[blackjack93117]

Among the battery draining features on playbooks and phones, I am wondering if some of the geniuses have ideas about what drains the battery fastest -

What should be sacrificed when you are running low and a charger or outlet is not available? What is the order of priority?

Display Brightness ( my first choice)
Audio
Bluetooth radio
wifi radio
Streaming video
GPS

Other battery saving tips?

[peter9477]

Battery saving tip: buy Battery Guru, on sale now! :-)

You can read some background info on power consumption here: PlayBook: Power Consumption

In rough order of priority, reduce brightness, disable WiFi or minimize use of it, don't use GPS, minimize audio volume, don't play videos, and disable Bluetooth.

[wxmancanada]

Brightness would be my only sacrifice, but I'm thankful to have never have run into this... yet.

[FF22]

Women and children first followed by screen brightness.

[esqlaw]

^^ first born

[Hgouck]

1st reduce brightness. If you have a WiFi connection shut down bluetooth if not shut down WiFi. Do not stream or download if it can be avoided. Limit multi tasking.
Find the nearest Staples and buy a rapid charger for around $15.

[Spencerdl]

^^ first born

To each his/her own, but the PlayBook is the BOMB .....getting ready to blowup in your FACE .....HaHa Oh yea, the screen brightness is the first sacrifice

[blackjack93117]

Battery saving tip: buy Battery Guru, on sale now! :-)

You can read some background info on power consumption here: PlayBook: Power Consumption

In rough order of priority, reduce brightness, disable WiFi or minimize use of it, don't use GPS, minimize audio volume, don't play videos, and disable Bluetooth.

1st reduce brightness. If you have a WiFi connection shut down bluetooth if not shut down WiFi. Do not stream or download if it can be avoided. Limit multi tasking.
Find the nearest Staples and buy a rapid charger for around $15.

So bluetooth is the lowest power consumer of the bunch?

conflicting priorities here. Battery guru is just for monitoring, not power management, no?
I am wondering if anyone has done some actual testing with battery monitoring in this regard.

[barskin]

Thank you, guys, for reminding me. I presently have a charging dock, a charger I leave permanently at home, a charger I carry around with me, but I realized I should have a charger that stays at my office. So, I just hopped on over to ebay and ordered one. I'm covered, now!

[patpatiar]

BBM is a huge waste on battery for me. So avoid using BBM and revert to texting if possible when trying to save power.

I always leave my BB brightness to a minimum. (I get used to it) and my battery lasts for longer.

Wifi/Bluetooth are always turned off (unless i really need to use a bridge connection for the pb)

[berrysqueezer]

I do nothing! I continue as if nothing is wrong, then when then the battery dies in the midst of killing zombies in hi-def I do what any real BB man would do! Curl up in a ball suck my thumb under my desk and wait for my kids to get out of school and bring my charger to my office - half a block from my house.

Actually, I have a charger in the car, home and office. My kids were tired of finding me like this.

[Sith_Apprentice]

It really depends. Any radio that is constantly sending/receiving (including when looking for a connection) kills battery. Having multiple of these connections running will assuradly nuke it. The more data that is transmitted, the faster it will go. That being said, screen brightness is very possibly the single worst killer of battery on a mobile device. I drop mine down all the way when in a well lit area. It rarely ever goes about 25% or so unless im watching a video and need the picture quality. Also, i would kill any running android apps. While they may not seem like much, they do load into a VM which increases CPU load from the baseline.

[houshinto#IM]

I wonder if the HTC Battery Bank at the Crackberry Store is usable with the Playbook.
Since it can store quite a lot of juice it would make a good backup.

Anyone who has one can post if they've had success charging a playbook with it?

[computer_chick]

I carry a charger with me in my laptop bag and I have a car charger

[peter9477]

So bluetooth is the lowest power consumer of the bunch?

conflicting priorities here. Battery guru is just for monitoring, not power management, no?
I am wondering if anyone has done some actual testing with battery monitoring in this regard.

No real conflict: I said "rough", and Hgouck didn't order the full list the OP posted.

In the end, as Sith_Apprentice points out, it depends a lot on the nature of your usage. I don't have a lot of data pumping through my Bluetooth, so I don't notice it as much of a battery user. But: "rough"... you'll want to do your own analysis if you're really interested in this.

Battery Guru does just monitor... there are no options for "management" in the current APIs, for third-party devs to use anyway.

[Rello]

i dont know about ya'll....but my screen brightness is down all the way all the time, especially if im not home, because i personally dont think the playbook has good battery life which im hoping OS2 will fix. saves me a ton of battery life doing this. besides that though it isnt much else i can do besides rob someone for their charger...hmmmm....

[blackjack93117]

I do nothing! I continue as if nothing is wrong, then when then the battery dies in the midst of killing zombies in hi-def I do what any real BB man would do! Curl up in a ball suck my thumb under my desk and wait for my kids to get out of school and bring my charger to my office - half a block from my house.

Actually, I have a charger in the car, home and office. My kids were tired of finding me like this.

You're killing me lol!

It really depends. Any radio that is constantly sending/receiving (including when looking for a connection) kills battery. Having multiple of these connections running will assuradly nuke it. The more data that is transmitted, the faster it will go. That being said, screen brightness is very possibly the single worst killer of battery on a mobile device. I drop mine down all the way when in a well lit area. It rarely ever goes about 25% or so unless im watching a video and need the picture quality. Also, i would kill any running android apps. While they may not seem like much, they do load into a VM which increases CPU load from the baseline.

That's why I suspected GPS to be at the bottom of the list....it's only a receiver.

I had a feeling this would draw Peter in here - and yes I have the guru - in fact I just bought it on sale which is what brought the idea of this thread to mind. When will we have a power management app Peter?

Of course the best idea is to place it onto standby when not using it - not sure what hardware is "power managed" when you do that - I suspect off would not be a good idea short term since you then have to suck juice to boot it back up again.

Thanks for the inputs, and welcome to Crackberry you cute little newbies!!

Don't miss the tips and tricks for newbies in the link beneath my post...VVVV


.

[Hgouck]

it really depends on what I will be needing the PB for before I get to my charger. Playing games, watching video, or working . Regardless, I would again first lower my brightness to lowest possible setting and turn audio all the way down. (I keep mine that way most of the time to conserve on battery life) Then turn on Airplane Mode and keep it on stand by as much as possible ( Again I do this anyway to conserve battery). Since I use my playbook mostly for gathering info whether internet or email/texting I would switch to using my phone for these things. I would shut down WiFi because even if you are connected to a wifi the PB will continue to look for other wifi in the area which has to cost in battery usage. Once you are connected with bluetooth it maintains this. No data to prove any of this just my opinion.
I have used my PB off and on since 6:30 AM maybe a total of 4 hours of use and still have 50% battery left

[peter9477]

What Hgouck just said reminds me of something that may save you even more power than lowering the brightness in some situations: put it on standby.

It seems a bit silly to say at first, since you mostly can't use the tablet that way.

In fact, two minutes of having the screen on is about the same as one hour of standby. If you use your PlayBook in brief spurts, make liberal use of the "Standby" button available under the battery icon in the system tray (status bar) on the home screen. Don't rely solely on the standby timeout, no matter how short you've set it, if you're trying to skimp on battery.

I go through phases where I'm using the browser for a long period, or playing games. Can't do much with those and standby...

At other times I run various little apps (mostly for work) where I swipe the PlayBook on, tap a few buttons or type a few words, then immediately bottom-swipe, tap, tap it back into standby. If nothing else, this saves up the energy for use on more important things, like playing Bejeweled 2 or, maybe during the holidays, Angry Birds...

[blackjack93117]

Thank I had forgotten about airplane mode - thats an easy way to turn off everything at once.

So Peter, just minimizing the app reduces battery consumption? That should be done even if in standby? The app still runs? Isn't that only in showcase mode?

[peter9477]

So Peter, just minimizing the app reduces battery consumption? That should be done even if in standby? The app still runs? Isn't that only in showcase mode?

Well, that wasn't quite what I meant, but that's a consideration too.

What I meant was simply that the screen and backlight use so much power, that manually putting the thing into standby the instant you're done with it, minor inconvenience though it may be, will save you a lot of power compared to if you simply leave it sitting there with the screen on, but unused, until it puts itself to sleep 30s or a minute or two later. At this point, doing the swipe/tap/tap-to-Standby thing is pretty much second nature to me, so I hardly think about it.

As for minimized apps: there's no 100% consistency here. In principle, the Showcase/Default/Paused ("Application Behaviour") setting controls that to some degree, but apps can override that if they want.

In Showcase, all apps are always "active" and generally use whatever CPU they'd use when fullscreen. (That's a simplification but close enough.)

In Default, the last app you had fullscreen is still active even when you minimize it (i.e. until another is made fullscreen).

In Paused, no apps are active except the one that is currently fullscreen, if any.

Generally speaking, putting the PlayBook into Standby makes *all* apps go inactive, so the three mode settings above are relevant only while the tablet's awake. (Another way to put it: Standby is much like Paused with no app fullscreen...)

Apps can chose to override this in various ways, though most don't.

Battery Guru acts like it's Paused all the time except when it's processing an update, which takes a few milliseconds every two minutes. It's almost inverted: normally inactive, but active briefly every now and then even when the tablet is in Standby.

The latest EA games (because of Marmalade?) seem to ignore the whole thing, which isn't very sociable... they suck lots of power even when minimized, or when you put the tablet into standby, so long as the game is running. For example, running Bejeweled 2 with Paused mode and on Standby, it still sucks up 0.5W for itself... bad app, bad!

Relatively recently (a couple of months ago) they finally gave devs the ability to reliably detect when our apps are actually minimized (regardless of the "Application Behaviour" setting), but few devs have taken advantage of that yet. (The EA Marmalade apps do: they freeze themselves when not fullscreen, but see above: they still suck power, stupidly.)

And in the latest 2.0 beta, we finally have the ability to actually detect when the tablet itself has gone into Standby, so only once 2.0 is released will we finally have the ability to make our apps do exactly what they should be doing, appropriate to their own unique situations. (Of course, devs have to know they can do that, and be willing to, and do it correctly, which is a tall order, but at least in February it will finally be possible. That's the first and most important step.)

So back to your point: minimizing an app can reduce the load, but in Showcase mode generally won't, and in the end it's app-specific anyway. Wait for 2.0 and then pester the devs behind your favourite app to fix their code and do the Right Thing�, as they'll have no excuse not to at that point...

[peter9477]

By the way, Blackjack, I like your new tag line. ;-)