Sleep Mode & Battery Use

[Andre86]

Hey guys, I'm new to his forum : )

I am thinking of the A500's battery usage while it is in sleep mode. The 'Battery use'-tab shows me what uses the battery most. In my case it is the screen, followed by Tablet idle and Android OS. I think there's nothing special about that, but Android 3.1 introduced this fancy one-pixel bar under the battery-diagram that shows me that my tablet is not sleeping very well... It's running more or less all the time.

I tried to fix that, but nothing worked:

1. I changed Wi-fi disconnect policy to 'When screen turns off'
2. I disabeld automatic email-syncing (I use an Imap-email server)

Can there be an app running in the background, that stops my tablet from sleeping?

Thanks for any advice,
André

 

[Icebike]

Look, you are on the wrong track here.

You've taken all the wrong steps. You've made your tablet less useful, and for what?
All in the quest for a full battery?

Use your battery, that's what its for. Plug it in when it's sitting idle.

But don't shut down essential functions just to have a battery reading 5% higher. You want your email checked, you want your apps updated, you want to get your Google Talk instant messages.

Wifi sleep Never actually saves battery. It takes less power to keep it alive than to wake it up all the time.
Set your gmail to use IMAP and disabled pop. That takes less power on the tablet because of the way it works.

I use the hell out of my tablet and I still have 25% battery when I go to bed at night.

Use your battery. Make the tablet work for you, not the other way around.

 

[Andre86]

I believe if I'm saying the display uses most of the energy, you can't blame me not to use my tablet.

To be honest I'm a little bit disappointed of the tablet's idle-energy management. I am used to my iPhone 4. Before that I had an iPod Touch 3g. If you didn't start Skype or similar apps like that, the device could lay around for days. But my tablet uses 40% of battery for a day or so, for me that's not ok.

 

[Icebike]

I believe if I'm saying the display uses most of the energy, you can't blame me not to use my tablet.

Perhaps, coming from Apple land you misunderstand that battery usage display.

If you take the device off of the charger and immediately wake it up and check battery it will show that +95% of the usage is the display.
Yet the battery level will still be in excess of 99% full. So of that less than 1% of battery usage, 95% went to the display. All 7 seconds of usage!!. So saying the display accounts for most of the usage doesn't say anything at all about your usage.

To be honest I'm a little bit disappointed of the tablet's idle-energy management. I am used to my iPhone 4. Before that I had an iPod Touch 3g. If you didn't start Skype or similar apps like that, the device could lay around for days. But my tablet uses 40% of battery for a day or so, for me that's not ok.

Tap that battery diagram where you see the one pixel display. You will get a time-map of of charging, Screen on, Awake, And Wifi.
You will find it sleeps much more than you are claiming.

Then do this:
Set Wifi disconnect to Never.
Set background data and autosync both checked.
Turn off Iconia tab sync, its a waste of electrons
Turn on sync for any Google accounts you want (I sync EVERYTHING on my primary account).

In you Gmail accounts set them to IMAP, disable pop.
In your other IMAP accounts be sure your provider supports IDLED (most competent mail servers do).

Shut down any thing you don't need, like constant facebook monitoring, news widgets, weather updates every 5 minutes, etc.

This will be the lowest usage state for battery.

Shutting down wifi when tablet is counter productive. It forces the tablet to fire it up any time it needs data, fetch an new IP, re-establish the connection, and check for traffic. If you leave wifi on (disconnect never), the chip drops to a low power state, but leaves sockets open, till they time out (usually about 18 minutes after last traffic). Any socket that becomes readable (traffic) triggers the wifi chip to full power to handle the event (Imap IdleD relies on this, as does iPhone push events). So the instant your Imap server sends on its idleD socket your tablet knows mail arrived and starts reading the socket. Without this, it has to drop back to polling the mail with takes a LOT more battery, because it has to wake up the entire tablet every once in a while just to see if there is any mail.

This device was designed to be charged every day. Just like your iPhone. Still I often get two days of use (mostly web surfing news reading, google talk, and some low-activity games) on the Acer with the settings I posted above.

My battery life is so good I leave GPS on ALL the time, and I've taken to leaving Bluetooth on ALL the time because the tablet wakes up faster if its on than when its off.

But you can't come telling us that the iPhone has great battery life when the net if overflowing with people complaining about battery life of all Apple devices. You can't get more than a day out of any iPhone that is used for calls, surfing, email or games. Sitting there on the desk, yeah, maybe. And the advice I give you here was all the same advice recommended by Apple for the iphone when they finally got push working for email.

Some day I'll find out how long it will go just sitting there, unused. But its not going to be any time soon, because I use mine a lot.

 

[Mike02z]

To be honest I'm a little bit disappointed of the tablet's idle-energy management. I am used to my iPhone 4. Before that I had an iPod Touch 3g. If you didn't start Skype or similar apps like that, the device could lay around for days. But my tablet uses 40% of battery for a day or so, for me that's not ok.

I agree. I have both the Iconia as well as an iPad 2. The iPad 2 can sit on my desk for 3 weeks and still have some battery but the Iconia will be at 10-15% after just 48 hours of sitting without use. I love the device, just think battery management needs some work.

 

[Andre86]

I appreciate that a device like that has been design for normal use and that it can charge over the night. Mostly I use it for reading e-papers. If I read them, I use the device for 30 or 40 minutes. But after that I think it is allowed to sleep 'till I want to continue reading. So yeah you're right, Ios needs the same power for normal usage. But if you have your iTouch whatever laying around, normally it does not need the same amount of power like my Iconia. Doesn't mater.

I've checked your settings and changed the Wi-Fi policy and the Sync stuff. I will continue observing the Iconia's 'sleeping patterns'. Maybe it helps. And maybe you can tell me what the illuminated power button indicates? I can not see any regular pattern there.

Also I downloaded Advanced Task Manager. I was used to EZ Task Manager but for any reason it did not show me the same amount of running apps/tasks.