Cell phone battery drain

Assuming you have bluetooth in your car. The car keeps the bluetooth connection alive with the phone so that i t can ring when there are incoming calls and be responsive when you ask it to make a call. Just having bluetooth turned on can cause a phone's battery to drain quicker, having a bluetooth connection active causes even more drain.


One thing that surprised me is that the car appears to keep the connection going even when turned off.

 

NCPriusNoob is probably right. Or your Prius is making phone calls by itself. :lol:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Gaelyn @ Mar 22 2007, 06:17 AM) [snapback]410108[/snapback]</div>

I suspected this was a Treo 650 before opening the post. We have 2 but don't generally leave them in the car when we aren't there. The Treo is known for battery drain issues. It could be related to bluetooth as indicated above but I don't believe the pairing connection would remain active if the car is turned off. More likely it is related to low signal strength. If the Treo is in a low/no signal area, it will continue to search for a signal and this results in a rapid battery drain. My wife had the problem where she worked. I bet the signal strength where you park is not as good as in your work area. Try turning the phone off if you leave it in the car, that should solve the drain problem. If so, there are programs such as Treo Helper that prevent the phone from continuously searching for a good signal.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Gaelyn @ Mar 22 2007, 11:55 AM) [snapback]410318[/snapback]</div>

Just so you know, that if a phone has poor signal it will use more power to help maintain what signal it has. So if you're in a crappy signal area it will drain your battery quickly. If you want a good but illegal (hehe) demo for this turn your phone on during a long airline flight - your phone won't have any signal but it will go though a very large chuck of it's battery.

Add that to using your bluetooth, and the 2 things can add up to a shorter battery life. Bluetooth has a negative impact to your battery life, but it's not too significant.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Gaelyn @ Mar 22 2007, 03:17 PM) [snapback]410108[/snapback]</div>

Maybe your Prius is secretly stealing power to charge its traction battery. Or maybe it's secretly calling other Priusses (Prii?) while you're at work. <_<

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Gaelyn @ Mar 22 2007, 10:55 AM) [snapback]410318[/snapback]</div>

You might also like to try Treohelper. It's free and available here. It also gives you a numeric value for signal quality that might be helpful. The problem my wife had resulted from a low signal level that varied over time so her Treo kept trying to re-acquire a connection with the tower. We were able to reduce (but not eliminate) the problem by using the phone off when no coverage parameter in Treohelper.