1. coastiekline's Avatar
    Please excuse me if there has been previous threads on this subject, but I'm a newbie.

    My battery life for my Tour seem to have the life sucked out of it daily, but my wifes last for days. I'm pretty sure it has to do with running different apps, but can anyone identify "APP KILLERS" to battery life?
    01-23-10 06:44 AM
  2. mjbesen310's Avatar
    what OS are you running? and what are some of the bigeest apps you have on the phone?
    01-23-10 06:47 AM
  3. coastiekline's Avatar
    I am running 4.7.1.61.

    Apps most used: BBM, score mobile, weather channel & carbon9630 theme.
    01-23-10 06:52 AM
  4. bassplaya51's Avatar
    themes have a tendency at times to suck battery life faster
    01-23-10 07:18 AM
  5. mjbesen310's Avatar
    I am running 4.7.1.61.

    Apps most used: BBM, score mobile, weather channel & carbon9630 theme.
    none of those apps are battery killers at all.. the only one however I would question is your theam. I stay away from theams as I found most of them suck the juice out of the battery.

    you could always test that out though, just delete your theam for a couple days, and see if that was the problem
    01-23-10 07:20 AM
  6. jeffh's Avatar
    Talking, sending messages, and illuminating the screen are the three biggest battery drains. BBM can shorten your battery life because it leads to more sending and illuminating. The difference in battery life you're seeing is likely due to different usage. I've never seen anybody claiming days of battery life for the Tour. Your experience is typical. I bought a second battery and swap batteries in late afternoon most days.
    01-23-10 08:16 AM
  7. Bioamerican's Avatar
    I do Agree, Talking and Illuminating the Screen are Batt Killers.

    Also Signal has a HUGE impact too.. When i lived in South Florida i would get almost 2 full days out of my tour. and i was CONSTANTLY on it, Either Facebook, Texting, BBM'ing, Talking. Now im in the Middle of No where SC. and do MAYBE 1/4 of that and i barley get 1 day out of it.

    Also Watch how many apps you are running that auto seek updates. Of course the main one being E-mail. Anything that is always looking for info will drain too, so the more of them you use the faster your Batt Dies.
    01-23-10 08:44 AM
  8. Dyzrv's Avatar
    Talking, sending messages, and illuminating the screen are the three biggest battery drains. BBM can shorten your battery life because it leads to more sending and illuminating. The difference in battery life you're seeing is likely due to different usage. I've never seen anybody claiming days of battery life for the Tour. Your experience is typical. I bought a second battery and swap batteries in late afternoon most days.
    yes! agreed jeff
    01-23-10 09:07 AM
  9. jpr28056's Avatar
    I can tell you that when I went to .61 my battery life went in the tank. With the original OS that Verizon had (.41?) I could make it all day but now usually have to charge the phone in the late afternoon. I hope when Verizon finally releases 5.0 os they fix the battery life issue because I know its bad with the .419 os too.
    01-23-10 09:20 AM
  10. BrianFTC's Avatar
    The followings might save battery even a tiny bit -

    - Hold BB key a few seconds to see what is running - Home Screen, Phone, Browser, Messages, BBM need to constantly be run. And my case, Berryweather and smrtAlert also but Contacts, maps anything else to be exited.
    - Adjust brightness of screen. For regular use no need to be more than 50 (mine is always like 20)
    - As some ppl mentioned above, Your location really affects the battery life. When I go to this new Super Target only a mile away where any cell carriers' reception is bad, I have noticed being there for a long time really affects it.

    Mine usually last enough for a day and didn't care to carry a car charger in the past. Now even if I hardly use it, just in case, I bought a cheap car charger through ebay and leave it in car also.
    01-23-10 09:28 AM
  11. flash24's Avatar
    Jivetalk, I love the app but it eats your battery alive.

    Oh and disable your LED indicator too.
    01-23-10 09:33 AM
  12. kostnkost's Avatar
    Talking, sending messages, and illuminating the screen are the three biggest battery drains. BBM can shorten your battery life because it leads to more sending and illuminating. The difference in battery life you're seeing is likely due to different usage. I've never seen anybody claiming days of battery life for the Tour. Your experience is typical. I bought a second battery and swap batteries in late afternoon most days.

    Talking just wiped 10% of my battery as I was just on the phone for a half hour! Glad I hate chatting on the phone lol.
    01-23-10 09:46 AM
  13. Reed McLay's Avatar
    Research in Motion publishes spec for all models:

    BlackBerry - Tour 9630 Specs �€“ Blackberry Tour Specifications

    Battery & Battery Life
    Battery: 1400 mAHr removable/rechargeable lithium-ion battery
    Talk Time: 5 hours
    Standby Time: 14 days
    Talking uses a lot of power, but so does using applications like Media Player where the CPU is always powered and active.

    You will find the same with applications that execute continuous calculations when active and does not suspend in the holster.

    I have one like that, it will run down a full battery in a couple hours if I leave it at the top of the stack. Fortunatly, when it is in the background, it suspends the calculations until re-activated.

    ...
    Oh and disable your LED indicator too.
    LED's are very efficient users of power.

    Light-emitting diode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Typical indicator LEDs are designed to operate with no more than 30–60 milliwatts [mW] of electrical power. ...
    The LED notifier is only powered up for milliseconds (1/1000 second), the actual consumption is negligible.
    01-23-10 10:03 AM
  14. RVVillesis's Avatar
    To the OP, I used to run Score Mobile all the time, and it killed my battery very quickly. I think the reason is that it's pretty data-intensive with all the scores it has to update, and it updates them when you have it in the foreground or background.

    Three options for you for Score Mobile:

    1 - Exit the application (Click on Menu -> Quit) when you're not using it. This will help your battery life the most.
    2 - Change your foreground/background refresh settings (Click on Menu -> Settings) to increase the refresh intervals. I think the longest interval for foreground is 5 minutes and for background, it's 20 minutes.
    3 - Change either or both foreground/background intervals to None, then you can just refresh manually (Click on Menu -> Refresh) whenever you want to get the latest scores.

    Hope this helps. It did for me...I only have Score Mobile running now when I absolutely need it. My battery life increased dramatically after I cut down my usage. Good luck.
    01-23-10 10:12 AM
  15. deke.sask's Avatar
    My wife's and father in laws blackberrys were draining all the time, the old apps running without realizing it was their problem. I use my fairly heavily all day and get about a days worth of use. Sometimes less.

    D
    01-23-10 10:34 AM
  16. hondateg91's Avatar
    If you're part of a big BBM group that will kill the battery within a few hours since it's constantly updating.
    01-23-10 11:04 AM
  17. jaydubb71's Avatar
    If you're part of a big BBM group that will kill the battery within a few hours since it's constantly updating.
    Do what I did and get the Seidio 2600 mAh battery. Problem solved. Pandora all day at work and still have 1/2 battery when I get off from work. Previously, I had 2 keep my spare AC charger at work all day long. Not anymore!

    Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com
    Last edited by jaydubb71; 01-23-10 at 11:29 AM.
    01-23-10 11:21 AM
  18. pblakk's Avatar
    I bought a second battery and swap batteries in late afternoon most days.
    I hope you are running some form of OS 5.0 on your Tour for the faster reboots when you swap out for a freshly charged battery. I'm still waiting for Vzw's official 5.0, man I hate the 4 or so minutes required for the OS 4.7 reboot time.

    To the OP: In my experience, a notable 'battery charge killer' app. would have be UberTwitter!! Well I think it was really laggy while accessing data, so it would've been like loading a graphically intensive web page over a number of minutes.

    So beware of Ubertwitter!
    01-23-10 11:33 AM
  19. BlkBryAddict's Avatar
    I do think Viigo is a pretty major battery drainer as well. I try to just go on and check a couple of things and shut it down right afterwards. Memory leak is also tends to be an issue with that app.
    01-23-10 11:49 AM
  20. AHinMaine's Avatar
    I notice the significant drain from Ubertwitter as well. I'm wondering if it might have something to do with its gps usage. If it were constantly keeping track of your gps position instead of just when you post, would explain it. I set it to poll for updates only every 30 minutes and even when I leave it alone for hours, it stills gobbles battery very quickly.

    All gps apps eat battery though. I like to use instamapper because it has the best facebook profile app, but I only leave it running when I'm on the move. I'd pit it against anything in the entire AppWorld collection for wrecking a battery.

    This is one reason I love QuickLaunch though. I created menu items for quick toggling of things like bluetooth, brightness, that sort of thing.
    01-23-10 12:09 PM
  21. coastiekline's Avatar
    WOW! Thank you all for your insights and to the forum moderators for making this blog more attractive by changing the title...what do you expect from a newbie! LOL

    I'm glad to know that my 12 hour battery life is normal and will absolutely be resting some application settings today.

    Again....Thank you!
    01-24-10 06:31 AM
  22. JiveMasterT's Avatar
    The only app I use that I've noticed destroys my battery life is FourSquare. I just make sure to exit it completely when I'm not using it.
    01-24-10 04:28 PM
  23. Californian's Avatar
    If you happen to work near or in front of a computer all day, I keep my Tour plugged in via the USB connector at all times at my desk...which keeps the battery full.
    02-16-10 01:07 PM
  24. drevans18's Avatar
    berryweather was actually updated so it doesn't run all the time, and it runs in the background. i have it, and i just checked to see which programs were running, and berryweather wasn't listed (which is really awesome)
    02-16-10 03:59 PM
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