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My very own Desire rant thread

SimonM123

Newbie
Sep 23, 2010
33
0
I've had my Desire since Wednesday evening. I took it out of the box and put it on charge right away, and charged for 5 hours before switching it on. Since then, several issues have cropped up, and I've read more forums and posts than I can even remember. Here are the things that still erk me, I hope people here have some helpful or consoling words:

- Why do wifi and mobile data have to be 'on' or 'off'? My previous phone, a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, simply activated wifi or mobile data (choosing which based on whether an open wifi network was available, if not then using mobile data) for the activity for which the phone needed it, and when you had finished whatever you were doing (browsing the web, downloading apps/podcast etc) it would close the connection. This saves battery life, data use and saves me having to remember to turn wifi on or off every time I want to pop on the web for a minute. Why do I have to keep a constant wifi connection the whole time I'm at home, rather than the phone just opening and closing it when it's being used?

- Why do we need to fiddle with a host of different settings just to get the thing to last a day? As much as I loathe them, iPhones do not seem to require this. I do not want one of them, but the comparison is inevitable. With light use, the best I've had from this phone in 4 total charge/use till phone switches off/recharge-fully cycles, is about 13 hours. How can one enjoy a phone when you're afraid to use any of the advanced features that you bought it for, for fear of sapping the juice?

- Why is the heat sinking so woefully inadequate? This thing heats up whenever I do anything even remotely taxing - just sitting on the underground train listening to Spotify caused the phone to become uncomfortably warm. The heat all develops around the SD card, which I have read somewhere is where the processor is housed. I understand that a powerful processor is bound to heat up, but again - how have iPhone engineers circumvented this?

- Why is the loudspeaker not just mono, just appallingly badly balanced? It is just a head full of treble, like listening through a tin can. What happened to stereo speakers on smartphones? We are regressing here.

- Why is there no native podcast support within the music player or anywhere else in the 'stock' Android setup? I can't get Google Listen to work (due to the very common problem of the program refusing to run saying it needs a Google account, even though I already have one!!! Buggy bug bug bug!) and its still in Beta anyway, which means Google are being very slow off the mark. For now I'm downloading podcasts with PodCat, then listening to them with MortPlayer's audiobook player and an accompanying Widget (very impressive apps by the way). This works nicely but its not perfect, with Mortplayer sorting by folder rather than getting the podcast name from the id3 tag. At any rate, I shouldn't have to use third party apps for something as basic as podcast downloading /listening.

- Why does the Spotify app seem to be permitted to run a constant process, and apparently prevent the device from sleeping (evidenced by the uptime/downtime figures I've been getting). I know this is more Spotify's fault, but no one else seems bothered, so I'm confused.


I love the design of the Desire - the plastics used in its construction are without exception the finest I've ever experienced in any mobile device, ever. Ditto the svelte damping on the hard buttons. The sound quality through headphones is also utterly sublime, without fault and quite exemplary for all mobile device preamps. The screen is great too, and the speed of that overhungry and overheating processor is nonetheless stunning - I've never waited for anything on this phone, it is all instant. There just is no lag.

I so want to love this phone. I'm a big fan of open source and of Google, and I've long thought of HTC as one of the great unsung heroes of the mobile tech world (before they started using their own company name on devices they'd designed for carriers!). The look, feel and philosophy of this phone and associated communities are ideal for me. But the faults above are driving me nuts. I'm giving the phone till Wednesday, and if it's still bugging me, I'll be sending it back to O2 and requesting something else. I don't think battery tech or OS development is ready for some of the features now available and in demand for smart phones. THe current crop of high-enders seem to be pushing the limits now. I think I want a dumber phone until this stuff is ready.

Alas - hopefully the Desire will grow on me in the next few days. I genuinely hope so much that it will, because I so so SO want to love this phone. The massively varied experiences people seem to be having it suggest 2 things to me - firstly, that an open and gloriously tweak-able OS like Android will result in a broadly varied user experience, so its hard to make comparison. But to an extent I also fear for HTC's quality control, as a lot of this seems to be hardware related (heat/battery life), with many tales of 'i sent the phone back and this new one is perfect'.

Rant over. Thank you for reading. I hope this stuck a chord with some people.

This forum is great by the way, thank you for all the help reading your threads has given me.

Simon
 
Felt the same way the first week!

Battery took about 10 days for me to pan out and now get over a day with some pretty heavy use.

Had the phone get warm on me once, popped out the battery, put it back and never happened again!

Takes a little while to figure everything out and it's worth the learning curve because it's a really great phone.

Stick with it!! ;)
 
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- Why do wifi and mobile data have to be 'on' or 'off'? My previous phone, a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, simply activated wifi or mobile data (choosing which based on whether an open wifi network was available, if not then using mobile data) for the activity for which the phone needed it, and when you had finished whatever you were doing (browsing the web, downloading apps/podcast etc) it would close the connection. This saves battery life, data use and saves me having to remember to turn wifi on or off every time I want to pop on the web for a minute. Why do I have to keep a constant wifi connection the whole time I'm at home, rather than the phone just opening and closing it when it's being used?

Because the Nokia was a more passive device. Unless you left the applications running, it wouldn't notify you whenever anything happened (Twitter, mail etc). So you could pick and choose. You can with the desire really...turn off all background syncing events and make it manual, you will then have (essentially) what your Nokia was doing....ie, nothing unless you tell it to.

- Why do we need to fiddle with a host of different settings just to get the thing to last a day? As much as I loathe them, iPhones do not seem to require this. I do not want one of them, but the comparison is inevitable. With light use, the best I've had from this phone in 4 total charge/use till phone switches off/recharge-fully cycles, is about 13 hours. How can one enjoy a phone when you're afraid to use any of the advanced features that you bought it for, for fear of sapping the juice?
Check around...I had a similar battery issue and discovered I was plagued with a particular bug surrounding the calendar..until it is fixed, I just need to force stop it when the phone boots and I get over 24 hours now with moderate to heavy internet usage and games. Again...remember that we have things that automatically update, like widgets, that the iPhone doesn't have..these can sap power too...at the end of the day, you bought a phone that is infinitely more configurable than an iPhone..most people do so because they want that configurability. Until you are used to the device properly, you need to keep an eye on it. I installed a couple of apps yesterday and my battery started taking a beating again...my battery dropped 20% in just over an hour with almost no surfing or use...I quickly removed those new apps and as I sit here now, I still have 40% battery left some 18 hours later.

- Why is the heat sinking so woefully inadequate? This thing heats up whenever I do anything even remotely taxing - just sitting on the underground train listening to Spotify caused the phone to become uncomfortably warm. The heat all develops around the SD card, which I have read somewhere is where the processor is housed. I understand that a powerful processor is bound to heat up, but again - how have iPhone engineers circumvented this?
I must confess that I have never had this issue. Mine stays pretty cool throughout the day...so I can't really comment.

- Why is the loudspeaker not just mono, just appallingly badly balanced? It is just a head full of treble, like listening through a tin can. What happened to stereo speakers on smartphones? We are regressing here.
I honestly can never see why people care about this...all I want the speaker to do is play my notifications of choice, at a volume that means I can hear it. If I want music...that's what headphones or speakers are for. Unless you are one of the kids I see wandering around my city with their phone held like some kind of modern version of the 80s boombox....

- Why is there no native podcast support within the music player or anywhere else in the 'stock' Android setup? I can't get Google Listen to work (due to the very common problem of the program refusing to run saying it needs a Google account, even though I already have one!!! Buggy bug bug bug!) and its still in Beta anyway, which means Google are being very slow off the mark. For now I'm downloading podcasts with PodCat, then listening to them with MortPlayer's audiobook player and an accompanying Widget (very impressive apps by the way). This works nicely but its not perfect, with Mortplayer sorting by folder rather than getting the podcast name from the id3 tag. At any rate, I shouldn't have to use third party apps for something as basic as podcast downloading /listening.

For me, apps is the whole point of getting an Android phone (or an iPhone for that matter), noone will ever be happy with stock apps and let's face it, the more time spent on the pre-installed apps, could potentially mean the less time spent on more important things.

- Why does the Spotify app seem to be permitted to run a constant process, and apparently prevent the device from sleeping (evidenced by the uptime/downtime figures I've been getting). I know this is more Spotify's fault, but no one else seems bothered, so I'm confused.

I don't use it, but as you say, a problem for the developers of the app...absolutely not a Desire issue


I love the design of the Desire - the plastics used in its construction are without exception the finest I've ever experienced in any mobile device, ever. Ditto the svelte damping on the hard buttons. The sound quality through headphones is also utterly sublime, without fault and quite exemplary for all mobile device preamps. The screen is great too, and the speed of that overhungry and overheating processor is nonetheless stunning - I've never waited for anything on this phone, it is all instant. There just is no lag.

I so want to love this phone. I'm a big fan of open source and of Google, and I've long thought of HTC as one of the great unsung heroes of the mobile tech world (before they started using their own company name on devices they'd designed for carriers!). The look, feel and philosophy of this phone and associated communities are ideal for me. But the faults above are driving me nuts. I'm giving the phone till Wednesday, and if it's still bugging me, I'll be sending it back to O2 and requesting something else. I don't think battery tech or OS development is ready for some of the features now available and in demand for smart phones. THe current crop of high-enders seem to be pushing the limits now. I think I want a dumber phone until this stuff is ready.

Alas - hopefully the Desire will grow on me in the next few days. I genuinely hope so much that it will, because I so so SO want to love this phone. The massively varied experiences people seem to be having it suggest 2 things to me - firstly, that an open and gloriously tweak-able OS like Android will result in a broadly varied user experience, so its hard to make comparison. But to an extent I also fear for HTC's quality control, as a lot of this seems to be hardware related (heat/battery life), with many tales of 'i sent the phone back and this new one is perfect'.

Rant over. Thank you for reading. I hope this stuck a chord with some people.

This forum is great by the way, thank you for all the help reading your threads has given me.

Simon

The fact that battery life varies wildly between users would tell me that it is the issue of software..more specifically how people have their phone setup.

Some of the issues you raised would suggest to me that, perhaps, you didn't research the phone well enough. The desire is like your home desktop...you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, but you can suffer badly if you don't make sure things are configured properly. The iPhone is more like a corporate, locked down desktop..you can do very little to the way it works and all of them function in basically the same way...you have no control and rely on the company to do something about an issue.

You either want the flexibility or you don't...if you do, flexibility does require some effort.

For the record, I picked up my desire just over a week ago.

Cheers
 
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Thanks to both of the users above. You're right about the flexibility, I guess the need for fiddling is the other side of the coin.

What is this 'particular bug surrounding the calendar' - I noticed that process is always running, is it something to do with that?

I did research this phone into the ground before buying it, including learning about Android's multitasking methods and why there's not much point with a task killing app. But I did not come across some of the issues above, and there's only so much research a man can do! I work in websites and am a long term techie, but part of good tech for me is a balance of user control and OS 'god hand'-ing to keep things fluid.

I am envious of the people reporting no heating issues. I have removed my battery numerous times (SIM swapping a bit with my old phone for practical reasons), and the issue returns. Perhaps I have a dodgy unit.

For the record, the reason I want the loudspeaker better is because A) I sometimes play podcasts in random rooms throughout my house, and dont want to lug speakers about and B) I like using speakerphone around the house, it's handy. Not so great when everyone sounds like they're talking over CB Radio.

I could forgive any other faults if I could get full morning to night battery and no uncomfortable heating. Everything else is more a gripe than a direct complaint, really.

This is a bad moment in my life for tech stress, as I'm also undergoing a migration to Linux (Ubuntu). Perhaps I'm a glutton for punishment...
 
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The calendar bug is described here:

[Solution] Massive Battery Drain for HTC Desire - www.hardwarezone.com.sg

Basically, it stops the phone from sleeping properly...stopping it and then restarting it makes the issue go away. If you check the partial wake usage and the calendar is a big bar...you have the issue

do *#*#4636#*#* on the phone and goto Battery History, then change the first dropdown to Partial Wake Usage.

I am by no means saying that this will miraculously solve your battery life issues...but it made a dramatic difference to me.

What also helped me was determining what I wanted to sync regularly and what I was happy with manually syncing. Took me a couple of days to strike a balance. If you take your Nokia as a benchmark, and are happy to manually refresh everything as you need it, there is no reason you can't.

Personally, I prefer the automatic syncing as I always forget to check things...but this could be down to my path the the desire (aswell as my early onset senility)...N95, Blackberry Storm and now the Desire.

I suppose it might well be a dodgy unit that is causing the heat problem. Also, I completely feel your pain regarding Ubuntu...I did it a year or so back and it was....interesting....to say the least :)

Noone can guarantee that you will fall in love with the phone in the next few days...but I personally consider this to be the best phone I have ever owned..quite a statement to make after a week of usage.

Cheers
 
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I leave WiFi switched on with my Desire all the time. Battery issues not withstanding, this means whenever I am near a known network ( home, work, friends etc ) it will turn off 3G and use WiFi. As soon as I move out of range of the network 3G kicks back in. It does mean you have to have all the networks you are likely to use remembered on the device. Not sure how it will handle 'open' ones as I never seem to encounter any.

Like I say this works well, but canes the battery ( even more ) !

Hippo
 
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stick with it Simon,
it took me about 3 weeks to get over 'f**K me this thing is amazing, what else can it do, damb i have drained the battery fidling about all day again itis'

Im now happy with my setup, and regularly get 1.5 / 2 days light/medium use on one charge, admittidly a lot less when i am ap warring with the iphone boys at work ;)

you wont regret it...
 
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The calendar issue is fixed in Froyo.

Speakers, lay it on a surface and the surface becomes part of the speaker - I forget what this type of speaker is called, but Gadget show had one on the other week where Jason used a pizza box.

Wifi, leave it on and enable sleep policy in settings. It'll turn off just like the Nokia wifi does when you're not actively using the phone after the set time and it's locked. I 1st disabled wifi all the time, then tried simply letting it sleep and found zero impact on battery life leaving it on v switching off.

Heating up: My nokia got hotter than the desire with wifi and bluetooth on. Remember your Nokia didnt have a 1gig processor in it. ;)

Battery will improve after about a week. Just updated to Froyo and it seems to have reset battery calibration back to when I first got the phone. After almost 5 days now things are getting back to pre update normality - 24-36 hours between charges.
 
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The calendar issue is fixed in Froyo.

Unfortunately it wasn't for me.

The first thing I did with the phone before setting up anything was to update to Froyo. 2 days later, and me wondering why my battery was getting hammered, I found the calendar fix.

Partial Wake History showed that Calendar was stopping the phone from sleeping (biggest bar) and once I stopped the app and relaunched it, the issue went away.
 
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Ive come from a Samsung galaxy I7500, the battery life on that was truly terrible! I can get over 24hrs on the desire with minimal usage and everything turned on, with moderate usage I get around a day.

Ive read some posts on here about the battery being better when not fully charged/discharged between charges due to it being a li-ion battery or whatever but i've personally found charging this way to be worse.

I find I get the best life from charging when the phone asks me to connect the charger, currently im on wifi streaming from radiotime after being unplugged for 3 hours and have 94% charge!

Compare this to last week when I plugged the phone in when it was around 50% when I unplugged it had gone from 100% to 85% in around 10 minutes.

Makes no sense heh
 
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Don't discharge the battery all the way down to the bottom more than once a month (and even then....). Modern Lithium batteries like to be fully charged. Discharging them completely down to 10% and below damages them.

The heat isn't the processor, but the battery discharging. This happened on my Nokia 5800 as well (that also has a lithium battery). Some apps can show you the temperature of the battery, the most I have observed so far is 41 degrees C!
 
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Felt the same way the first week!

Battery took about 10 days for me to pan out and now get over a day with some pretty heavy use.

Had the phone get warm on me once, popped out the battery, put it back and never happened again!

Takes a little while to figure everything out and it's worth the learning curve because it's a really great phone.

Stick with it!! ;)

2nd'D !
 
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Update:

The battery has improved markedly, and I now to go bed with around 30 - 40% still remaining, this is good.

One major help was turning off Background Data (I prefer to manually sync anyway), but this is annoying as every time I want to enter the market I have to re-enable it then turn it off again when I'm finished. I also can't work out the difference between 'Background data', 'auto sync' and 'always on mobile data'. Anyone able to clarify that?

The only remaining major problem is the heat, which seems to be more than other Desire users have. I posted another thread about the Spotify app, and I seem to be the only person whose Desire heats up from playing music offline (not streaming) in Spotify.

I'm reluctant to go through the exchange process and lose all of the setup I've done on this phone (looks great now, custom scenes, widgets et al), but perhaps there's no avoiding it. Can't be carrying an oven about!
 
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As said above, it took a couple of weeks to get to know how things work, and these forums gave me almost all the help I needed.

To summarise the important things I learned, I think application management is the key. Only use apps that you actually need and avoid cool looking apps/widgets that you don't use - they just use resources. Get to know the Settings for every app you use, and adjust features like update intervals. For example, Twitter updates every 15 mins by default, using battery and data, but even hardcore tweeters can easily live with updates every hour! Same with email clients - select a longer polling time and restrict email size to save battery, phone storage and data use.

Setting up your apps correctly is by far the best way to maximise usability while minimising the drain on system resources.

At first I liked to turn off wi-fi when I left home, and turned off mobile internet when wi-fi was enabled. I found that this made little difference to phone performance, and actually had a negative effect on usability because I had to switch things on and off! Now I keep mobile internet, wi-fi, background data and auto-sync switched on all the time and can easily manage 15-18 hours per day from my battery with moderate to heavy use. Mobile internet is used when I'm not in range of my wi-fi router at home, and my apps only use internet when needed based on the Settings I give my apps.

You can have wi-fi, GPS and internet all turned on, but they will only be used when an app uses them either at intervals you choose in Settings or during a manual refresh.

Having come to Android from the excellent Sony Ericsson K810i with it's 7 day battery, the Desire took me by suprise. But now it's part of my life and it's staying. I get so much more from it and the only real change to my daily routine is to have a charger both at home and at work, and plug in the Desire every time it's just sitting there doing nothing.
 
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Tip for Auto WiFi disabling -

Download "Juice Defender" (FREE!) from the marketplace.
-> Use the advanced settings
-> Untap everything except for the button that says "Data" and the one that says "Screen"
-> You can configure Juicedefender to disable any internet connections if the screen is locked


But really, the overheating shouldn't be that bad. I watch videos/stream stuff all the time and never are really bothered by it. This phone is just fantastic :D
 
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Where are these "sleep settings" for wifi? I turn mine off during that day as I know I won't be near one, but I've checked and can't see any control that puts it to sleep if it doesn't detect a network.

My experience also suggests that bad apps are the worst culprits for battery use and probably data use too. My phone is very lean with only a few apps added (mostly google's own) and my battery lasts all day with updates on, etc. I do have a charging cable with me in case it needs a boost at work though. But it ususally doesn't.
 
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