Help HTC Desire battery lasts 4 hours

Oops. Double post.

Phenomenological said:

I browse the internet for maybe an hour a day on wifi, 30-60 minutes of phone calls, between 100 and 200 texts, syncing three news feeds regularly, download an app or two and some updates daily, and play about an hour of games on it a day to while away the bus journey...And I normally have about 50% left after a 07:00-23:00 period off charge. I can assure you, the battery is fine.

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Well then good for you, my battery doesn't! The battery is not fine or I would not be on this forum, so stop being a tit please.

nofear said:

Well then good for you, my battery doesn't! The battery is not fine or I would not be on this forum, so stop being a tit please.

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Tweet tweet.

On a serious note, do you have a friend with the same phone so you can swap out the batteries and see if it makes a difference? At least that way you can rule out a hardware fault.

You send 6000 texts a month?!

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When you have a lot of communicating to do, unlimited texts works out a lot cheaper than lots of minutes. It varies between about 2000 and 5000 depending on the month.

junkiepilot said:

Sorry but what a shite article, whats the point in buying a high end device and then switching everything off, in!

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because you dont need all that crap on , when its in you pocket , doh

spenspuma said:

I'm sorry but there is no way on earth you will get 30 hours out of a single Desire charge under medium to heavy usage...absolutely NO WAY!

I know about 6 people with desires and most use them regularly throughout the day and every one of us has to charge it every night.

Depends what your definition of Heavy usage is...Im talking an hour or so calls and a good 2 hours internet...plus texting and maybe navigation....some days I can get to 3 o'clock and need to charge it!

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Sorry but I do, and I use my phone alot, I play a alot of emulators for the Snes and mega drive. I send 5-10 emails a day, around 40 texts, play mp3's and 30 hours is easy for me.

My trick is to only use what I need. I found disabling always on mobile data helped along with using GSM only when I don't need 3g although on O2 I rarely get 3g). I use a dark wallpaper. I use the force close widget on ATK to kill non core apps.

I always have a good signal, perhaps that helps my battery. Either way 30 hours is literally a stroll in the park for me

I will agree that GPS and navigation rinse the battery quickly though

Phenomenological said:

I browse the internet for maybe an hour a day on wifi, 30-60 minutes of phone calls, between 100 and 200 texts, syncing three news feeds regularly, download an app or two and some updates daily, and play about an hour of games on it a day to while away the bus journey...And I normally have about 50% left after a 07:00-23:00 period off charge. I can assure you, the battery is fine.

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I'll swap batteries with you! I'm somewhat envious! I maybe do an hour or so of net and 100 texts a day and I'm out of it by 20:00 after unplugging at 08:00.

I am in the "get more than 30 hours out of a charge" boat and from my recent findings I am starting to lean toward it being an end-user issue rather than it being a phone issue.

Here is why......

When I got my Desire the battery was shocking, less than a day for the first few days, then I got into the nuts and bolts of the phone and found all the things that were draining the batt. The easiest way to do this is to turn every single thing to off and then switch them on one at a time and see what the resulting effect is.

Now, I have a mate who has been moaning about the shitty batt life and that he wasnt getting more than 5 or 6 hours on the Desire and how there must be a problem with his phone and that he cant understand why I can get so much out of my phone etc etc. So I suggested me taking his phone for a few days and seeing what was what.

Sure enough, the phone as he gave me it had a lot of battery drain. So I went through the same process I did with my phone and switched everything off and set his phone up pretty much the same as mine. End result, he now gets over a day out of his phone between charges and he is a heavy user. Uses the t'interweb and is constantly txt'ing and tweeting and facebooking as well as listening to the crudiest music you've ever heard and playing the odd games......

My tips to help you get a better battery life, that have worked on 3 Desires now and gets you between 30 and 96 hours of use between charges, are as follows;

- Switch off everything that is NOT required, so only turn on things like bluetooth, GPS, Wifi, and Data as and when they are needed. You can get widgets aplenty to make this easy. Remove things like facebook, weather and email from the homepages as these eat a serious amount of juice. Use them as apps instead.

- Remove any and all apps that you dont use! They might be cool to show off to friends etc, but some app devs have not got a clue what they are doing and their bad coding leads to an app bleeding power when it is not required! A lot of users just download stuff and forget about it.

- Go into menu>settings>accounts and sync and switch off weather and stocks and any other account that you dont need. This saves loads of battery!

- I have a page that is dedicated to all things t'interweb and have things like browser, wifi on/off, data on/off, mail, etc on it. IF you organise things you can keep a better control over what they do and when.

- Stop processes that constantly update. Either do it manually or schedule it better. DO you really need to check for emails every few minutes? IF NOT then do it manually!

- IF you are going to use an app killer, DONT use it as a widget as this drains more battery than if it used as an app. Certain widgets have this issue, so play around and see IF that is having an effect.

- You can set the brightness level to low IF you want to, but I have found that leaving it on auto causes NO significant drain.

As I said, play around with swithcing things on and off and see if this improves things any. My guess is that a lot of you are getting poor battery life due to a Vampire app that is constantly draining power when it is not required.

Maps seems to be the only one I cannot stop, any ideas?

Hi All,

Today I got to the point of being really pissed off with my battery performance. I called HTC and said to the support guy (very helpfull) what I had done to try and improve the life of the battery. He was impressed and said I had done everything possible apart from un-installing apps which was the next step. I explained that all apps were from the market and should not have this effect on the phones performace/battery. He daid I needed a new battery and it would be supplied under as the phone was only 6 months old.

Personally I think there were a batch of faulty batteries supplied. Lots of people have this problem and even if the upmost is done to try and improve the life of them, it is still poor. The battery was as over 60% power on the battery at 5pm today when I left work.. and I now have under 5% remaining! And I have done minial browsing (a bit of email and facebook).

tanbe174 said:

my phone can last 3 days from decent to max use such as internet, market, etc.

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No. No it doesn't last 3 days from decent use.

beyond said:

4-5 hours sound about right to how much I can get out of my phone if I use it intensively. That means a good couple of hours internet on 3g, general faffing about, calls and text. I think that's the general timeline for everyone no?

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This is a little more like it

gie62001 said:

nope, for me everything can be on (bluetooth, wifi, gps, hsdpa, background syncing,...) and i still would get at least 7-9 hours playing games, listening to the music, browsing internet...
so i dont think 4-5 hours is alright

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This seems about right.

Entropy1024 said:

I have also loaded Advanced Task Killer and go tthat shutting down any errant apps every 30mins.

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Grats, you're the one causing the shitty battery life. This is one of the dumbest things to do on Android ever.

[HOW TO] Calibrate Desire Battery - xda-developers

if it doesn't work , go get a new battery under warranty...

simple answer

gie62001 said:

nope, for me everything can be on (bluetooth, wifi, gps, hsdpa, background syncing,...) and i still would get at least 7-9 hours playing games, listening to the music, browsing internet...
so i dont think 4-5 hours is alright

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Can you clarify this, please? Surely you don't mean you can play games for 7 hours. Do you?

i love the way people suggest switching everything off to save battery. why not just switch the whole device off, then the battery would last forever!

I live in a semi-rural part of zambia (central africa) and am often in areas of poor cell signal, it seems to me that the desire chows a lot of battery searching for better or more signal. when i go off camping to areas where i know there is no signal at all i put the phone in airplane mode and the battery lasts ages, even using camera, flashlight and playing music. But it still cant fly.

Entropy1024 said:

I bought a HTC Desire on a week ago and love it. Only problem is tat the battery is dire. I found it lasts for about 4 hours then it's dead. I am not running any apps or Wi-Fi, GPS, syncing etc. I initialy put id down to me playing with the phone constantly for the 1st couple of days. However by the fith day the battery was still dying in 5 hours or sooner. I took the phone back suspecting a faulty handset or battery. Got a new phone and battery. Still have the same very poor 4 or 5 hour battery life. I have loaded 'Battery Graph' app and you can see there is almost a straight line going down losing 20% of power every hour!!!! This is even overnight when it's doing absolutely nothing. I have also loaded Advanced Task Killer and go tthat shutting down any errant apps every 30mins. Still no improvement in battery life. Any ideas what may be causing this? Neither of the batteries I have had have hologram stickers on them like my old Nokia did. Should the official batteries have hologram stickers? Any help much appreciated.

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Biggest battery killer I've experienced is when you're in an area which doesn't have a strong or consistent 3G signal. Could this be your issue?

funkmuncha said:

i love the way people suggest switching everything off to save battery. why not just switch the whole device off, then the battery would last forever!

I live in a semi-rural part of zambia (central africa) and am often in areas of poor cell signal, it seems to me that the desire chows a lot of battery searching for better or more signal. when i go off camping to areas where i know there is no signal at all i put the phone in airplane mode and the battery lasts ages, even using camera, flashlight and playing music. But it still cant fly.

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Agreed.

I'm a moderate user and I'm happy to charge my phone daily. You can turn everything off and be anal about battery life but personally I don't see the point unless you're going to be in a place without electricity! I like my all singing, all dancing phone with silly weather updates, silly animated screen and multiple email account syncing. But hey that's just me.

Furious duck we are on the same page. Now maybe if you loose some of the anger in your name we could be friends

I know the phone is new but try a factory reset. I was using 20% cpu per hour after I installed the last Android patch (2.10.405.2). Couldn't find a reason for it but a factory reset fixed it.

mine only last six hours with only blue tooth on and just a few short phone calls

I wanted to like android so badly and I have forgiven so many of it's failings because of this - things I would have crucified another platform for (eg iphone). I know I'll get flamed mercilessly for saying this, but android's multitasking system is broken at the most basic level. Everyone is constantly singing the praises of it's flexibility and openness but I can't decide if I want to shut an app off??? The system knows best? Clearly it doesn't when I can't make it home from work without a dead battery. The comparatively ancient Symbian had the ability to close apps years ago.

The fact that a whole world of app-killers sprung up to counteract (unsuccessfully) the way android manages tasks is proof positive that this aspect of the system is a tragic failure. At least give us the option to shut them down for crying out loud (without automatically restarting them again!).

The countless posts on innumerable forums about the hoops you have to jump through to get acceptable battery life are testament to just how broken core elements of android are. And frankly, the fact that some people get 30+ hours out of theirs while I get about 12-16 on average out of mine now (up from 8 when i first upgraded to Froyo) is further proof of it's brokenness. It's not really an open and free system if I have to do ludicrously specific "tricks" and use it in very particular ways for it to be functional.

While I still think that android is the best smartphone system currently available, it really is proof that none of the technologies really fulfill our (realistic) needs. The thing that gets me so annoyed is that I believe android COULD be great if they fixed a few minor flaws in its design.

As I type this I'm doing the battery 'reset' thing to it as it's the last hope for me before I throw it off a bridge. It constantly lets me down when I need it.
The fact that android phones are in the hands of millions of non-technical users now makes all it's quirks unacceptable and put its longevity in doubt. Most people don't want to faff around with their phone endlessly.
</rant>

(HTC Desire 8183 Telstra Australia)

skinner_au said:

I wanted to like android so badly and I have forgiven so many of it's failings because of this - things I would have crucified another platform for (eg iphone). I know I'll get flamed mercilessly for saying this, but android's multitasking system is broken at the most basic level. Everyone is constantly singing the praises of it's flexibility and openness but I can't decide if I want to shut an app off??? The system knows best? Clearly it doesn't when I can't make it home from work without a dead battery. The comparatively ancient Symbian had the ability to close apps years ago.

The fact that a whole world of app-killers sprung up to counteract (unsuccessfully) the way android manages tasks is proof positive that this aspect of the system is a tragic failure. At least give us the option to shut them down for crying out loud (without automatically restarting them again!).

The countless posts on innumerable forums about the hoops you have to jump through to get acceptable battery life are testament to just how broken core elements of android are. And frankly, the fact that some people get 30+ hours out of theirs while I get about 12-16 on average out of mine now (up from 8 when i first upgraded to Froyo) is further proof of it's brokenness. It's not really an open and free system if I have to do ludicrously specific "tricks" and use it in very particular ways for it to be functional.

While I still think that android is the best smartphone system currently available, it really is proof that none of the technologies really fulfill our (realistic) needs. The thing that gets me so annoyed is that I believe android COULD be great if they fixed a few minor flaws in its design.

As I type this I'm doing the battery 'reset' thing to it as it's the last hope for me before I throw it off a bridge. It constantly lets me down when I need it.
The fact that android phones are in the hands of millions of non-technical users now makes all it's quirks unacceptable and put its longevity in doubt. Most people don't want to faff around with their phone endlessly.
</rant>

(HTC Desire 8183 Telstra Australia)

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Sorry you're frustrated. I can understand it since I get about the same usage time. The only thing I can say is that it is the best platform option out there and battery technology will get better. I really believe all the manufacturers realize this and are working on figuring it out.

Hang in there. With the speed of innovation it won't be long until we here some good news.

I've only had my phone since November and up to recently the battery life was good. However in the past few days, it's dropped down to half power after only a couple of phone calls and texts. I phoned the provider and they suggested switching off the mobile internet. I never used wi fi so that was off. I do have some apps running in the background but when i go to stop them I get a warning and I'm not sure if I will be able to get them back. Anyway, I turned off mobile internet and I turned everything off I was sure about and had it on charge all night. This morning I have one phone call and sent one text and the battery has dropped to half again. I rang provider and they are going to send me a new battery but I wonder if I'm doing something that is draining the battery and that the new battery will go the same way. Any suggestions as to what I can check on and how to turn things off without losing them. This is my first android phone and I'm not that techky. Thanks.