Cerebro is such a battery hog its ridiculous!: Only 1 hour of usage!!!

[Vandam500]

I installed it last night because it looked interesting. Similar to the MobileMe Find My iPhone but free. Anyways, woke up today (8AM) to go to school.

My classes are from 8:30AM-2:15PM. I only have a 1 hour break in which I listened to Slacker radio while I used library computer. When my last class of the day came around, I saw my battery meter, 8%! It then died 5 minutes later without no use whatsoever except that 1 hour of Slacker Radio and that's all!

Nothing was running in the background or anything! So I warn you guys if you install still that it will SEVERELY bring your battery down.

 

[pcs are junk]

wow, i had it fully charged today, so i came home from school, (i unplugged it in the morning and put it in a drawer.) and the battery was at 73%! i hadnt even touched it the whole day! thanks dude, im gonna get rid of it. get family tracker from the app store...much better and it doesnt drain battery life.

 

[Vandam500]

wow, i had it fully charged today, so i came home from school, (i unplugged it in the morning and put it in a drawer.) and the battery was at 73%! i hadnt even touched it the whole day! thanks dude, im gonna get rid of it. get family tracker from the app store...much better and it doesnt drain battery life.

Yeah its crazy! I'ma look into that Family Tracker though, have you had any good experiences with it?

 

[pcs are junk]

yeah its pretty much the exact same thing..its 5 bucks on the app store...but its exactly like it. same accuracy, but it doesnt have that make the phone play music feature....which didnt even work on cerebro. ill add u on youtube. my username is applehack23.

 

[Vandam500]

yeah its pretty much the exact same thing..its 5 bucks on the app store...but its exactly like it. same accuracy, but it doesnt have that make the phone play music feature....which didnt even work on cerebro. ill add u on youtube. my username is applehack23.

Awesome! Thanks

 

[ouanthhony]

A few things...

1) What are your settings for Cerebro? Once you logged into the website, did you change any settings? For normal updates, make sure your setting is every 3600 seconds or more. You really don't need it to update often because you have the ability to turn on live monitoring from the www.ifindmyiphone.com website. If it's less than every hour (3600s), it will obviously drain your battery more.

2) What is your GPS accuracy set to? The more accurate (smaller number), the longer the GPS chip has to run...the more it kills your battery.

3) The sonar feature DOES work, but it takes up to a minute (or longer if you change the setting on the website) for your phone to receive the sonar/play command. Same goes for the stop command.

I changed my settings as follows:

GPS updates: 3600 seconds
GPS accuracy: 300 meters

I've noticed a small impact on the battery life, but nothing to the degree you guys mentioned. If your phone is ever stolen, you'd use the live monitoring for the GPS updates, but that WILL drain your battery VERY quickly as warned by the app's author.

I haven't used the other app you guys mentioned, but from my experience, Cerebro does a great job with minimal impact on battery life. You just gotta be smart with your settings. I'm sure other things impact battery life as well (such as how old your battery is, the OS that you have installed, the actual GPS chip in your phone, etc)...so maybe everyone won't have the same experience as me (3gs manufactured last summer). Just some things to think about...

 

[Vandam500]

1) What are your settings for Cerebro? Once you logged into the website, did you change any settings? For normal updates, make sure your setting is every 3600 seconds or more. You really don't need it to update often because you have the ability to turn on live monitoring from the www.ifindmyiphone.com website. If it's less than every hour (3600s), it will obviously drain your battery more.

2) What is your GPS accuracy set to? The more accurate (smaller number), the longer the GPS chip has to run...the more it kills your battery.

3) The sonar feature DOES work, but it takes up to a minute (or longer if you change the setting on the website) for your phone to receive the sonar/play command. Same goes for the stop command.

I changed my settings as follows:

GPS updates: 3600 seconds
GPS accuracy: 300 meters

I've noticed a small impact on the battery life, but nothing to the degree you guys mentioned. If your phone is ever stolen, you'd use the live monitoring for the GPS updates, but that WILL drain your battery VERY quickly as warned by the app's author.

I haven't used the other app you guys mentioned, but from my experience, Cerebro does a great job with minimal impact on battery life. You just gotta be smart with your settings. I'm sure other things impact battery life as well (such as how old your battery is, the OS that you have installed, the actual GPS chip in your phone, etc)...so maybe everyone won't have the same experience as me (3gs manufactured last summer). Just some things to think about...

Hehe, well I knew it would effect the battery but not that much. I did have it in 500 seconds which now that I think about is way to frequent Hmm xD

Thanks for the post

 

[ouanthhony]

After additional thought tonight, I upped the values even more...and lowered the timeout values. I don't really plan on using this unless my phone gets stolen. If that happens, all I have to do is activate the live update. And I can always change any settings at will using the website. My most recent settings are below...I'll try to update tomorrow regarding battery life. Today, I'd say the battery's charge was reduced by around an hour vs. not running Cerebro...which is a significant chunk of time on the iPhone.

GPS Interval: 7200
GPS Timeout: 30
GPS Minumum Precision: 1,000 meters

I'm not sure how the other tracking apps work, but it seems like I read that most of them do not run in the background. In other words, a thief would need to open the tracking app to get it to even function. Is that right?!

Hehe, well I knew it would effect the battery but not that much. I did have it in 500 seconds which now that I think about is way to frequent Hmm xD

Thanks for the post

 

[Vandam500]

I'm not sure how the other tracking apps work, but it seems like I read that most of them do not run in the background. In other words, a thief would need to open the tracking app to get it to even function. Is that right?!

Yes the other tracking apps in the AppStore require the app to be open which is worthless. The only one's that I know that can find the iPhone without a app having to be open is the Mobile Me and the AT&T Family Map

 

[twon]

iLocalis is a similar app I use, my setting are set to update every 15 minutes and I can noticed a quicker battery drain, but it still makes it through the day. Like Cerebro, if I set iLocalis to update every minute, then it will drain the battery in a few hours.

Point being, it's not the apps fault, what we are asking our phones to do, takes a lot of juice. I have to be very careful about the settings in iLocalis. But I lover the options it gives us

 

[Gix1k]

I uninstalled it.

 

[ouanthhony]

I just wanted to report back about my battery life concerning the latest changes I made (listed above). I didn't really notice any significant decrease in battery life vs. before I installed Cerebro...so these settings look to do a good job at saving the battery, yet keep Cerebro running in the background. For those of you that are giving up on Cerebro already, I'm not sure if you know that you can change the settings to something more aggressive if your iPhone is stolen. For my purposes, I don't need to track myself at all, which is why I'm fine with it updating once every two hours. And I don't care about the accuracy right now, so I set it to 1000 meters so the GPS chip won't be active long.

If the phone gets stolen, I'll make it more accurate and make it update every few minutes. Easy to fix via the website (setting changes are sent to the phone)...and no need for the thief to click on anything to activate it.

Will someone who has consistent phone use throughout the day time how long your battery lasts without Cerebro, and then with Cerebro set to my latest settings? I'd like to confirm that I'm not crazy. Thanks!

 

[ckong]

Noticed an update on BigBoss. Version 1.1 lists these changes:

# Battery issues
# Login issues.
# Introduces a feature called Òpush updateÓ which should decrease the load on our servers.

I just installed it. Looks really great for free.

"GPS Interval" is set to "0" by default so it'll only do a location update via a Push notification. That should save the battery quite a bit since the GPS only runs on demand and not automatically.

I'll be watching battery and see how it goes.

 

[Vandam500]

Noticed an update on BigBoss. Version 1.1 lists these changes:

# Battery issues
# Login issues.
# Introduces a feature called Òpush updateÓ which should decrease the load on our servers.

I just installed it. Looks really great for free.

"GPS Interval" is set to "0" by default so it'll only do a location update via a Push notification. That should save the battery quite a bit since the GPS only runs on demand and not automatically.

I'll be watching battery and see how it goes.

Thanks for the heads up

 

[Stebe007]

Noticed an update on BigBoss. Version 1.1 lists these changes:

# Battery issues
# Login issues.
# Introduces a feature called Òpush updateÓ which should decrease the load on our servers.

I just installed it. Looks really great for free.

"GPS Interval" is set to "0" by default so it'll only do a location update via a Push notification. That should save the battery quite a bit since the GPS only runs on demand and not automatically.

I'll be watching battery and see how it goes.

The push update seems like a great fix for the battery, but I'm having a problem with the GPS interval setting in 1.1:

GPS Interval
This is how frequently the GPS will update. Value is in seconds, default is 3600 seconds (1 Hour); May not be less than 1800; 0 will stop updates (Cerebro 1.1 only)

For some reason when I put 0 (zero), it keeps defaulting back to 1800. Anyone else having this problem? Super frustrating that I can't turn it off

 

[ouanthhony]

The push update seems like a great fix for the battery, but I'm having a problem with the GPS interval setting in 1.1:

GPS Interval
This is how frequently the GPS will update. Value is in seconds, default is 3600 seconds (1 Hour); May not be less than 1800; 0 will stop updates (Cerebro 1.1 only)

For some reason when I put 0 (zero), it keeps defaulting back to 1800. Anyone else having this problem? Super frustrating that I can't turn it off

My wife's phone is doing the same thing! I was able to set the setting on my phone to zero without a problem. However, hers keeps defaulting to 1800 when I put in 0. I tried reinstalling 1.1 on her phone, as well as uninstalling and then reinstalling. Neither worked. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the software on the phone, or the communication between the phone and the website. If it is the software, reinstalling wouldn't fix it because the installation file is cached on the phone...haven't researched how to clear the cache. Whatever the problem is, I hope they fix it soon. I just set the value on her phone to 14400 so it will rarely update. Not quite as good as 0, but should be pretty close.