Testing battery life

Is there a good app or other method for testing battery life? I guess I could just charge my phone and let it play a movie at max brightness until dead.

I have a galaxy nexus with the extended battery, but now, after around 16 months of use it seems like the battery has been draining faster than normal. I was thinking about throwing the original battery back in.

It may have been the plethora of ROMs that I used on my Gnex, but I noticed battery life degrading after just a year or so on my (Verizon) Gnex too with the OEM extended (2100 mAh) battery. Sometimes I would throw the stock 1850 mAh battery in just to see if I could tell a difference and I really couldn't.

So with that, yeah, just try switching back to the stock battery to see if you notice a difference. Or get an aftermarket 2100+ mAh battery on Amazon for $10/piece or so.

I've always wanted to test my own batteries out with a run down test to compare them, but that would mean I can't use my phone for that whole test and I just can't go that long without messing with it (sad, I know ), lol. It probably wouldn't be so bad on the Gnex because I'm confident I could kill a full battery on it in less than 2 hours if I wanted to, but on my Note 2, I'm sure it would take 4-5 hours regardless of what I did on it.

Depending on your usage / charging habits, a noticeable capacity degradation after a year isn't that unusual at all.

Thankfully cheap Chinese replacements for the GNex are plentiful and cheap and tend to work reasonably well.

Last summer I bought a combo kit off Ebay consisting of two 2300mAh batteries and a wall charger for like $10 with free shipping and they've worked quite well.

I also keep a spare charged 3800mAh (and associated replacement back) with me if I go on a long trip, but I don't like to use that one because it makes the phone twice as thick.



About the only caveat to the cheap Chinese batteries is they usually don't have the NFC (Android Beam) capability that the OEM battery has. I don't use NFC, never plan to, and don't know anyone that DOES... so it makes no difference to me.