New question on battery drain

[PoffieVA]

I know that a lot has been written on battey drain, but I have not had my situation answered yet. Please bare with me because I am finding this situation very frustrating. Every morning my battery says 99% and many times will stay there for a long time. It has stayed at 99% for 8hrs over night. Other times it will drop 8-10% in an hour or so. This is with nothing turned on. I have the "camera patch" installed. Date/time, BT, beam receiver all turned off. I have had a Treo since Dec. '06 or should I say I have had several since I had to return some because of how bad they were on the battery. This particular on I have had a little over a week. The problem is that each one acts the same. It is the inconsistency of it that is hard to deal with. I normally drop 2-3% per hour with nothing turned on. I hope someone out there can shed some light on this. Thanks for listening.
PoffieVA

[avrum68]

Yikes. You see, this scares the hell out of me. It's so friggin hard to get an objective review of what works/what doesn't of the 680.

I receive mine on Friday...anything you'd recommend I do to ensure my unit works (I've got 30 days or 30 min of talk-time before I can return it). Thanks.

[Maris]

Originally Posted by PoffieVA

I know that a lot has been written on battey drain, but I have not had my situation answered yet. Please bare with me because I am finding this situation very frustrating. Every morning my battery says 99% and many times will stay there for a long time. It has stayed at 99% for 8hrs over night. Other times it will drop 8-10% in an hour or so. This is with nothing turned on. I have the "camera patch" installed. Date/time, BT, beam receiver all turned off. I have had a Treo since Dec. '06 or should I say I have had several since I had to return some because of how bad they were on the battery. This particular on I have had a little over a week. The problem is that each one acts the same. It is the inconsistency of it that is hard to deal with. I normally drop 2-3% per hour with nothing turned on. I hope someone out there can shed some light on this. Thanks for listening.
PoffieVA

You have only had this one a week? If you have been reading the many posts about battery issues with the Treo, you probably have seen how these issues seem to clear up after 2 - 3 weeks of good use. That is exactly what happened with my Treo, too. I couldn't even make it through the day with average use when I first got it, but after about 2 weeks of gradual increased life, it finally settled down about the third week where I can get a solid 1-1/2 of heavy use to 2-3 days of moderate use. You may need to quit babying it and go ahead and use it so it breaks in faster. Just carry your usb cable with you for a week or two in case you need a quick refresh of the battery until it settles down. I don't even carry my cable with me any more ... it has become that trustworthy.

[Yokie Kuma]

Originally Posted by PoffieVA

II normally drop 2-3% per hour with nothing turned on.
PoffieVA

2-3% per hour is a bit high. The best rate I have seen posted is less than .5% per hour with nothing on.

A couple of suggestions to help find out where the issue is:

Check the charge level, turn phone off, soft reset, don't press buttons or use, check the charge level a few hours later. Is it still 2-3% per hour?

Other options posted are to drain it fully (keep using until it stops working), then fully charge it.

I do know that the wall charger will charge it to 100% then will stop charging. Depending on how long afterwards you check, you will see a charge of less than 100% (mid to low 90s) as the phone draws from the battery and not the charger (even if still plugged in). Basically the charger tops it off then shuts off. Period. However, even if the battery is drained a bit, the unit will read 100% since it is still plugged in and it reads the charger level (100%) not the battery level (already discharged a bit). This may be why sometimes you read 99% after charging and sometimes it drops quickly.

The USB charger tops off the battery and keeps pwoering the unit so there is little discharge on the battery when you unplug it.

I hope this helps a little.

Yokie

[PoffieVA]

Thanks Maris----Your suggestion that it takes a couple weeks to break in is encouraging. The Treo 680 is a great tool and I enjoy it very much, however I probably have been babying it too much to conserve power. I'll start using it more and see what happens. Thanks to the help.

[skoenig]

If you'd like to do more reading around the subject look up "battery conditioning" it's a known behaviour of LithIon batts. To speed up the conditioning process you can try what they call deep discharging followed by deep charging.

To do this, let the battery run out to the point when the treo switches off then fully charge it in one go from the main charger.

USB cables and some 3rd party chargers run on 500-750mA wheres the real deal pumps out 1 amp which will both deep charge your battery and charge it much more quickly than the 500mA provided by all USB charging cables.

The 99% thing is quite normal, more so if you're 'trickle' charging via USB.

The drain rate, whilst apparently high compared to some users here, does reflect to a large extent the signal quality with the nearest cells. You will drain your battery faster if the handset has to increase the transmission power to compensate with lower reception even when it's just checking in.

2-3% I assume the phone is on but nothing else? This would give you 30-40 hours of standby...which doesn't seem odd to me.

Hope this helps..

~ Steph

[DGodfrey]

Hi
I have been studying the battery drain problems with the 680 quite extensively (cant help myself, I am a scientist!), and also testing the findings of some other keen experimenters on these forums, especially Treocentral. I have made a summary of my tips for optimising battery life here: DIG's top 4 tips for optimising performance (battery life) of the 680. - TreoCentral.com

- some of these may be well known, but maybe there is a new idea or two that might help.

Also, there is a new phone call-related bug that can trigger the 2-3% per hour battery drain which lasts until a soft reset, or another phone call under certain circumstances. This has been tested by two of us and seems to be reproducible, at least with our phones. I am guessing it is the cause of higher drain rates for many users who are having trouble. The thread describing this is here: Rapid and prolonged battery drain induced by GSM activity. The Glen Phenomenon. - TreoCentral.com (it is known as The Glen Phenomenon, for want of a better name).

[Krafty]

I am unable to perform the following posted suggestions for increasing my battery life.

When I go to phone > opitions, I do not see "Select Network".

I also am unable to find "active polling" anyware in my versamail (I use AOL wtih it).

Can someone advise me how to find these?

Thanks



# Turn “Select Network” to MANUAL instead of Automatic (go to Phone > Options > Select Network and click on your carrier)
s a very significant difference in power usage – thanks for the tip Casey.)
# Disable “Active Polling” in Versamail or other 3rd party email solution

[Krafty]

One other question:

Regarding the following item posted on the Treo blog:

By the time all the new Treo 680 power accessories arrive you should have four options to maximize battery life:

1. Adjust the various available setting that influence battery life (see Treo 680 Battery Review)
2. Get an original spare Palm 1200mAh battery or;
3. An Extended 2400mAh Battery Pack (available within 10 days) or;
4. A slim extended 1800hAh to fit the normal battery door (hopefully available within the next two months).

DOES ANYONE KNOW THE STATUS OF OPTION #4--SLIM EXTENDED 1800hAh batter to fit the normal battery door.

thanks again.

[bigcatny]

It's not available yet.