[lamazion]

I downloaded BatteryGuru and I'm seeing some interesting results. while my PlayBook was in StandBy for 5 hours, I lost about 1% per hr. This seems a little high. Have others seen this loss? Also, under normal use, I'm consuming about 15% per hr.

I'm also keeping Battery Guru running at all times. Do I need to keep it running?

I appreciate any help for a newbe!

[Chaddface]

I downloaded BatteryGuru and I'm seeing some interesting results. while my PlayBook was in StandBy for 5 hours, I lost about 1% per hr. This seems a little high. Have others seen this loss? Also, under normal use, I'm consuming about 15% per hr.

I'm also keeping Battery Guru running at all times. Do I need to keep it running?

I appreciate any help for a newbe!

Standby seems normal to me. You would have to define normal use though. There a lot of varibles when using the PB. Backlight is a big battery drain.
I keep guru running a lot to keep the recording going. It's interesting to see all that data it records.

[jafobabe]

I don't have battery guru, but when I have the PB is standby I click on Airplane Mode. It disconnects the Bluetooth and wifi thereby saving the battery drain.
When I take it out of airplane mode I check to make sure the wifi is connected again and same with the bluetooth options.

This has saved a lot from battery drain for me.

[peter9477]

I downloaded BatteryGuru and I'm seeing some interesting results. while my PlayBook was in StandBy for 5 hours, I lost about 1% per hr. This seems a little high. Have others seen this loss? Also, under normal use, I'm consuming about 15% per hr.

I'm also keeping Battery Guru running at all times. Do I need to keep it running?

Thanks for buying Battery Guru. The standby power seems to vary with the tablet, with a range from about 0.050W to upwards of 0.200W, and no consensus yet as to what causes the variation. If your health reading is about 90%, then 1% per hour would be 0.180W, which is on the high side for what I've seen (over 8+ units) but not as high as some people report.

One possibility for the higher standby consumption may be use of Bluetooth or WiFi. I theorize that if you've got a Windows machine showing the MEDIA share from the PlayBook, it will constantly "poll" the PlayBook to refresh the view, and that will keep the WiFi fully active and using more power.

Others have suggested that if you're away from any known/saved networks, it will constantly be polling to find new networks, using more power.

There's also at least one known bug with GPS where if you've been using it, it can (but may not always) stay active after you exit the app, and that will keep it using about 0.200W even in standby.

Try disabling your radios (BT and WiFi) and then restart your tablet. Run nothing but Battery Guru once it's booted up, and put it into standby. Check on it five minutes later and see what the power reading is, immediately out of standby. That's your baseline... anything higher at other times is either wireless data, the GPS issue, or something else. More reports and analysis from people might let us track down some pattern and identify certain problems that may exist in some units. You can bet RIM isn't going to be admitting any units are flawed, any time soon, so it's up to us to analyze it ourselves if we want to.

You do need BG running all the time if you want it to be recording data. There are no features in the OS yet which would allow developers to write "background services", which would let it continue monitoring without having the UI showing. Another thing we hope RIM provides some day...

[Hgouck]

Peter knows his stuff. If I can offer a couple suggestions. By turning your screen display down as low as usable (swipe down from right top edge and tap the battery) it will help with battery life. Also when you are not using your PB, I tap the option icon (looks like a gear) and turn on airplane mode which turns off all connections will extend battery life as well. One last thing instead of closing your PB and letting it time out tap the battry icon and tap stand-by will also help with battery life. Next time you open your PB again the airplane icon will be at the top right corner. Tap it and turn it off and with in 10 seconds you will be connected again.

[lamazion]

Thanks for all the great feedback! Interestingly, I just put it in standby for about an hr and had almost no battery drain. Oh well, at least with Battery Guru I have the tool to help figure out why the two standby drains were so different.

[leanneleg]

Just bought it too! Great little app with tons of info!

[bap2510]

i downloaded battery guru yesterday and can't figure out how to access the csv exports. Can someone please tell me how?

[kennyliu]

By the way, do you, guys, expect the Playbook to consume more energy when on standby due to more apps (email, calendar, etc) constantly running and syncing in the background? Or will the background services be too negligible to affect standby battery life?

[peter9477]

It would depend on your synchronization settings, and of course on how much data was retrieved. Having native email running, I definitely expect to see an increase in average power consumption in standby. I don't expect it to be too great...

Remember, the screen and backlight use by far the most power in the system. Using WiFi for masses of data can use quite a bit (but well under the screen's usage), but if you only do that for a few seconds and then stop until the next synchronization, that averages out to very little.

I also expect that, whatever the increase, they'll be optimizing it over time and in my opinion it seems unlikely it will be a cause for concern in the long term.

[peter9477]

i downloaded battery guru yesterday and can't figure out how to access the csv exports. Can someone please tell me how?

The files are dumped into your documents folder, under a subfolder named Battery Guru. To get to them from your PC (which is the main way they're useful), you need to know how to retrieve data over the network using USB or WiFi. The technique for doing this isn't unique to Battery Guru, so there should be any number of threads in this forum on how to "transfer files over WiFi" or "access Samba share from a PC" or things like that.

I should probably find the master RIM documentation on this and bookmark the link... I've never needed it myself so I've never looked.

[diegonei]

8-12% per hour of use here (unless Dead Space/NFS is involved). In standby, with Bridge and WiFi on, it lasts over 10 hours, which is impressive in my book.

[smartie88]

Hey,

I am new to PB, just wondering is there any setting or apps that can disable my WiFi or BT if I don't use PB say for 10 minutes. Android has some apps to do so. I don't want to disable manually.

Thanks

[Sparksx]

I too have been running into strange battery draining. I think I should probably disable push maybe? Not sure what else it could be.

Sent from my BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps using Tapatalk

[crackberryrob]

Hey All

I am glad to report that I have fixed my battery issue. Since OS2.0 update I have been having wacky issues with my PB. I finally bit the bullet and did a wipe.

That still didn't solve my issue. I would unplug my PB at 7am and by 4 it was dead.

I went to this link: How to restore your BlackBerry PlayBook OS to the current version (v1.0.7) if you�ve installed the Developer Beta OS (v2.0) �Inside BlackBerry Help Blog

I then followed the steps and had my PB os reinstalled.

It did not reinstall the old OS it actually kept 2.0. I then went and reinstalled all my apps.

Today was the first full work day with the newly installed system and here is what I have to report:

Unplugged at 7am and had it with me with wifi and bluetooth on all day. Bridged to my 9900 all day. Did a lot of emailing and also downloaded the 2 free game apps from the store which are 400 and 500Mb respectively. I kept the brightness low. I also pairedthe pb with my Ford Sync. Awesome

It is now 11:30pm and I am at 62% battery power.