Have you often wondered why your recently full battery was suddenly drained empty? BetterBatteryStats is a program that keeps up with what code has been eating your battery and making your phone burn juice, which can help you pinpoint your drain.
Battery drains are generally caused by two things: radio conditions and applications keeping the CPU awake. While this does nothing to help you with radio conditions (you'll have to scootch closer to an operating tower for that), it does allows you to see what applications or services have been keeping the phone awake (wakelocks) and can help you determine what processes have been coming back from the dead (in case you're using some sort of task killer or it's the night of the comet).
The app includes an online knowledge base that can help you determine what some of the trickier or obscurely named services are and also provides some tips if it's known how to manage their wakelock fury.
BetterBatteryStats is $2.89 from Google Play.
You can also hunt down the developer thread to find a trial/free version of it, but please consider supporting useful development like this if it helps you out.
Real developers have to eat too.
Download: Google Play
This app was invaluable to me when I was troubleshooting what the heck was wrong with my Sony Tablet P battery. It identified that a particular wakelock was keeping the device awake for 10+ hours when it was actually supposed to be sleeping. Once I found out what was causing it and found a fix, that wakelock went from 13 hours (at its worst) to just 17 seconds.
Yeah, this app is well worth the money even tho it’s available for free on XDA… Between this and the phone’s native battery stats you will pretty much never have to wonder what’s using up all your battery. Also, for tablets, Auto Airplane Mode by Don is pretty useful… My TF in particular has a habit of leaving Wifi on when the screen is off even tho it’s set not to, which kills standby time, Auto Airplane fixes that right up by turning Airplane mode on when the screen is off.