Treo 680 battery life
 

I just recieved my new unlocked GSM Treo 680, and am using it with T-Mobile with no problems. Now I understand that the battery on this device leaves a lot to be desired, but I think mine has a problem. Just curious to see if anyone has any suggestions or has had this same issue.

I charged the phone to 100% in the evening, and took it off the charger. Let it set on my dresser overnight. When I got up in the morning, it was down to 20% remaining. That is after 8 hours of just setting on my dresser. I charged it again, and after 4 hours it was down to 50%. I made a couple of calls and checked my email, and it was down to 30%. Is this normal? If it is, it's going back to Palm. My 650 was far superior in terms of battery life, and the benefits of the 680 vs. the 650 do not make up for this poor of battery life. :(

I did contact Palm and they are sending a replacement battery out. I just can't imagine any device that has this poor of battery life. :mad:


Any suggestions appreciated.

It's a battery calibration and battery meter problem. To recalibrate, plug in the charger, remove the battery, wait a bit, then put it back in to reset it. The battery meter should be better, as even though yours shows 20%, chances are it still has a lot of juice left (a few people on TreoCentral were running on 5% for hours lol). Second thing is to keep the puppy charging as much as possible, and within a week or two it'll start to be steady and at least for me, the battery life is now fine.

This seems to be correct. After doing the remove the battery reset described above, my battery indicator is showing more power than before.

I've been following the threads on TreoCentral on this issue, and it seems to be all over the place. Some have good luck with the reset, some don't. Some are talking about SIM cards being the problem, some aren't. Palm sent me an entirely new phone, and it is exhibiting the same issue. I am running a program called BatteryGraph that seems to be providing some data but no answers. For some reason, the phone is doing something when it is just sitting, and no one can seem to figure out why. :confused:

Oh, well, the debate continues. :eek:


:D

I found the battery life a bit on the down side as well, but could not really compare having used a T3 before (which is a real power hungry beast :rolleyes:).
After applying the 'in-cradle reset' procedure as described above by +Kardboard+ and going through 1 full discharge/charge cycle I can say I am able to get close to 6 hours of continuous use (tested with BatteryTime and AlwaysOn). Pretty cool I would say ... :cool:

Bear in mind that most LiIon battery only reach their maximum capacity after going through 5 or 6 full discharge/charge cycles.

Hello,

as I read in the german forum (palmpaper.de) the user Replay investigated that the camera is the application that drains the battery down.

Do the adjustment of the battery and don't use the camera after the adjustment. Then the battery life will increase. Try it and have fun.

Best regards TT3

My results
 

I got a 680 Saturday and have found the same issue with the battery. I've read a whole pile of threads on this now. I just posted this over at Brighthand:

Initial report - after the cradle reset and charging the battery I have let it sit for 3 hours. I turned the screen on and the battery meter is reporting full. I phoned Rogers tech support and they have not heard anything from Palm but they've only had the unit for 10 days. I've called Palm. They do advise a in cradle soft reset. But the problem, that has been reported after camera use causing the unit to discharge and require an in cradle reset to stop what the camera is doing in background, has not been heard of.

I told Palm I would test the unit as a PDA only as I don't want to go over my voice and data limit that would prevent me from returning the phone. If it tests out as I would expect it to as a PDA, I will enable the phone receiver for just standby mode to see how that manages. If that is fine, I will then take a couple of photos. If the battery suddenly starts to discharge abnormally, then I think we can assume it is something to do with this. If not, then who knows.

Palm has given me a case number. They want the results of my tests so that they can input them to their system. From my perspective, I want to provide these results as I have to decide whether to keep it or not. I'm not concerned about what I paid for the Treo 680 as I got it for an excellent price $250 Canadian all in with a very good three month introductory voice and data plan discount. I'm concerned about the 3 year contract and would not want to keep this if the phone is problematic as this would be a real waste of money.

Anyway, if anyone has gotten to the point where they've replicated and isolated the camera as the culprit in the battery drain scenario, then it would be wise to report this to Palm technical support and then their Corporate office. I have the corporate number if anyone would need that.

I've done the in-cradle reset / plug-in-and-take-battery-out / drain-fully-several-times regimen and it has certainly helped.

I've also stayed away from the camera.

The result?

My 680 was plugged in overnight and unplugged at 12:30 this afternoon. Now, over 8 hours later, the battery meter reads 99%.

I think my meter is screwed up the other way now.... sigh.

Interesting. I did the same thing and after 12 hours but just letting it sit idle the battery meter is reading full or it looks full. So there is something to this in cradle reset. I too have stayed away from the camera. But after I test this further by syncing, turning on the cell radio and keeping it in standbye to see how well it performs, if it keeps performing well I'll take a couple of pictures and see what happens. If it keeps performing well then it must be that for some reason, even though it was new and straight out of the box it required this kind of reset. If it starts performing poorly then I guess it would be something to do with the camera. In talking to Palm, although they do recommend this in cradle reset they are not aware of anything with the camera. But there are more than one notations in the threads about the camera being the culprit. Should be able to figure this out fairly quickly.

Sounds quite cool in other mind :D lol

How do you perform this "in-cradle reset" on the Treo 680?

To do an in cradle reset plug in the charger then remove the back cover and pull the battery out I'd say for one minute. Then put the battery back in while still plugged to the charger. Let the unit reboot.

I've found the above seems to affect the excessive battery drain. Yesterday and the day before I just let it sit in standby mode and the 680 went from 94% to about 89% in over a 12 hour period. Last night, at 10 pm, with the battery performing well, I decided to take 2 photos. The meter read 89%. I looked at the photos and then jumped back to the desktop and turned off the screen. I then turned out the screen and looked at the battery meter at 1:30 am. It was now 79%. So in 3.5 hours it dropped 10%. In my other two days, where I didn't use the camera, in periods up to 16 hours the battery only dropped between 4 and 5%. I think there must be something to this battery theory.

So "in-cradle reset" and "plug-in-and-take-battery-out" are basically the same thing?

When I first got my Treo 680 battery life was terrible. Just like the first poster, overnight my phone's battery went from full to nearly empty. I was stunned. I got a free utility to turn the keyboard lights off after 15 seconds of non-use, I got Phone Technician for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to turn off the phone automatically when I'm asleep. This might not appeal to everyone but anybody who really needs to get hold of me overnight knows to call my phone-service. I also keep IR and BlueTooth turned off unless I need them.

These steps let me (barely) get through the day the first week I owned it. But near the end of the week I noticed I had close to 50% battery left when I got home - compared to under 20% the first day I took it to work. Now another week has past and when I got home last night I had 65% left. My guess is the circuitry/software that controls the battery indicator needs some discharge/recharge cycles under its belt.

BTW, Friday was a pretty hard use day and we decided to go out for dinner so it got some use while we waited for a table. So there's no question that, at least in the beginning, the phone appeared to be getting bad battery life and was shutting down automatically when there was, in fact, a goodly amount of charge left.

Yes they are the same thing.