[jmarkey77]

Hey all,

Anybody else ending up with only four hours of battery life under constant use? When normal usage saying using Vevo or YouTube or Facebook I get 4 hours of usage with a 4 watt draw. Seems really terrible to me.

Anybody else doing better than this? Is this normal?

Note: This is my second PB, got it just shy of 2 weeks after launch so as PBs go it's pretty old. First one died and had to do the 14 day exchange.

[FranzJoseph]

If I am watching movies on it I can usually get through about 3 and a bit without a charge so I would put mine at about 5 hours or so under constant, battery killing use.

If I am just occasionally browing the internet and playing some games then I easily get 8-10 hours

[peter9477]

Anybody else ending up with only four hours of battery life under constant use? When normal usage saying using Vevo or YouTube or Facebook I get 4 hours of usage with a 4 watt draw. Seems really terrible to me.

If you can see actual wattage, I assume you're using Battery Guru (in which case, thanks! :-).

While I was testing it, I wrote an article comparing power consumption under a variety of different types of use. As it says there, to get only 4h playing videos, you'd have to be running with the backlight pretty much at 100% and without running full-screen, and they'd probably be Flash videos. You should get somewhat longer video playing under almost any other conditions.

Is your battery health (not level) showing as much lower than 92% or so? And are you measuring the duration by running from fully charge all the way down until the tablet shuts off, or just until it nears 0%, or perhaps even just by watching Battery Guru's graph? (Note that in the first release, the graph showed 12h of data but labelled it as 10h. That's been corrected.)

[frfghtr]

Anybody else doing better than this? Is this normal?

Gotta ask. Have you accepted the Video Chat - User Agreement? This is known battery drain issue even though the app is closed. No one knows why. But because of it, I'm always checking newly installed apps, to see if something might be running in the background.

[peter9477]

Gotta ask. Have you accepted the Video Chat - User Agreement? This is known battery drain issue even though the app is closed.

Note that it appears that issue has been resolved as of 1.0.7. See section "Resolution" on this page: KB26855-The BlackBerry PlayBook battery drains faster than normal or has irregular fluctuations in the battery level

[freedomx20a]

do a full battery drain and dont charge it for a couple hrs. then full chatge. repeat a couple times. battery should fix.

[peter9477]

do a full battery drain and dont charge it for a couple hrs. then full chatge. repeat a couple times. battery should fix.

Ooooh, another "do this magic thing" recipe! First time I've heard this one too. Did you make that one up yourself, or is there a reference somewhere?

What's the particular effect that "don't charge it for a couple of hrs" is supposed to create?

(I'm not saying it won't do something... but I hate "cargo cult" approaches to this stuff. If it works, explain to people why it works, so they can at least decide whether it makes sense in their particular situation.)

[jmarkey77]

Yes battery guru is in use! It showed 4 hours until it showed 0% battery but didn't shut down. I was using VIVO and guru while full brightness and using the HDMI out.

Just seems very short

[peter9477]

@jmarkey77, it's unfortunate but we can't rely on the "0%" indicator to represent "fully drained", so you might have had as much as an hour of remaining capacity there if you'd let it run all the way down (till it shut off) instead of stopping the experiment at 0%.

That said, this "extra capacity" doesn't generally last nearly as long when you're running with a heavy load (e.g. 4W). The voltage "sags" and it's primarily the voltage (not the % level) which the tablet uses to determine whether it's time to shut down. You can eke out much more life if you're running at low power (e.g. 0.5W from a music app in standby) where the voltage doesn't sag as much.

The time does seem short when you're doing that sort of thing, but it is pretty typical, and other than dropping the brightness down there's not much you could do to improve it.

Best to buy the rapid charging cradle for that sort of use...

[lamnguyen2020]

do a full battery drain and dont charge it for a couple hrs. then full chatge. repeat a couple times. battery should fix.

battery conditioning has been debunked. there was an article floating around cb.

[grahamf]

battery conditioning has been debunked. there was an article floating around cb.

True, but how else you expect to do a "battery pull"?

[peter9477]

battery conditioning has been debunked. there was an article floating around cb.

"Battery conditioning" doesn't apply to Lithium Polymer batteries per se, but that doesn't mean that the same basic steps won't have any effect at all on the system as a whole.

RIM even recommends something like that (without the mysterious "don't charge it for a couple hrs") as a way of helping the software recalibrate its estimate of the battery capacity.

[yauchunh]

i can get through 2-3 movies on full brightness and speakers. i can get about 10 hrs.

[jmarkey77]

@jmarkey77, it's unfortunate but we can't rely on the "0%" indicator to represent "fully drained", so you might have had as much as an hour of remaining capacity there if you'd let it run all the way down (till it shut off) instead of stopping the experiment at 0%.

That said, this "extra capacity" doesn't generally last nearly as long when you're running with a heavy load (e.g. 4W). The voltage "sags" and it's primarily the voltage (not the % level) which the tablet uses to determine whether it's time to shut down. You can eke out much more life if you're running at low power (e.g. 0.5W from a music app in standby) where the voltage doesn't sag as much.

The time does seem short when you're doing that sort of thing, but it is pretty typical, and other than dropping the brightness down there's not much you could do to improve it.

Best to buy the rapid charging cradle for that sort of use...

I use my cradle all the time. **** I take the damn thing to work and when I travel for work. The cradle doesn't have an HDMI out and I was using my TV and BT keyboard/mouse. I should have turned down my brightness, duh.

As for the reset I did that three days ago with no change.

[jmarkey77]

I cant say 'the really hot place only some people believe in' but I can say damn? lol

[peter9477]

Oh, yeah.. HDMI + cradle == FAIL. Forgot about that.

[dmcd09]

I have just purchased battery guru and disappointingly my battery health is showing at 83% and I only purchased the PB just under two months ago! Charge count is 24

i'm not sure this is right? considering my usage in that period although i would guess that on average my my battery would last me 6-7 hours of constant use from 100% power through to shut down which would include mainly web browsing and playing games occasionally

Is this normal as i would expect my battery health to be higher at this stage. I don't really have a problem with the power drain at this stage but want to know if i need to get on the phone to RIM about the health as this can only get worse right ?

Thanks, any advice appreciated