Battery problems, .668 update, and Hotmail

I've recently upgrade to a 64gb Playbook, and not long after applied the .668 update when it came out. I then started to suffer horrific battery life - within 12 hours on standby the battery would be done to 2% or so.

All the usual tricks - doing a hard reset etc. - had no effect.

In an effort to track it down (and with the realisation that a backup of settings in .668 wasn't going to restore to the previous release - bummer!) I started to disable things that could affect battery life.

First stop was email accounts, disabling them one at a time. The first one was Hotmail - and bingo! Battery life back to normal.

Clearly with Outlook.com MS have 'done something' to how their public email systems work - whether it's a change in push, or polling, or what, I don't know (and can't debug on a tablet).

Yes, I understand that push email and polling for email will have an impact on battery life - but it should never be this severe, and certainly never used to have this sort of impact.

My Playbook is configured to pickup email from 7 self-hosted email accounts, GMail, Hotmail, LinkedIn, and Facebook - it gets used very heavily and so I'm aware of what battery life should be like for my 'normal' usage.

Anyway, disabling all Hotmail/Live/Outlook accounts on your Playbook should help put battery life back to normal.

As a test, after two days of normal battery life, I fully charged the Playbook, and re-enable my Hotmail account. Back to 3% battery after 12 hours on standby.

Disabled the account, recharged the Playbook, and 36 hours later I've got 70% charge still.

So I'm fairly certain, after this testing, that it's not the .668 update that caused battery issues, it's MS's email systems.

YMMV and all that, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who:
- has poor battery life with the pulled update, but *doesn't* have a Hotmail/Live/Outlook email account enabled
- has disabled their Hotmail/Live/Outlook accounts on their Playbook - what's the effect on battery life afterwards?

Cheers,
TOM

I did a security wipe and loaded the .668 OS and the battery life was even better. However, I have experienced some problems with the calendar not opening anymore. It kind of opens and just shows the circle as if it's syncing or updating but it never loads properly.

Maybe this is why the OS was pulled by RIM???

That about sums up the problems I've been having. My email doesn't work anymore and the battery drains excessively in standby.

thread in the main forum which has also reached the same conclusion that hotmail was the cause of excessive battery drain

Well, actually RIM's incompetence caused the problems. Just sayin

Changing the configured server from m.hotmail.com to snt-m.hotmail.com solved my heating, notification, and battery drain issues on the 2.1 beta.

To fix my heavy standby drain I simply changed the hotmail account Push setting to sync every 15mins which is found in the advanced settings. It's all back to normal now with my battery lasting 3 days with normal use.

I just found this and I had the same problems. I had this a few days before the 668 update and had hoped the update would fix them. I deleted the hotmail account and then did a three finger reboot and battery usage is now back to normal.

I updated to .668 and just like every single update I have ever done on my PB it caused a great amount of issues, but I learned how to simply fix every single issue with one simple step: Security Wipe.

It fixed my android player issues, battery issues, et cetera...

Honestly, I know people hate SecWipes and do not believe that they should ever really have to be done, but I keep my backups up-to-date, and just expect every time to do a Security Wipe, and I have to say on a PB it does not take any more than a few additional seconds...

I just consider it normal e-housekeeping now...