Semi-Fix and Extend T-Mobile G1 Battery Life
Posted: Oct 31, 04:09 PMI have been using the T-Mobile G1 for a little over a week now and I have to say I really love this device. It is easy to use and navigate with one hand, huge bright display, UMTS/HSDPA enabled, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. This phone has it all. Unfortunately for the past week battery life has been nothing to write home about.
For the first couple days, battery life was actually pretty good. After installing more than a few applications from the Android Market, I quickly noticed a significant decrease in battery time. Where as I was getting a good 5-6 hours previously, I was barely getting by without charging my phone ever 3 hours – if that. On top of that I noticed that the sync icon was always staying on in the notification area which seems to be a problem a lot of people are having with version RC19 of the Android OS.
I tried everything I could think of from deleting applications to soft-rebooting the T-Mobile G1 every few hours, hoping to close whatever applications were still running in the background and to maybe stop the device from the never-ending sync, which I’m sure had a lot to do with the battery issue.
Nothing worked and eventually the idea came to be to just pull the batter for a few seconds. Luckily this seemed to work. Popping the battery out for about 5 seconds and putting it back in and booting up I noticed a drastic increase in my T-Mobile G1’s performance. No longer were the graphics all twitchy whenever I tried to bring up the menu and the never-ending sync hasn’t been seen yet.
After a few days of using the device and having it get all gummed up again, and even starting the never-ending sync again, I was able to reproduce the positive system effects of pulling the battery out. Strangely enough though, just rebooting the device without pulling the battery out doesn’t appear to help at all in speeding up my system. I’m not sure why pulling the battery seems to have such a positive effect, but it did. Now after pulling the battery, I can unplug my phone from the charger at 8AM and still have over 80% batter power left after 2PM.
If your’re having the same problems as I was with your T-Mobile G1 battery life, this little trick should help you until T-Mobile either releases the RC29 update to all of their customers, or some crafty programmer creates a Task Manager type program, It baffles me that there wasn’t one already included in the OS, so we can just kill whatever system hogging applications are running in the background.