On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 06:59:59PM +1000, Tim Connors wrote:
Grr, I've just been looking at this, since my own android phone is a pile of shit, and appears to be monitored by the Mafia, RIAA, Russians, and ASIO (or maybe Android is just shit, and 20% of the battery really does go to "Android OS" and another 19% of battery goes to "Android system" and another 20% of battery goes to Flaky-as-fuck WiFi in 8 hours of uptime while it sits idle in my pocket).
most likely you have apps that are doing lots of stuff in the background, or indeed looping and crashing, which kills the battery. it's almost always random apps that are at fault and not the OS itself. un-install all your apps (your vendors crapware may not be un-installable - see if you can disable it by Settings->Apps->All->click-on-app->Disable instead) and check the battery life again. and/or hook it up to adb, log on, and see what it's actually doing - top, logcat, powertop, procrank, dumpsys activity processes, etc. Re: paranoia: no phones are secure - android or not - I'm sure the .gov people who care can always break in through the GSM layer via a fake tower and then up to the OS 'cos it's all mmap'd. if you carry a smart phone you are carrying a pretty tracking and surveillance device.
My requirements: 1) can easily (no downloading rootkits from the Russians) run latest stable version of clockworkmod, and likely to keep running latest stable ... 2) has an sdcard slot. No google, I can't move all my music into the
I'd recommend a Sony Xperia Z1. cheap 'cos of the Z2. I have a Z1 Ultra (the 6.4" version) and it's great. waterproof too. the only thing I would complain about is a slightly over-sensitive screen. Sony officially supports unlocking so you can run cyanogenmod on it if you want. maybe you lose some accelerated camera function when you unlock it - I forget. warranty too, obviously (unless you re-lock it before returning), but that's true of any unlockable phone. I left mine locked and run a rooted stock image. Sony was really quick about releasing 4.4.4, and it has little bundled crapware and some nice features, so I feel no real need to install cyanogenmod just yet. battery life is ~5 days for me - or more precisely about 6 hours of screen-on time. mostly web browsing & email, wifi on only when the screen is on, mobile data on rarely. I prefer to see updates only when I feel like checking it rather than have the thing chirp at me 24x7. so that's quite a low power use configuration choice - your battery life will probably be shorter. the Z1 is the same SoC as Z1 Ultra, but other things vary (battery, screen size, camera) so that will affect your battery life too. BTW, it's crazy, but the Sony bootloader only cryptographically verifies that the kernel is stock - so as long as you stick to the stock kernel you can flash a rooted /data image and it's perfectly happy. odd. if you choose rooted stock rather than unlock & CM, then the procedure is (of course) a little convoluted - you have to revert to an old rootable OS version, root it using your favourite kernel bug tool (may be written by Russians but some even come with src, or just write your own), and install a custom recovery (dual CWM and TWRP) so that you can then do backups of all partitions and flash the image of your choice. it's not hard to do once you wade through days of (of course) conflicting XDA posts. if you get one then let me know and I'll give you the cheat sheet. HTH cheers, robin