bzzzzz

I'm not sure if this has been done before (I had a brief search and couldn't find it) but I don't see any harm in having an up to date version of this thread.

We all know that battery power is an important issue with the HTC Hero. I just wondered what people had discovered in the way of apps and using their phones to optimise usage.

I've included things which I like, and which I don't because I find it useful to read about applications which aren't so good, so I know to avoid them, but feel free to try them for yourselves.

Close everything

I installed this from the market, after reading it suggested on a blog, but I'm not convinced its the best to be honest. I've "closed everything" and yet still seen tasks running in the background I'm going to remove this pretty soon unless someone points out a reason not to.

TasKiller

Worked fine for the first week but I've now removed this as I prefer Taskpanel

TaskPanel

I like this a lot and have used for a few weeks. It tells me all the applications which are running and allows me to stop them all. If I want to keep something running (eg scrrebl) in the background then I can set it to ignore "kill all background tasks" for specific applications. It also tells me how much available memory I have.


finally a couple of apps that I find useful for increasing battery usage although not task killers in themselves are.

screebl

This little app turns the screen off very quickly (after about 10 seconds) unless it looks like you're using the phone. It thinks you're using the phone if you're holding it at a certain angle (which you can set).

Graphical Battery Stats Monitor

I installed this yesterday. It takes a while to collect data, but its telling me that it i'm using 5% battery an hour, which would explain why I need a daily recharge.