So far I have been happy with the battery life of my new HTC One smartphone. Today, however, I’ve noticed faster than usual battery drain. Battery Widget Reborn is showing battery discharge is currently decreasing 1% every 4 minutes; normally that is around 10-13 minutes. However, I am beginning to wonder whether something is wonky with the widget because it is also sharing the charger was unplugged 54 minutes ago, and I know that to be much longer.
- Is Battery Widget Reborn counting since I restarted the phone? (When I noticed that the phone seemed to be draining battery faster than usual I rebooted the phone.) The stats being reported make more sense if that is the case. I’ve just plugged the phone in to a charger to see how that makes a difference.
I’ve been down this road before and my experience is that network communications is one of the top culprits for battery drain, and specifically I’ve seen that the automatic backup service in Android was having problems and transferring a lot of data. In those instances I disabled automatic backup and the battery drain improved.
In the past, to troubleshoot what is talking on the network I had installed an app to monitor network traffic, but I was having difficulty remembering which app I had used. I found a Lifehacker article about what it thinks is the best data usage monitor app for Android and it recommends Onavo Count, which I installed. The article also mentions My Data Manager, which I think is the app I used before, but since I have already installed Onavo I am going to use it for a while.
- Apparently, there is also a network compression tool intended to increase the amount of data you can transfer called Onavo Extend, but I am not using it.
Notes From The Cave 