A couple of days ago I finally got the eagerly awaited system upgrade to Gingerbread on my Nexus One. The update went pretty well, although some Nexus One users reported about problems with the updating process. The only thing I noticed is that Dropbox didn't work after the upgrade.
A re-install solved the issue. All-in-all Gingerbread is great. Beside UI enhancements it feels also faster than Froyo. However, after trying it for two days now, I noticed a substantial increase in battery consumption. By looking at the system battery stats (Settings -> About phone -> Battery use), Android System was listed to
consume 23% of the battery *confused*.
Apparently the problem is a bug in Gingerbread version 2.3.3 (you know there is 2.4 as well) on how the system handles the Wifi adapter. If you go into your Settings -> Wireless & Networks -> Wi-Fi settings, press the menu button and click on "Advanced", you'll see a menu entry "Wi-Fi sleep policy". Gingerbread seems to have a
problem when that option is set to
"When screen turns off". While that may sound to be the most energy-saving option, the bug turns it into a battery killer. If you
switch the option to "Never", the Android system will only consume ~3% in the battery stats.
Obviously, in addition to this, the best battery saver is to just turn Wi-Fi off when you don't need it ;).
Caution, if one of the future updates fixes this problem (which I strongly hope), you have to set the option back again.
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