Samsung Galaxy S2 Battery

SatanIsMyMotor

I've been struggling with my Samsung Galaxy S2 for a few months now and I'm about at the end of my leash. While I have a few problems the battery life is probably the biggest. When I look at the battery chart it says the display is the culprit - eating up over 60% of my battery life. The phone actually gets physically warm. Has anyone else experienced this? Any known fix?

I've updated and have reset the phone to factory defaults then updated again. I'm thinking of rooting the phone next but I wanted to check with y'all to see if there was something simple I could be missing.

Iceman.USAF

Does 60% seem legit? I mean what are you doing on your phone in a given day? How long is your battery lasting? Are you using the stock battery?

SatanIsMyMotor

It does seem legit. It still has the stock battery in it and I'm finding that I'm lucky to get a full day out of the phone with minimal usage.

Apogee

Sounds way off to me. My phone currently has been on for 6 hours, and I had about half an hour of talk time today, plus some redditing. Battery stands at 83%. 40% went to calls, 15% to cell standby, and 7% to display (lots of misc stuff in there too) Something seems off for yours; my display timeout is 10 seconds, and it's on regular auto-brightness.

Darkewolfe

I have an S2. I had a problem with a malfunctioning screen lately (about 8 months into ownership) and got a replacement from them. Resetting to a new phone made me realize how poorly the old S2's battery had held up over time. When I first had it, battery life was pretty good, heavy use across an entire day would drain it, but otherwise I'd have it for a full day. After owning it a bit, regular use would drain it by the end of the day. Resetting to a new battery, I'm back to the better battery performance.

Not understanding the science of batteries, my uninformed opinion is that the S2's battery just "wears out" after 6-12 months of use.

Calixtus

Do you always have the screen, like, on? Because standard usage shouldn't make it warm, only time I managed to heat mine up was when I forgot a sound analyzer on for well over an hour straight. Doing shit that just keeps the display running shouldn't be enough, it needs to be running something that'll actually make the CPU work. And it shouldn't be.

Get an advanced task manager and kill every process you don't need. The one I use is called just that, Advanced Task Manager.

defreak

What is your brightness set at? if it's close to max, then 60% is probably right. It also depends on how often you use the phone for actual calling. If you just text mostly, then it's possible to have 60% just for display on low brightness setting.

SatanIsMyMotor

Brightness is set to autobrightness and is never above 50%. And, no, the screen isn't on all the time. I have it set to time out at 10 seconds.

AresProphet

SatanIsMyMotor wrote: »

Brightness is set to autobrightness and is never above 50%. And, no, the screen isn't on all the time. I have it set to time out at 10 seconds.

I have an AT&T Galaxy S2. Turn off autobrightness. Set yours to the 25-33% area, it'll seem a little dim at first but you will adjust and notice no difference after only a few hours. The display on that phone looks fine even at a low setting.

Automatic brightness seems to chew through battery life on most phones, and for me it never seems set at the right level for what I'm doing.

If that doesn't fix it, warranty that sucker.

Afty

I have a Galaxy Nexus and I notice that it does sometimes get warm, I have a silca gel case thing on it which I've heard can make phones over heat, if you have one try removing it. Have you tried a "battery saver" App at all there are a couple of good ones that can really help.

SatanIsMyMotor

I'll definitely check out some battery saver apps. As for a case - it's not even in one.

Thanks for the help so far folks. Really appreciate it.

ruzkin

I have a Galaxy S1. Over 12 months, my battery life dropped from 4-5 days when it was new to around 24 hours with minimal usage. I was sad.

Then I did some googling and ended up using Batteryspy (free app) to reset my battery calibration tables. I followed that with a full discharge (Angry Birds and streaming video for 5 hours killed the battery dead) followed by a full recharge (and I mean full - around 20 hours plugged in) followed by a second full discharge, to really reset the full and zero calibration.

Now I get, no shit, 8-10 days of battery life with wireless off, 3-4 with wireless on. It's magical.

Lanchester

I have a S2 as well and experience similar battery issues, including the battery/phone actually getting hot.

If you don't use Bluetooth, GPS, and even wifi when you're out...you can turn those off and it helps a little. Your main saver will be the display.

However, I haven't really found a fix so I just bought a second charger to keep in my car...

Apogee

Oh yeah, bluetooth/GPS drains the battery quite a bit too. Wifi even more so, Reddit on wifi will drain the battery to zero in a couple hours. I keep them all off unless actively using them.

techdood

i just get a cord and tether my self to a outlet

SatanIsMyMotor

Some how the problem has randomly seemed to have corrected itself. Now to deal with the 100 other problems with the phone...

Dhalphir

I had similar problems re: battery life, but in my case it was the Android OS chewing up all the battery life. Turns out that a bunch of apps were continually waking the phone from standby with an attempt to sync, but being blocked by my data usage app (which doesn't allow apps to sync unless I say they can). By disabling those apps, my battery life went way up.