What kind of code could make a Blackberry consume a lot of battery power?

Question

I'm not a Blackberry programmer at all, but I've been asked to investigate what might possibly be making one of our Blackberry applications cause the device to overheat and completely drain the battery in less than one hour.

As far as we can determine, this only happens to the program on one kind of device (the Bold 9700), so we're not at all certain that it's actually caused by our program. The application does periodically poll one or more servers/services, and we're aware that this has a negative effect on battery life. However, this particular problem is much more extreme than normal with a polling process going on.

Can anyone point me to any good links or resources, assuming this is a not-uncommon problem with Blackberry apps?

Answer 1

I would look into phone specific features that could be failing.

Example (This is a contrived example), lets say your app uses GPS, and the 9700 doesn't have or support the mode of gps you ask it to use. In your program, if you looped with a condition that the gps has to be ready to proceed, the erroneous results could lie hidden and could have some hardware repercussions.

Answer 2

Try connecting the problematic device to the JDE or Eclipse in debug mode, then use the profiling tools to profile the CPU usage. If it's getting in some sort of tight loop, you should be able to see the code causing the problem.

Answer 3

Once I installed Google latitude on my Black Berry Curve 8530 and I noticed that since then the device battery drains every morning, even though I left it fully charged in the night. If you have installed any GPS related software or other active software that runs in the background, then try uninstalling it.