I wanted to put together a collective for all of you Hero users out there having trouble with poor battery life or if you are looking to get a little bit more. Feel free to add your thoughts and discuss. I will add suggestions as they come in as well. I have broken it into two sections, the first list won't really affect your usability of the phone. The second list will disable features that help the phone auto update or pull e-mail.
First and foremost, please make sure you have the Sprint 1.5 Maintenance Release already installed.
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Brightness - Disabling the Auto Backlight feature and setting your brightness to an acceptable low level.
Menu > Settings > Sound & Display
(I have mine halfway between middle and lowest and i'm considering going farther yet as the screen is still pretty bright down this low.)
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Screen Time-out - Set this as low as you can live with it.
Menu > Settings > Sound & Display
(I have mine at 30 seconds and make a habit to turn the screen off before I set it down)
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E-mail polling - Other than your GMail, if you are using the phone for e-mail, it helps to set it to check for new mail on a longer interval 20 minutes.
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Self Updating Widgets - The HTC Flipclock has been called out as a battery hog as well as some weather widgets.
(I try to keep it to one self updating widget per home screen.)
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On/Off Toggles - For Sense UI, HTC has widget toggles for GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. I toggle them all when needed. The extra 2 seconds it takes for them to turn on does nothing to impact my usefulness of the features.
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Location - Location Setting enabled but "Use Wireless Networks" disabled. When needed I toggle on my GPS. Also this will provide a much more accurate location for Google Maps and Sprint Nav.
Menu > Settings > Location
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Automated Task Killers not so good - They run in the background closing out your tasks that you leave open. Two things here that contribute to the bad battery life. If you have to re-open everything from scratch all the time it uses more CPU time. Since android apps enter a pause state when you are not using them the CPU is not being utilized.
(For this I recommend "Close Everything" you open it and hit close everything and if something is open that shouldn't be or what not it closes it. Also good for programs that don't force close on error or back key press.)
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HTC Weather - Turn of the automatic updates if you are using the weather widget from HTC. Possibly consider switching to another app/widget where you can set your update frequency.
App List > Weather > Menu > Settings
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Facebook and other Social Apps - Turn the update frequency down to an hour or more.
FaceBook > Menu > Settings
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PRL Update - Your phone can struggle if you are in between towers or have a constant weak signal. As more towers are built or updated so should your PRL list be updated. Try to remember to update this once and a while incase something has changed in your local tower network.
Menu > Settings > About Phone > System Updates > Update PRL
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Disable Haptic Feedback on KB - This may be a smaller gainer but its still a gain. Disabling the vibration on every key press, especially if your a heavy text'r or tweeter.
Menu > Settings > Locale & Text > Touch Input > Text Input > Vibrate when Typing
The following tips will incur feature loss with the Hero
Disable Always on Mobile Network - This will make it so you have to manually update most of your widgets and applications.
Menu > Settings > Wireless controls > Mobile network settings
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Disable Background Data - This will disable all automatic sync of Gmail, Google contacts and calendars. If you do not use any of these, feel free to disable.
Menu > Settings > Data synchronization > Google > Background data
In addition to the above tips try charging your phone while its off for a much faster charge!
12/28/2009 Update : 3500mah battery availble for Hero
http://www.seidioonline.com/product-p/bacy35hhrs-bk.htm