One of the first things you ask yourself (or should be if you didn’t) when you’re looking to buy a new phone is “how about battery life?”. In Gizbeat’s opinion this is in the top 5 most important things when deciding on a new phone. It’s also what some users obsess over after buying their phone.
So to help you obsess further, today we’ll take a look at the 4 apps Gizbeat uses on his own phone to determine charging rates, battery life and help troubleshoot possible trouble areas, for example if your Android phone isn’t going into deep sleep, how much battery life your phone is using during use, charging times and many other aspects of Android battery life.
First up is My Battery Drain Analyzer. This is a great little app that shows battery use for every % point your battery loses. For example, you can see in the image that from 6:58am – 9:45am the battery dropped from 38% to 37% which calculates to .3% of your battery. It also shows battery use by color. Green 0%-1% battery use per % point, yellow for 1%-5%, orange for 5%-20% and red for 20% or more.
This app is perfect for quickly seeing exactly how much your phone is using during deep sleep or while in use.
For seeing averages of charging rates and power drain I use Battery Spy. What an incredible app this is. At the top of the screenshot you can see the money stats are:
- length of time phone’s been on the charger/off the charger
- how much longer before it will be finished charging/time left before battery is dead
- current battery level
- charging/discharging rate per hour
In addition, there’s a very handy graph that can, by sliding your finger along the time bar, expanded to show use from 1 hour-1 week. The graph is a bit small horizontally for it to be useful for taking a look at more than a day, but from 1 hour – 1 day is very handy to see usage rates.
I generally use battery spy to see charging rates. Example, how long it took to charge or current average charging rate.
Now we take a look at CPU Spy Plus. This app is excellent for seeing what state the CPU has been in over a given period of time.
I particularly use this app for quickly determining length of time the phone has been in deep sleep as opposed to awake, or even more importantly – is the phone deep sleeping at all. If it’s not deep sleeping, this next app can help determine what’s keeping it awake.
Better Battery Stats, which is a paid app on Google Play, but free to members of XDA. This app holds a girth of information including:
- how long wifi has been on
- data connection time (2G/3G)
- deep sleep time
- awake time
- screen on time
- phone on time
Importantly and in addition, you can use this app to determine the above times:
- since charged
- since unplugged
- since screen off
- or, set a custom reference point
And maybe most importantly, allows you to see what processes were engaging kernel wakelocks. This is very important in troubleshooting what is keeping your phone from deep sleeping.
Gizbeat usually uses this app to determine screen-on time so you can get a great idea of how much actual ‘on time’ your phone is getting and is invaluable in troubleshooting deep sleep issues.
As usual, come on by the forum to discuss or ask questions about this article or any other article on Gizbeat.
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