# Multi Rom Battery Life Comparisons, tweaks and tricks



## Shane269 (Jun 10, 2011)

I am starting this to consolidate the topics of batter life discussion and try to keep them out of the ROM discussions as they seem to flood the topics sometimes. Post up your tips and successes and comparisons here. This will make them easy to find and compare results.


----------



## BMc08GT (Jun 23, 2011)

Powerboost







nuff said

/soapbox

My modified smartassv2 will help tho upon release.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using RootzWiki


----------



## Goose306 (Sep 12, 2011)

In my opinion, if just going strictly for battery life, running 2nd init ROMs:

Underclock and undervolt. Be on the Defy base (IMO, which would be MIUI) because its based on a smaller CPU that is normally clocked lower. If you are just using primary functions like me most of the time (browser, text, phone, a few other small apps and games but nothing too intensive) it just purrs along. Speeding up animation makes it seem snappier on the go so you don't really notice the underclock, and a bit of filesystem read-ahead works nicely. Finally, get a good governor and clock speed set-up, for your phone. I know not everyone likes MIUI, but if I am going strictly for battery life and on 2nd-init, I would say it probably gets the best.

Running blur ROMs"
Slight overclock and undervolt. Blur needs more power because it has more running, and thats just the stock OS. Its feels fat to me, even when debloated. Kicking it up a bit is needed to make it really feel right, undervolt usually helps a bit. I'd imagine something like the Smartass v2 (as its the best we have currently, although waiting to try BMc's) would probably be awesome on most likely Vortex, or Liberty. Liberty was always a bit hit-or-miss to me for battery life however, but I know plenty of people that could get a long life.


----------



## griz.droidx (Jun 29, 2011)

Good luck with the thread, and thanks for the advice Goose. I've been trying for ages to get the battery life of Liberty 3 V2 on CM7GB and/or MIUI and it just ain't happening for me. I have profiles setup in AndOC for screen off, screen on, and battery <50. But I use those on all roms. Right now on Liberty with all the bells and whistles, facebook, weather updating every 4-6 hours, and so on, I can usually go all day with light use and only lose ~10%. The best I could do on the 2nd inits was 10% in the first four hours, then by the end of the day or time for bed, I'm at 15-30, b/c I use it heavily at home as a tablet for web browsing/news etc.

In fact, yesterday we had a huge snowstorm the worst for us of the season, and I flashed my nandroid of Lib in case the power went out!. A few years ago our power was out for 5-7 days and so I figured I'd better go back to Lib for a while. Exactly how long does your battery life last on Defx MIUI? And with what kind of use? Where do you get Smartassv2? I saw that BMC was including his version in PB 2.5, but if you're already using it then where are you getting it from?

I'd like to see some more people chime in even though it's been beat to death on every thread on every forum.


----------



## Goose306 (Sep 12, 2011)

griz.droidx said:


> Good luck with the thread, and thanks for the advice Goose. I've been trying for ages to get the battery life of Liberty 3 V2 on CM7GB and/or MIUI and it just ain't happening for me. I have profiles setup in AndOC for screen off, screen on, and battery <50. But I use those on all roms. Right now on Liberty with all the bells and whistles, facebook, weather updating every 4-6 hours, and so on, I can usually go all day with light use and only lose ~10%. The best I could do on the 2nd inits was 10% in the first four hours, then by the end of the day or time for bed, I'm at 15-30, b/c I use it heavily at home as a tablet for web browsing/news etc.
> 
> In fact, yesterday we had a huge snowstorm the worst for us of the season, and I flashed my nandroid of Lib in case the power went out!. A few years ago our power was out for 5-7 days and so I figured I'd better go back to Lib for a while. Exactly how long does your battery life last on Defx MIUI? And with what kind of use? Where do you get Smartassv2? I saw that BMC was including his version in PB 2.5, but if you're already using it then where are you getting it from?
> 
> I'd like to see some more people chime in even though it's been beat to death on every thread on every forum.


It honestly depends on my usage. It sounds like you are getting phenomonal (sp?) battery life on Liberty. When I used to use Liberty I just could never push it that hard. I tried stock bare bones with no syncs, tried underclocking, undervolting, everything. Are you on an extended battery? When I was on Liberty my battery life was fairly comparable to DefX. I could sometimes get a bit better, but it just wasn't worth it to me, and it was just to blurry and not customizable for my taste (after living on MIUI since it was first released by Framework, its been damn hard to come off) It might have gotten slightly better, but not enough for me to warrant not being on MIUI, which honestly between all the various ROMs I've flash is by FAR my favorite. Once ICS becomes a bit more mature and hopefully gets a working camera, I may start looking that direction, I did like Encounter when I was on it.

My battery life (on a stock battery) is pretty solid with DefX. One thing I will say is I ditched Facebook a LONG time ago. Even when I had syncs set up on that for every 6 hours it was still pulling partial wakelocks constantly. Maybe it was just me, but dumping that literally easily added another 4-6 hours to my battery life, and I rarely use my Facebook, I just had the app to upload pictures, so I dumped it. Everything else is pretty solid, I have two different weather apps, set to update only when already waked and every 2 hours. I do not use QC Advanced for the most part, I have it but is rarely used since we now have the functioning boot menu. I underclock and undervolt mine, my current profile is set 900-700-500-300 with VSELS at 52-40-28-18. I applied a faster transitions mod using Spare Parts + so it doesn't feel underclocked. It is completely stable, however when I first wake it, it will take about 1 1/2 second for the screen to be responsive. This is by no means a deal breaker to me, especially for the battery savings.

I use my phone fairly consistently, I use it when on lunch and smoke breaks at work, which total up around an hour or more, and when chilling around waiting for class and whatnot when I'm on campus. I'm usually not playing games but web browsing, texting, calling, etc. which is why I don't mind the underclock even more. I would say total time between charges I usually run from at 5am I am up and unplugged, and it is usually put back on to charge around 10pm. Depending on the day, I am somewhere usually around 75-50% battery remaining. I also use WIFI when at home. (I do not have WIFI at work, and campus WIFI is worse than 3G, so I don't use it there). This is on a stock battery, I'm getting an extended in the mail so we'll see where I am with that. Essentially, with normal usage I could probably pull around a two days uncharged with usage, with very light usage I could probably extend that out to 3 or so. With Liberty the hardest I could push it under normal usage was around 2.5 days, but that was inconsistent, and it was definitely creaking trying to run everything with how tightened up and throttled-down I had it. Blur is just too bulky for underclocking in my experience.

If you want the Smartass v2 governor and any other newer ones (besides BMc's) I zipped up the govs from DefX including the symsearch.ko. You can grab it from my dropbox if you want, I believe other people have gotten them working pretty easily on other ROMs:

http://dl.dropbox.co...5/Governors.zip
*MD5*: E3A0996576D853CF829FDA78206DDFDB
Installation according to bobcaruso:



> Make sure you also have symsearch.ko as well (also device dependent)
> Both drivers go in the /system/lib/modules dir
> 
> then grab an init.d script (from PB or JB, modify it to use smartassV2.


*EDIT:* Wow, holy crap, sorry for the story. I type really fast when I'm on my laptop and sometimes I lose track of where I am. TL;DR - underclock, undervolt, run light programs consistently, DefX I can get 2 days of standard usage. If you want details how and info on the govs, read above.


----------



## hyt1993 (Dec 2, 2011)

Well for the smartassv2 governor its included with the latest miui rom with the defyx base

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk


----------



## griz.droidx (Jun 29, 2011)

Goose306 said:


> It honestly depends on my usage. It sounds like you are getting phenomonal (sp?) battery life on Liberty. When I used to use Liberty I just could never push it that hard. I tried stock bare bones with no syncs, tried underclocking, undervolting, everything. Are you on an extended battery? When I was on Liberty my battery life was fairly comparable to DefX. I could sometimes get a bit better, but it just wasn't worth it to me, and it was just to blurry and not customizable for my taste (after living on MIUI since it was first released by Framework, its been damn hard to come off) It might have gotten slightly better, but not enough for me to warrant not being on MIUI, which honestly between all the various ROMs I've flash is by FAR my favorite. Once ICS becomes a bit more mature and hopefully gets a working camera, I may start looking that direction, I did like Encounter when I was on it.
> 
> My battery life (on a stock battery) is pretty solid with DefX. One thing I will say is I ditched Facebook a LONG time ago. Even when I had syncs set up on that for every 6 hours it was still pulling partial wakelocks constantly. Maybe it was just me, but dumping that literally easily added another 4-6 hours to my battery life, and I rarely use my Facebook, I just had the app to upload pictures, so I dumped it. Everything else is pretty solid, I have two different weather apps, set to update only when already waked and every 2 hours. I do not use QC Advanced for the most part, I have it but is rarely used since we now have the functioning boot menu. I underclock and undervolt mine, my current profile is set 900-700-500-300 with VSELS at 52-40-28-18. I applied a faster transitions mod using Spare Parts + so it doesn't feel underclocked. It is completely stable, however when I first wake it, it will take about 1 1/2 second for the screen to be responsive. This is by no means a deal breaker to me, especially for the battery savings.
> 
> ...


Man, that is some killer battery life from a 2nd init rom! Wow.

Nope I'm not on an extended battery. And I hear ya on the customizations. The Blurry roms are still too bloated for me even though Liberty is fairly stripped for such a rom. I've been using the 2nd Init roms since they came out last June, I think right around the 16th or so because it was near my birthday. I had one of the early CM7 froyo builds tweaked to death to get really good battery life. Almost as good as what I'm getting on Liberty now as hard as that is to believe. I have the screen's to prove it too on another forum (dedicated to the X).

Yeah, so even though Liberty is fairly customizable for not being a 2nd init, once you're used to something like CM7 or MIUI, there's just no comparison. What I miss on MIUI that is available on CM7 is the ability to use the Volume Controls to skip tracks. I know the latest builds include that feature but I'm fairly certain it only works with the stock MIUI player (which is pretty awesome BTW). I undervolt, but I'm using 300mhz with a vsel of 18, 705 @ 37, 940 @ 49, and 1175 @ 63. Using CPU Spy I find that I rarely use 1175. I don't do a lot of gaming myself either although I have several installed mostly instant satisfaction games like Reversi, Freecell, Angry Birds, etc and rarely if ever play them. I do use Autostarts and/or Rom Toolbox Pro, to prevent stuff like Maps and other Apps from Automagically starting when they don't need to. One thing that seems to hurt my battery life is being in an area with a very weak signal both at work and home. I have two bars max at both places of 1x. At home wifi is on constantly. I've been thinking about using tasker or one of those Battery saving apps to turn off Wifi and data when the screen is off, or just letting it come on occasionally for updates. When I use CM7 or MIUI, I've been turning off WIFI and data while at work to try to squeeze out a little more life.

Maybe with the combination of getting rid of facebook, underclocking/undervolting, and using Smartass2, I can get similar life. I certainly hope so. I'm gonna give MIUI a go, I just like the theme's Red passion, Eyecandy, and Cherry Mixer so much on CM7. And can't find anything even close on MIUI even though there are a lot of nice themes for it. I've tried getting themes from Zcool, but it's all chinese and I can never find the download links. I found a new green theme somewhere that I'll probably try if I use MIUI. If you happen to know of any nice Black and Red theme's that are readable and look nice let me know. I might have to mix and match a few to get what I want. That's one thing I do like about MIUI, is the ability to Mix and Match theme's easily. And I use the spare parts to speed up animations too.

One person told me that he thinks the reason the battery life is generally worse on 2nd Inits like CM7 is the massive Customizations and settings.. I disagree, because no matter how much you de-bloat the stock rom, there's still a lot of stuff lingering.

Thanks everyone for all the info. I can't wait to try the blue light overclock/undervolting. I wasn't sure if that was working or not. I do like that you can enter CWM Recovery from there. I've used that a ton in the past.

Oh and as far as Liberty not getting the life you might expect, I'd say, I'm not getting much better if any than what you are on MIUI. But one thing I do when installing a non 2nd-init rom is restore my Rooted, CWM installed, 605 nandroid, then install Liberty. When I tried just wiping data from CM7 and installing Liberty, I got all sorts of errors, fc's and so on. Well, I've really gotta get back to work. Modding your Droid is probably more addicting than Crack or Heroin.









Thanks again guys for the info.


----------



## griz.droidx (Jun 29, 2011)

One more question, I already know the defx build uses the defy base, the galnet build uses some ics stuff and that's about all I know. Are there pro's or cons to each. Also, if memory serve's me DXC started the Defx Builds. Are there advantages or disadvantages to using either? Without starting a war.. LOL. I've ran both in the past and both ran well for me. But I'm thinking about trying the Defx buidl tonight and was just curious.


----------



## Goose306 (Sep 12, 2011)

griz.droidx said:


> One more question, I already know the defx build uses the defy base, the galnet build uses some ics stuff and that's about all I know. Are there pro's or cons to each. Also, if memory serve's me DXC started the Defx Builds. Are there advantages or disadvantages to using either? Without starting a war.. LOL. I've ran both in the past and both ran well for me. But I'm thinking about trying the Defx buidl tonight and was just curious.


Personal taste. Both are relatively stable and have the same fixes implemented or available for them, same with features. They are both initially based off the Defy base that DXC ported over, Beans is just the ICS build with the framework tweaks, where Wiz's is full GB, basically picking up where DXC had left off. I'm currently on DefX, but between the two I'd say you can get comparable battery life.


----------

