Battery drain

[chomlee]

It seems that after the update last week, my tablet has been draining battery power when on standby. Anyone else having the same problem? I have tried setting the wifi to turn off when screen is off and it helps but not enough.

Sent from my A500 using Android Tablet Forrum

 

[Icebike]

You might have actually made matters worse by turning off wifi when screen goes to sleep.

If you have applications running that check email, facebook, twitter, etc etc these will actually make battery drain WORSE with wifi off than leaving wifi on (disconnect = Never). The reason is they have to wake up the entire wifi stack, fetch an IP from the server, re-log in, etc each time you check mail. If you leave wifi on, they can revert to using imap IDLED for mail checks, this takes way less power. The wifi chipset still goes to a deep sleep state (translation: slooooow), but it leaves a socket open to the mail server, and when mail arrives at the server it just sends it on this socket, the tablet sees that the socket has become readable, and ramps the wifi chip up to full speed.

So start by checking your other apps, Mail, news, twitter etc., for short polling intervals. Run away from POP mail as fast as you can, if the ISP does not support IMAP, then have Gmail pop the account for you, and by ALL MEANS enable IMAP in Gmail settings screen (on the web).

The other thing I've noticed, is if you leave a browser in the foreground when the tablet falls asleep and you are on a page that does periodic refreshes (like google news) it will keep keep the tablet pretty busy.

To my way of thinking, the tablet works for me, not the other way around, so I want it fetching mail in the background when its just sitting there so I don't have to check mail etc each time I pick it up.

You will consume a little battery this way, but the utility of your tablet will increase. Sitting unused, I've actually gotten 3 days out of my tablet, with just a few minutes of reading mail each day. I've never yet run out of battery all together on this tablet, even after hours of angry birds. I just don't worry about it.