grist for the mill.
http://gizmodo.com/5973073/an-iphone-lovers-confession-i-switched-to-the-nexus-4-completely

Not a typical iphone suxks, android rulez! post. I found some of the apps that he listed especially useful and that site http://mycolorscreen.com/popular/ is super cool. How do I get my phone to look like that?

On the one hand, I love this article because lol Hanzii.

On the other, Gawker.

On my third, lesser known hand, holy christ dude you really don't need to use so many goddamn italics. Also "I like the device because X" is great but really more objective analysis can sometimes be helpful.

I wish the author had gone into specifics over why he didn't like the Galaxy S3, even with Android 4.x installed on it. He mentions the TouchWiz stuff but I'm not clear on what is so different between the S3 and Nexus 4 in terms of UI that would make him decide one is groovy and the other is poop.

I did like the list of apps he provided, though. some good stuff in there.

The key is to use an alternate launcher. I have been tooling around with creating fun and cool looking home screens and I recommend a combination of Nova Launcher and Ultimate Custom Widget (UCCW), and Minimalist Text. The trick is to use a combination of a background that has some elements build in, then overlaying widgets over the top of it.

One of the coolest tricks is to take parts of the background and make them into widgets and overlay them over the same part of the background. Then you can hide icons halfway behind them and make it look like something is popping out of the background of the phone.

Maybe I should make a post your homescreen thread for people to show off what they use. Iphone users are welcome to post a sheet of grid paper as well... ;)

Edit to emphasize: I should say that what I am describing above is really easy to do. I am not a graphic designer, and am pretty much incompetent in the art department. But between Nova Launcher, a couple cool widgets, and a free paint program, I was able to make some pretty nice looking stuff.

I've never used a TouchWiz device, but there is a part of me that feels like anyone who would name their UI "TouchWiz" is unlikely to make a particularly good UI.

(Also, now that I've been using the N7/N10, and am used to stock Android, it's jarring when I go back to my Sense-ridden phone. So much stuff that I'm just used to on the tablets doesn't work right on the phone, which has inherited more of HTC's increasingly-dated Sense idioms.)

Wader, whether you make a new thread or post in this one, I would be interested in seeing your 'design a homescreen' stuff. I grabbed Nova Launcher and Minimalist Text but haven't played with them yet.