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battery - tell me what im doing wrong!

lookseehear

Member
Jan 13, 2010
94
0
I've had my desire since Friday and I don't think it's been off charge for much more than 8 hours or so. I have the screen on lowest brightness most of the time, sync turned off on the android power widget thing - in fact all of the widget options turned off generally.

Anyone got any tips?
 
Took me a little bit of tweaking over a couple of days to get the battery to last as long as the Hero, but it's there now.

Initially it was shocking, I was losing 10% per hour on standby :eek:

And HTC have been a bit tricky by altering the sync settings on the desire compared to the Hero, but I finally managed to figure it out.

I'm sure most already know this, but in case you don't here goes:

First thing
menu > settings > Wieless and networks
Scroll down to Mobile networks selection and uncheck 'Enable always on mobile'

Next
menu > settings > Accounts & sync
Background data and Auto-sync are both checkboxes. You can turn these off (uncheck) and this means that nothing will autoupdate, you'll have to do everything manually. This will save some battery but I find it a bit of a pain. I've got them both on, we can alter the settings in the apps themselves to lengthen battery life.

Below that you'll see 'Manage accounts' There should, by default, be your Google mail account, stocks, and weather. Turn off stocks. Unless you're particularly interested in keeping bang up to date with constant stock updates then you really won't need this. Turn off weather too if you're not bothered about that. I have weather on, but once again we can alter the weather settings elsewhere. Leave your Google mail sync on...unless you really don't use it at all.

then
menu > settings > Sound and Display
There are three checkboxes I unticked. These are: 'Audible touch tones' 'Audible Selection' and 'Haptic Feedback' If you really want these feedback options on then do so but it will impact battery. You can also turn these feedback options off for the virtual keyboard via the keyboard settings menu (open the keyboard and hit the little cog wheel icon)

The next thing to do is to manage app updates. You can do this by opening up the app and pressing the menu button. There will usually be a settings option in which you can manage update intervals.

For example the weather widget.
Click on the widget so that it opens full screen.
Select menu > settings > update schedule.
You can now select how often the weather app will automatically update, although this will be unavailable if you turned off automatic weather updates in the previous 'Manage accounts' section.
I've selected an update every hour. I can't imagine anyone wanting more than that unless you're a real weather update freak.

One of the biggest culprits for accessing data and sucking the life out of your battery is the news widget. I've ditched it altogether, and noticed a big improvement.

If you do want to use it then I suggest you go with as few feeds as possible. To do this, press on the top bar of the widget. You'll see '+ Add Feed' but if you hit menu > settings' then you'll also be able to delete feeds. I've only got one, in case I ever decide to use the widget, and that's the BBC. Your choice is up to you.
If you select the 'settings' option you'll also be able to select the update frequency. I have it on Manual, you can set it up for various times, but obviously the more frequently it updates the more battery is being used.

Task Killers
These are a bit controversial on here and aren't strictly speaking essential, but if you know what you're doing with one they can be very useful for letting you know exactly what apps are currently running and, therefore, giving you a good idea of what may be trying to communicate and what is using your battery.

Using the above settings, or at least something similar. I now lose about 1-3% of battery life per hour on standby, which is pretty good. Of course if you spend all day playing youtube videos and streaming music then you'll get far less, but what do you expect :)
 
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You're just spoiling the phone though!! Half of those I don't touch, its now nearly midnight, my phone has been unplugged since 9am and the battery has 25% charge left.

Setting up the phone so that it does what I need it to do instead of what it wants to do is spoiling it? I don't think so.

One of the big advantages of Android that we all keep banging on about is it's flexibility and it's ease of customisation. All I've done is customise the settings to do what I need it to do. If you want a phone to just do everything for you without tweaking then you can get an iPhone ;):p

I'm not suggesting that all those settings are absolutely necessary, or desireable for everybody, but they are a good start to utilising the phone's power to enable you to do what you need it to do instead of using resources on useless stuff (for most people) like updating stocks and shares every hour or dragging news feeds you aren't interested in from half a dozen sources that you don't care about.
 
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Setting up the phone so that it does what I need it to do instead of what it wants to do is spoiling it? I don't think so.

One of the big advantages of Android that we all keep banging on about is it's flexibility and it's ease of customisation. All I've done is customise the settings to do what I need it to do. If you want a phone to just do everything for you without tweaking then you can get an iPhone ;):p

I'm not suggesting that all those settings are absolutely necessary, or desireable for everybody, but they are a good start to utilising the phone's power to enable you to do what you need it to do instead of using resources on useless stuff (for most people) like updating stocks and shares every hour or dragging news feeds you aren't interested in from half a dozen sources that you don't care about.

Ahh true, each to there own :p

Oh and by the way. Mine has been unplugged since 8:00am and I've still got 46% charge left :p

grrrr!! ;)
 
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It's strange this, I have had mine 5 days and I haven't had a problem with the battery at all. I have all this on:

: Auto check twitter every 5 minutes
: WIFI on all the time even when not connected to a network
: Live wallpapers on all the time
: Auto sync of emails

Also check the news a few times throughout the day, check the Android market, Web Browsing, Making phone calls, Twittering from my phone, Texting and basically just using it as much as I can throughout the day and the most I have got to killing the battery is 13 hours of use and the battery had gone to amber.

I do also have the power control widget on my home screen and also Advanced Task Killer running so I can quickly kill apps that I don't want running.

I made the mistake last night of not locking the screen and put it in my pocket, after a 30 minute drive my phone had been going crazy and got really warm, when I killed unwanted apps it killed 20 apps and that seriously drained my battery in the 30 minute drive home.

Maybe give Advanced Task Killer a go. Works a treat for me and maybe this is what is giving me so much use out of my battery?
 
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