I found that disabling Android's 'Account's and Sync - Autosync' feature from running all the time saves battery life big time.
I have an app called
Tasker that can disable/enable 'Autosync' throughout the day. At first, I was enabling Autosync every two hours for 5 minutes between 6am and 10pm and experienced a battery life savings of about 15% over nine hours since I typically leave work now with 70% battery remaining instead of being in the mid 50's. However, I just set my Tasker Autosync profile to every four hours after I notice that I had inadvertently left my phone off the charger last night which after 10pm Autosync is never enabled, and after being unplugged since 8am yesterday my phone still has 40% battery remaining at 6am this morning. That's just 60% battery drain over 22 hours.
The only thing Autosync does for me is sync GMail contacts, Google calendar events, and HTC Hero's native Facebook events. I thought about it, and as long as any contact or calendar event I change syncs between the phone and Google or Google and the phone sometime throughout the day, that would be fine for me. I don't use the GMail app (hate conversation threading) so I don't have it syncing GMail since I use the HTC Mail app instead with hourly updates. I also don't use the infamous HTC Weather Clock widget since the Weather sync is tied to Android's Autosync feature. So, I'm using beautiful widgets instead with an hourly update.
So, there's something to battery life and using Android's native autosync for its intended purpose of 'instant push'. I would rather use 'text message alerts' and setting HTC Mail to a lower check interval time instead of using 'instant push' for things and save a bunch of battery life doing so.
Oh, and by the way, I have the
Tasker app disable the timed Autosync profile I created and enable Autosync and leave it on anytime I'm plugged into power. And when I unplug from power, Tasker disables Autosync and re-enables the timed Autosync profile.
What an APP!