[daexpression]

suggest that you do the following..
1. do a webosrepair - Not a full delete. See if there are any files missing.
2. Then you do a proper shutdown and reboot... I believe some of the services are running and are eating battery power.

[-Gamah]

Lithium Polymer batteries hate to be fully discharged. In fact, discharging a cell below 2.7v can lead to fire and/or the cell never recharging. Just a few years ago the Lithium Ion battery technology was still popular in phones. These cells didn't like being charged until nearly fully empty.

The more often you keep your phone's Li-Po battery near-fully charged, the longer overall life the battery will have.

[pullbangdead]

Lithium Polymer batteries hate to be fully discharged. In fact, discharging a cell below 2.7v can lead to fire and/or the cell never recharging. Just a few years ago the Lithium Ion battery technology was still popular in phones. These cells didn't like being charged until nearly fully empty.

The more often you keep your phone's Li-Po battery near-fully charged, the longer overall life the battery will have.

The Pre's battery is Li-ion, NOT Li-Po.

To the OP: And like all electronics that use any lithium chemistry, the Pre has circuitry built in to keep you from over-charging and over-discharging the battery. Normal use won't in any way harm your battery. You don't have to worry about that 2.7V limit, the phone is doing that for you already.

You can look up in many places over the internet how to use your battery the "best" way to extend it's useful life, but in general, Li-ion works best to keep it somewhere "in the middle". Top it off when you can, but don't feel bad if it gets drained all the way. It won't hurt the battery in any significant way.

Also VERY seldom, your phone can benefit from letting it drain all the way down to zero capacity. This does nothing for the battery itself, but can serve to "recalibrate" the circuitry that controls your battery's charge/discharge level. This is something that you can just occasionally do every several months, but don't feel obligated. For instance, last month I decided to let my phone do this after not doing it for 6 months, and my phone hit "0% remaining" and then stayed on another 2 hours, so now my battery meter is behaving much better.

[palmdoc#AC]

Sounds like something is running in the background.

[Joescan09]

Just charge it whenever.

[GodShapedHole]

For instance, last month I decided to let my phone do this after not doing it for 6 months, and my phone hit "0% remaining" and then stayed on another 2 hours, so now my battery meter is behaving much better.

How did you do that? My Pre automatically shuts itself off when it reaches 5%, every time.

[pullbangdead]

How did you do that? My Pre automatically shuts itself off when it reaches 5%, every time.

My battery meter wasn't calibrated correctly, apparently. At that point, my battery hadn't discharged itself to the point of cutting off in over 6 months.

Yours doesn't sound like it's properly calibrated either, but the only way I know how to fix it is let it go 'til it dies, which you apparently do already. So I don't know what to tell you. Maybe the google has a suggestion for you?

[jssepos]

Have the latest version of webOS with Preware and all that brings along. The other day I picked up a Touchstone and have been using it for several days. Something really strange has happened in the last two days, I walk out of the house with a full charge but when my battery gets down to 50 percent or so it just starts to drop and fast. Today it was at 30 percent and in about 10 seconds was down to 0. Any clues as to what could be causing this and some fixes? Thanks!

[murrayalex]

I had real battery problems on my Pre after v1.4 and it turns out that Google Calendar and Google Contacts were chomping the battery. Had to delete them, went back to syncing with iCal and things are fine now

[GodShapedHole]

Has never happened to my Pre, but something very similar (minus the Touchstone of course - which I don't think has anything to do with this anyway) happened to a previous phone of mine.

In that case, it was simply the battery dying an untimely death. I bought a new one and that was that. Do you have anybody that could borrow you a spare battery for you to test whether it really is the battery?

If you don't, may I suggest the 1400mAh Mugen Power battery. It's cheap, comes with free shipping from the manufacturer, and gives you more capacity than the standard one that Palm will sell you while still being compatible with the Touchstone.

All that being said, it might also be an issue with your phone - I just don't think so. You could always just follow the Palm mantra: "when in doubt, run webOS doctor" and see whether it helps. But everything seems to point at your battery being on its way out.

[jssepos]

I might just check it out. Does that battery require a larger backing seeing that it is extended? And is it compatible with the Touchstone, if not then I can't do it. Just dropped 20 bucks on the Touchstone and I don't want a battery that wont work with it. Thanks.

[chrisnis]

Yeah, sometimes the battery % can be a bit slow at updating itself. I've dropped from like 20% to 0% in 2 minutes, even when not using the phone at all. It's just the tweak not working all that well

[Cantaffordit]

Start with adding the patch that shows the battery charge as a percentage. The little picture will show all 5 bars before it is truly 100%.

Also, there is another thread that explains that the Pre requires at least 1000ma of charging power to reach a full charge. The output of the touchstone is conveniently absent from the package and the Palm website doesn't include that in their specs.

I don't pretend to understand that topic, but I am wondering if the Touchstone doesn't have the juice to actually get the battery to a true 100%. I've noticed that when I run the "Battery Monitor" app that it usually shows my charge level as about 5% less than the battery display on the phone.

Finally, be sure you check out the thread on tips for saving battery life. If you haven't already done that, you will be surprised at the little things (like dimming the screen and turning off wifi when the screen is off, turning off location services, etc) can save battery consumption.

I have also noticed a few times that my battery lost the charge faster than expected, and I found myself thinking back to whether is had just been on a touchstone. Also, the battery definitely discharges faster after it is below 50%, too. That's why I got a touchstone for my car. It keeps the phone from sliding around, and lets me top it off when I drive. I was mostly using my extended battery, but I just love the touchstone.

One of these days I am going to have the extended battery back modified to work with touchstone. There is a member on this forum that will do it for $50 delivered. I want to buy an extra TS back to send him, and I haven't taken the time to get one... But it's on my bucket list.

[Cantaffordit]

I might just check it out. Does that battery require a larger backing seeing that it is extended? And is it compatible with the Touchstone, if not then I can't do it. Just dropped 20 bucks on the Touchstone and I don't want a battery that wont work with it. Thanks.

See my previous note about the guy that will put your touchstone hardware inside the extended back... for the 2600mAh battery I have.

The 1400mAh the previous post mentions will fit right in to your standard battery cover and work great with the TS charger.

[GodShapedHole]

Does that battery require a larger backing seeing that it is extended? And is it compatible with the Touchstone, if not then I can't do it. Just dropped 20 bucks on the Touchstone and I don't want a battery that wont work with it. Thanks.

Nope, it's just as large and no larger than a stock Pre battery that's shipped by palm and is 100% compatible with the Touchstone and Touchstone-enabled back cover. I ordered mine in November, when my stock battery wouldn't last for seven hours (ahh, 1.2.x, how I do not miss thee) and it cost me €22 including free shipping then; took a week to arrive from Hong Kong though.

I, too, can't see myself using a battery that doesn't work with my Touchstone - even if it's a small thing, it's the nicest phone accessory I've ever owned. I come home late every night, and previously needed to switch on the light to fiddle around with my HTC's usb cable to charge it. Now I just stone my Pre while plopping on my bed and that's that

I don't pretend to understand that topic, but I am wondering if the Touchstone doesn't have the juice to actually get the battery to a true 100%. I've noticed that when I run the "Battery Monitor" app that it usually shows my charge level as about 5% less than the battery display on the phone.

That's not a Touchstone issue, it's a Palm Being Weird issue. The charge level displayed in the device menu is always 4%-5% smaller than the ACTUAL charge - presumably because they want you to think the battery life is better than it actually is (stays longer at 100%, is always higher). There's a patch in Preware that 'fixes' this - "undim battery level" if I remember correctly.
I have nothing to go on here, but my gut feeling says that this is going to go away as soon as 1.5 or whatever (remember "by fall"?) brings GUI-accelerated CSS transforms and scrolling, which should make battery life a whole lot better as processor load goes down when graphics stuff is actually offloaded to the graphics chip. This is the ONE reason why the Pre's battery life is worse than other devices running on the same OMAP3430 chipset like the 3GS and Droid; for us, right now, the Cortex needs to do everything while the PowerVR just sits there tweedling its thumbs. Once that sumbich gets some work, the processor can relax more, resulting in battery life++.

And in the future, everybody will laugh at us stupid early adopters that didn't have it until the second tier of devices was released.

[zenshinji]

What works for me:

Disable data, enable wifi
Change the EVDO Mode to 1xRTT only (dial ##3836#)
Keep roaming off (Sprint Only for me) unless you know you are roaming. Then enable roam only.
Use Brightness Unlinked and dial down the screen and keyboard to what you can see.

I tend to keep bluetooth, wifi, gps, and the phone running all the time. I get about the same battery life as I do on my work iPhone with similar services running. I do have push messaging enabled on my Pre but manual fetch messaging configured on the iPhone.

Hope This Helps.

[fed123]

blinking notifications off. i no longer am waiting on the edge of my seat for e-mails.

[chrono807]

I originally got a Sprint Pre when it first came out, but I moved 2 months later and had no Sprint service at home. I ended up switching to AT&T.

Now that the Pre Plus is coming to AT&T, I'm thinking of buying one (once they start showing up on eBay or Craigslist). The only thing is that the community has completely EXPLODED since I got rid of my Pre... I had it in the days of manually rooting using the command line and I know that the community has gotten much more organized with patches and stuff. I also know that WebOS has progressed significantly.

Basically... I'm looking through the forums now and I'm completely lost. I've spent too much time over at Crackberry trying to figure out why my Bold's standby button keeps dying...

If I get a Pre, where do I start these days? I was running with Smartflex enabled, stock speed, and had a couple of basic homebrew apps installed I THINK using Preware.

Also, will the GSM version get better battery life than my Sprint Pre got, or should I consider the Seidio 2600mah battery a requirement? I hate carrying 2 batteries, so it's either hope the battery life is better, carry chargers, or buy Seidio. I used to carry a Treo so I can handle the added bulk.

[Disaster]

It is pretty much the same...but with an even better homebrew community and more options. You still put the phone in developer mode and install and run WebOSQuickInstall on your computer. From there you install Preware and most apps and patches can be installed using it. There are some apps that still require rooting around, like the tethering apps, but you can do 99.9% of it with just Preware.

[chrono807]

What IM services and email services are built into the Pre now, and which ones are available using patches? I switched to AT&T back when IM was only AIM and Gtalk, and email was only Gmail and Exchange. Is the built-in IM client still the only one for the Pre, or is something available like Beejive or IM+ for Blackberry (that switches to a reduced power push mode when the IM client is inactive)?