[Cool Niceman]

From what I've gathered, when it's indexing the media, if it encounters a corrupt file, it'll try to index it around the clock.

[BBUniq01]

Does leaving nfc on all the time not become a battery drain in itself. I also use the Bluetooth to pair up with my earpiece in the car and don't mind unlocking it to do it. Have it assigned to one of the three swipe up functions.

No NFC doesn't drain like Bluetooth does.

[Cool Niceman]

Looks like the logs showed it was defective

[tickerguy]

So you found that the problem was a corrupt media card but still want to claim the phone is defective?

[Cool Niceman]

So you found that the problem was a corrupt media card but still want to claim the phone is defective?

Is there a reason you want the phone to be fine? Is this a matter of you wanting to be right all the time, or does BlackBerry pay you every time you post that the phone isn't defective?

I'm still getting between 8-10 hours of idle time out of the phone, and maybe 3 hours of screen time.

[RichardAitch]

There are definitely huge differences in battery performance that people are experiencing. The first 60 I got was from BB immediately they released it. The battery was very poor and I started a thread on this forum about it. BB told me to return and refund was provided. I then bought from a local store in the UK and the battery is simply amazing.

Here is a screen shot from taking off charge at 0810 (UK Local) this morning. I have to admit I haven't used it much today but the standby is simply awesome and it won't be going on charge tonight.

[00stryder]

There are definitely huge differences in battery performance that people are experiencing. The first 60 I got was from BB immediately they released it. The battery was very poor and I started a thread on this forum about it. BB told me to return and refund was provided. I then bought from a local store in the UK and the battery is simply amazing.

Here is a screen shot from taking off charge at 0810 (UK Local) this morning. I have to admit I haven't used it much today but the standby is simply awesome and it won't be going on charge tonight.

Standby/idle is fine for me, it's active use where the battery tanks. But, I know this is very user-specific so I'm assuming it's something I'm doing. I don't have any of the usual suspects installed (Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) and I toggle Bluetooth off when I don't need it but still pretty significant drain. I don't think I mind too much though, and I'm very pleased with the charge rate of QC 3.0.

[trader69]

Standby/idle is fine for me, it's active use where the battery tanks. But, I know this is very user-specific so I'm assuming it's something I'm doing. I don't have any of the usual suspects installed (Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) and I toggle Bluetooth off when I don't need it but still pretty significant drain. I don't think I mind too much though, and I'm very pleased with the charge rate of QC 3.0.

Bad cellular signal area is a battery drainer... Take a look at this

[Cool Niceman]

Standby/idle is fine for me, it's active use where the battery tanks. But, I know this is very user-specific so I'm assuming it's something I'm doing. I don't have any of the usual suspects installed (Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) and I toggle Bluetooth off when I don't need it but still pretty significant drain. I don't think I mind too much though, and I'm very pleased with the charge rate of QC 3.0.

I've actually been shutting off LTE in an effort to save battery.

[00stryder]

Bad cellular signal area is a battery drainer... Take a look at this

I've actually been shutting off LTE in an effort to save battery.

Would not be surprised if that had a part in it especially where I live/work, though I do fine when I'm not actively using the phone so I'm not sure how much it'd affect it.

[tickerguy]

Is there a reason you want the phone to be fine? Is this a matter of you wanting to be right all the time, or does BlackBerry pay you every time you post that the phone isn't defective?

I'm still getting between 8-10 hours of idle time out of the phone, and maybe 3 hours of screen time.

No, I want you to find your problem and resolve it. Nothing you've provided thus far implies that the problem is a defective battery. Yes, it does happen that batteries are defective from the factory, but it's uncommon and when it happens it is nearly-always an internal partial short in the cell that causes it to self-discharge at a high rate. All secondary batteries ("storage" batteries) have a self-discharge rate; as they age, or if they're defective, that rate goes up. I've given you some places to start looking and instead of following them you did a small part of it, found one problem, fixed it, and then didn't go back and finish it -- but you're still proclaiming that the hardware is defective.

The evidence is simply not there at this time to support that charge. If you swap the device without knowing it's defective, and it's not, your problem will simply continue with the new one!

Now on to some more details....

IDLE bluetooth uses very little energy and NFC uses almost none. ACTIVE bluetooth uses a fair bit, as does any active RF interface (no matter what sort.) In order of consumption (lowest to highest) they are NFC, BluetoothLE, Bluetooth, WiFi and Cellular. There is a modifier on this in that WiFi (and LTE) can move a LOT more bits than Bluetooth over a given period of time, so the question also becomes what is keeping the transmit key on -- bits to move or time. Finally, when it comes to cellular radios the maximum legal handheld power output is 600mw but that is under control of the tower -- if you're close-in with a good signal it is throttled down a lot.

WiFi has different rules; the maximum EIRP is 36dBm or 4 watts (effective radiated power) in the 2.4Ghz band, but that includes antenna gain. WiFi power output on a handset is MUCH lower as it is in the 2.4Ghz band (roughly where microwave ovens are!) and to remain under SAR limits (since you often hold said phone to your head) power must be restricted. Typical is in the ~50mw range.

If you have a poor signal then your phone is running at a higher power output to the cell side, and that will severely impact battery life. It gets even worse if the cell carrier is frequently requesting a reselect, since that forces a burst of transmissions between your handset and the tower that would not otherwise occur. It is transmitting that kills you, basically. It gets even worse when cell companies get very aggressive with traffic management (usually because they have ridiculously oversold into a given area .vs. their actual deployed infrastructure) as that too results in lots of transmit activity that doesn't move user data for you.

You should be aware that if you have IMAP email accounts configured that some of them, especially the big players like Google, Yahoo and similar, abuse the IDLE specification which is used to support "push" email. They will and do frequently drop the IDLE connection, which forces a reconnect and resync of the INBOX folder. This in turn will materially increase power consumption. If you have multiple email accounts all doing this it will dramatically increase power consumption. This isn't BlackBerry's fault nor the Hub, it is the email provider that is responsible and none of them will stop it either. Your only defense if you insist on using such bad behaving email systems is to shut off push delivery (polling every 10 or 15 minutes) or use Exchange, which operates differently -- but be aware that public Exchange providers do the same sort of crap when it comes to "traffic management"! (What's going on is that IMAP/IDLE, or Exchange, keep a TCP socket open for notifications. This by necessity gets closed and reopened when your IP address changes, but otherwise should not. Unfortunately hosts have a limit on how many sockets they can have open, so the big public providers code their software to close said connections after a given period of time OR when they get busy. This does evil things to your power consumption due to it forcing a reconnect from your end as soon as the phone notices it, which involves among other things SSL renegotiation (reasonably expensive in terms of power and bandwidth).)

On the Android side the other issue is one of the app infrastructure. Google makes it difficult to determine EXACTLY what is going on in this regard. Whether this is intentional or simply poor accounting functionality in Android "as delivered" I do not know, but certainly anything that pointed directly back at them would make them unpopular, so you decide. It is not at all uncommon for an app that is responsible for trouble to clock its power consumption under "android services" or some similar thing rather than itself; this is a function of the fact that if you call a system service then the service gets the (power) bill, not you, since your process is waiting on the event to complete and not burning CPU. Abusive use of said services is extremely common and results in ugly battery drain issues that are hard to track down -- but that's not the hardware's fault.

I'll repeat for you:

1. Make sure you have both GSAM Battery Monitor and OS Monitor (free downloads from Play Store) on the device.

2. Fully charge to 100% and make sure it is full (leave it on charge for a few minutes after it reaches full; you want to make sure GSAM's statistics reset along with Android's internal per-charge stats.)

3. Put the phone in AIRPLANE MODE, turn the screen off and let it sit for AT LEAST two hours.

4. Look at the battery status. If it's still 100%, or 99%, the battery is fine.

5. If it is NOT then you still don't know. Open GSAM. You should see effective zeros for all the six categories. Phone, screen, phone radio, wifi active and bluetooth should all be effective zeros, of course, because they have are been off. If "Held Awake" is not an effective zero then AN APP IS RESPONSIBLE because all the system services that can hold the phone awake are disabled with it in Airplane Mode. At the bottom will be "app usage." Tap that and see what's burning up the power; this is a subdivision of the usage that was put forward by "apps." Post both that screen and the top one with the six categories from GSAM.

6. If "Held Awake" is material or you see an app listed with a material amount of power use then use OS Monitor and see if it shows up consuming power on a regular basis. It probably will. Snapshots of that screen are pretty useless as it changes literally by the second, but over a couple of minutes of time you can *observe* the app that is misbehaving.

7. Now look at Android's own internal accounting (pull down shade, select the battery twice.) This will PROBABLY not show you anything particularly interesting, but it might. Note that its estimate of remaining time is NOT just on the present charge; it includes previous behavior over time, and as such has to be mostly ignored. Select anything that shows up there (nothing, or nearly nothing, should) and see what the computed power use is. Again, I don't expect you'll find the culprit on that screen -- but you might.

The *odds* are your phone is physically fine but there is something, likely one or more apps, that is responsible. If you find an app that is responsible for excessive consumption remove it, wait a couple of minutes and then reset. Now re-do the tests *from the beginning*.

Oh, and don't reload the garbage that's causing the problem.

Let me give you one example of an app that is both hard to isolate AND is terrible in this regard -- T-Mobile's "Tuesdays" app. Once started it remains running and does not shut itself down, but what's worse is that on the "Android" accounting screen it charges basically ALL of its power use to Android's internal services categories! You CAN find it on the OS Monitor screen but you have to pay attention. GSAM will catch it as well. If you use it and then pocket the phone you'll find a quarter of your power gone a couple of hours later. But... the phone is fine -- it's the app that's doing it.

[Centerman66]

wow...that's a quality and detailed response to someone who probably doesn't deserve as much thought and attention as you have shown here......Top drawer!

[diego.roscetti]

No, I want you to find your problem and resolve it. Nothing you've provided thus far implies that the problem is a defective battery. Yes, it does happen that batteries are defective from the factory, but it's uncommon and when it happens it is nearly-always an internal partial short in the cell that causes it to self-discharge at a high rate. All secondary batteries ("storage" batteries) have a self-discharge rate; as they age, or if they're defective, that rate goes up. I've given you some places to start looking and instead of following them you did a small part of it, found one problem, fixed it, and then didn't go back and finish it -- but you're still proclaiming that the hardware is defective.

The evidence is simply not there at this time to support that charge. If you swap the device without knowing it's defective, and it's not, your problem will simply continue with the new one!

Now on to some more details....

IDLE bluetooth uses very little energy and NFC uses almost none. ACTIVE bluetooth uses a fair bit, as does any active RF interface (no matter what sort.) In order of consumption (lowest to highest) they are NFC, BluetoothLE, Bluetooth, WiFi and Cellular. There is a modifier on this in that WiFi (and LTE) can move a LOT more bits than Bluetooth over a given period of time, so the question also becomes what is keeping the transmit key on -- bits to move or time. Finally, when it comes to cellular radios the maximum legal handheld power output is 600mw but that is under control of the tower -- if you're close-in with a good signal it is throttled down a lot.

WiFi has different rules; the maximum EIRP is 36dBm or 4 watts (effective radiated power) in the 2.4Ghz band, but that includes antenna gain. WiFi power output on a handset is MUCH lower as it is in the 2.4Ghz band (roughly where microwave ovens are!) and to remain under SAR limits (since you often hold said phone to your head) power must be restricted. Typical is in the ~50mw range.

If you have a poor signal then your phone is running at a higher power output to the cell side, and that will severely impact battery life. It gets even worse if the cell carrier is frequently requesting a reselect, since that forces a burst of transmissions between your handset and the tower that would not otherwise occur. It is transmitting that kills you, basically. It gets even worse when cell companies get very aggressive with traffic management (usually because they have ridiculously oversold into a given area .vs. their actual deployed infrastructure) as that too results in lots of transmit activity that doesn't move user data for you.

You should be aware that if you have IMAP email accounts configured that some of them, especially the big players like Google, Yahoo and similar, abuse the IDLE specification which is used to support "push" email. They will and do frequently drop the IDLE connection, which forces a reconnect and resync of the INBOX folder. This in turn will materially increase power consumption. If you have multiple email accounts all doing this it will dramatically increase power consumption. This isn't BlackBerry's fault nor the Hub, it is the email provider that is responsible and none of them will stop it either. Your only defense if you insist on using such bad behaving email systems is to shut off push delivery (polling every 10 or 15 minutes) or use Exchange, which operates differently -- but be aware that public Exchange providers do the same sort of crap when it comes to "traffic management"! (What's going on is that IMAP/IDLE, or Exchange, keep a TCP socket open for notifications. This by necessity gets closed and reopened when your IP address changes, but otherwise should not. Unfortunately hosts have a limit on how many sockets they can have open, so the big public providers code their software to close said connections after a given period of time OR when they get busy. This does evil things to your power consumption due to it forcing a reconnect from your end as soon as the phone notices it, which involves among other things SSL renegotiation (reasonably expensive in terms of power and bandwidth).)

On the Android side the other issue is one of the app infrastructure. Google makes it difficult to determine EXACTLY what is going on in this regard. Whether this is intentional or simply poor accounting functionality in Android "as delivered" I do not know, but certainly anything that pointed directly back at them would make them unpopular, so you decide. It is not at all uncommon for an app that is responsible for trouble to clock its power consumption under "android services" or some similar thing rather than itself; this is a function of the fact that if you call a system service then the service gets the (power) bill, not you, since your process is waiting on the event to complete and not burning CPU. Abusive use of said services is extremely common and results in ugly battery drain issues that are hard to track down -- but that's not the hardware's fault.

I'll repeat for you:

1. Make sure you have both GSAM Battery Monitor and OS Monitor (free downloads from Play Store) on the device.

2. Fully charge to 100% and make sure it is full (leave it on charge for a few minutes after it reaches full; you want to make sure GSAM's statistics reset along with Android's internal per-charge stats.)

3. Put the phone in AIRPLANE MODE, turn the screen off and let it sit for AT LEAST two hours.

4. Look at the battery status. If it's still 100%, or 99%, the battery is fine.

5. If it is NOT then you still don't know. Open GSAM. You should see effective zeros for all the six categories. Phone, screen, phone radio, wifi active and bluetooth should all be effective zeros, of course, because they have are been off. If "Held Awake" is not an effective zero then AN APP IS RESPONSIBLE because all the system services that can hold the phone awake are disabled with it in Airplane Mode. At the bottom will be "app usage." Tap that and see what's burning up the power; this is a subdivision of the usage that was put forward by "apps." Post both that screen and the top one with the six categories from GSAM.

6. If "Held Awake" is material or you see an app listed with a material amount of power use then use OS Monitor and see if it shows up consuming power on a regular basis. It probably will. Snapshots of that screen are pretty useless as it changes literally by the second, but over a couple of minutes of time you can *observe* the app that is misbehaving.

7. Now look at Android's own internal accounting (pull down shade, select the battery twice.) This will PROBABLY not show you anything particularly interesting, but it might. Note that its estimate of remaining time is NOT just on the present charge; it includes previous behavior over time, and as such has to be mostly ignored. Select anything that shows up there (nothing, or nearly nothing, should) and see what the computed power use is. Again, I don't expect you'll find the culprit on that screen -- but you might.

The *odds* are your phone is physically fine but there is something, likely one or more apps, that is responsible. If you find an app that is responsible for excessive consumption remove it, wait a couple of minutes and then reset. Now re-do the tests *from the beginning*.

Oh, and don't reload the garbage that's causing the problem.

Let me give you one example of an app that is both hard to isolate AND is terrible in this regard -- T-Mobile's "Tuesdays" app. Once started it remains running and does not shut itself down, but what's worse is that on the "Android" accounting screen it charges basically ALL of its power use to Android's internal services categories! You CAN find it on the OS Monitor screen but you have to pay attention. GSAM will catch it as well. If you use it and then pocket the phone you'll find a quarter of your power gone a couple of hours later. But... the phone is fine -- it's the app that's doing it.

If the problem is not resolved after this post then I am not sure anything will "fix" it.

[falbo]

Some really good information in this post so thanks for posting. If my dtek50 ever plays up I know I can refer to it

[tickerguy]

wow...that's a quality and detailed response to someone who probably doesn't deserve as much thought and attention as you have shown here......Top drawer!

Thanks.. I'm a software and network engineer and have ported Android twice when the manufacturer of a handset had a crap version and refused to update it, so I'm very familiar with Android internals... unfortunately. Google employs some crappie coders, Android is a mess internally, and I'm being kind.

[Cool Niceman]

Thanks.. I'm a software and network engineer and have ported Android twice when the manufacturer of a handset had a crap version and refused to update it, so I'm very familiar with Android internals... unfortunately. Google employs some crappie coders, Android is a mess internally, and I'm being kind.

Thanks for the input.

Fully charged. Will be turning airplane mode off and unplugging it from charge at 9:20. Will post similar screenshots at 11:20

[00stryder]

Thanks.. I'm a software and network engineer and have ported Android twice when the manufacturer of a handset had a crap version and refused to update it, so I'm very familiar with Android internals... unfortunately. Google employs some crappie coders, Android is a mess internally, and I'm being kind.

Thanks for such a great post, it was very informative. I don't know if it applies to my particular situation as I have left my phone idle with both cellular and wifi radios on and it has sat near-perfect in terms of battery consumption over several (5+) hours. With Bluetooth turned on, but not actively connected to any peripherals (I do have a FitBit though, and even with turning off the apps continuous connection to the tracker I suspect it's constantly pinging my phone), it's a different story, so I don't turn it on unless I'm actively using it.

My issue comes into play when I turn on the screen and I'm using the device. I'll see pretty significant battery drain, even with the screen brightness at ~20%, adaptive brightness turned off, and me using a variety of apps/services (I do have the notorious Pok�mon GO but outside of that my apps are typically battery-friendly).

So as I've said before I'm pretty comfortable with this given the DTEK60 supports crazy fast QC 3.0, but while I have your ear I waited to take the opportunity to ask if you had any other recommendations to help decide if this is truly a software issue, or just par for my form of active phone use?

[Cool Niceman]

it's 10:37, on my PC. Just checked my phone. Down to 95 percent. Still saying "battery usage data isn't available." gonna let it ride for the next 43 minutes and post some shots.

[Cool Niceman]

The only thing I did was check OS monitor a few times to see if anything jumped out at me.

[tickerguy]

Top level of the GSAM monitor screen? You need both!

[tickerguy]

Thanks for such a great post, it was very informative. I don't know if it applies to my particular situation as I have left my phone idle with both cellular and wifi radios on and it has sat near-perfect in terms of battery consumption over several (5+) hours. With Bluetooth turned on, but not actively connected to any peripherals (I do have a FitBit though, and even with turning off the apps continuous connection to the tracker I suspect it's constantly pinging my phone), it's a different story, so I don't turn it on unless I'm actively using it.

My issue comes into play when I turn on the screen and I'm using the device. I'll see pretty significant battery drain, even with the screen brightness at ~20%, adaptive brightness turned off, and me using a variety of apps/services (I do have the notorious Pok�mon GO but outside of that my apps are typically battery-friendly).

So as I've said before I'm pretty comfortable with this given the DTEK60 supports crazy fast QC 3.0, but while I have your ear I waited to take the opportunity to ask if you had any other recommendations to help decide if this is truly a software issue, or just par for my form of active phone use?

OLED screens are power pigs and if you have something like Pokemon on your phone it's probably even worse. Bluetooth can also be nasty if you have an app that is linked to it.

Garmin had a period of time where their "Connect" app would blow up your power consumption whenever Bluetooth was on. They fixed it, but only after I got up their chute VERY LOUDLY with traces proving their code was responsible...... since they fixed it there is very little impact from Bluetooth even with it on (I wear a Fenix 3 so the sync is always there) -- except when actively using it for something like music streaming.

This is why I wanted BOTH screens from Cool -- the top one from GSAM is very important because if the phone is being held awake then that's where the power drain he's experiencing is coming from and the percentage hit he's taking (~5% an hour) is about right from that cause. If that's the case then it's an app that's responsible, not the device, and yes, it will do it even in airplane mode if the processor is being held awake.

But... he didn't post both screens after the "airplane mode" time had elapsed. And the one he DID post from right after unplugging DOES show "held awake" time accrued.

[jurgvonschmurg]

I also don't leave Apps running. If not being used...i shut them off. Also assigned Bluetooth to my convenience key for quick on/off. Bluetooth and NFC are on only when I need it.

This is genius. I've found that Bluetooth is the main battery hog. Have you done any testing to see if there are specific apps that are putting Bluetooth into an elevated state? I seem to recall that I was able to leave Bluetooth on and not get much battery drain back at the beginning, but I could be mistaken.

[Cool Niceman]

One

[tickerguy]

This is genius. I've found that Bluetooth is the main battery hog. Have you done any testing to see if there are specific apps that are putting Bluetooth into an elevated state? I seem to recall that I was able to leave Bluetooth on and not get much battery drain back at the beginning, but I could be mistaken.

This is fairly common and extremely hard to nail down. Even apps that shouldn't have ANY interaction (and don't "formally") can be responsible -- Gas Buddy is one of the notorious ones and the people who developed it should be BBQ'd and EATEN.

IMHO Cool ought to consider a factory reset, reloading ONLY GSAM + OS Monitor (important: NONE of the other apps currently on the unit) and then a re-test. If that gets the same result then I'd swap the device.

[Cool Niceman]

Two