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HTC Hero Battery Drain Question..

marcf

Newbie
Aug 6, 2009
14
0
Does anyone know what drains the HTC Hero battery the most? My battery life is just crazy, it's like I remove it from charging and like 10 minutes later is down to like 85% or whatever. I know on most phones like this the battery life isn't good, but this is just driving me crazy. Should I just go and buy another battery to have on stand by?

Thanks..

Marc
 
15% in 10 minutes? That seems to be very quick drainage!

I was charging mine around once a day but I'm finding (after a couple of weeks) it's improving slightly, the current charge has lasted around 2 days. Whether that's the battery getting better or me fiddling with it less I don't know, maybe a bit of both - I still fiddle with it a fair bit.

Are you running anything that's particularly draining for the battery? WiFi's the most obvious one. There are some battery apps people will recommend (sorry, don't use them myself) that will show you what's draining the battery most.

I believe current advice is to charge your phone often anyway, rather than full discharge/recharge cycles.
 
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There's a HTC widget for wi-fi that makes turning it on and off really easy, stick it on one of your home screens.

I'm not sure if it's useful, but the Hero has "Scenes" - these are different configurations of your home screens. So you could have one for work that would maybe show your work email, stock quotes and other work stuff, but you could also have a home scene that would have the twitter widget, bookmarks to sites you may not want to be seen browsing at work, and other non-work stuff.

I'm not sure if scenes also control phone settings, but if they do, theoretically you could set it up so that when you left the house and changed scene, your wifi would be turned off. Same, when you get home and switch to the home scene, wifi is switched back on.

Like I say, not sure that works, however, I think there is an app that lets you specify phone settings depending on your location (as determined by GPS). Of course, then your phone is using GPS and so draining the battery a bit more ;) But I'm sure the app does something clever to avoid draining the battery too much!
 
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HTC hero with battery drain problem?

Mine went down about 40% in one night with everything off. After full charge unplug it went down really quick to under 90%. I tried everything. Profiling, checking cpu load. I did a factory reset without any difference.

Solution? Factory reset + formatted sdcard.

It seems like there are a lot of cached data on the sdcard and since i did the firmware (rom) update to 2.7x.xx i guess maybe old cache-data caused some problem.

After formatting the sdcard the phone works as usual.
 
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The biggest battery eaters are 3G and Wifi. Bluetooth and GPS will take a decent chomp out of it as well. I've got mine to the point that a day of light usage brings the battery down only about 10%, light usage being just a few phone calls and a couple facebook updates and such.

I have the European Hero in the US, so of course I have 3G turned off. I also use the Locale app to manage when my Wifi can be enabled. Also, I have the setting ticked that turns off the wifi when my phone is asleep.

I get the feeling that 3G is probably the largest battery eater by a pretty fair margin, and when your phone is using it to update several times per hour, it can use a lot of the battery. You should consider giving turning off the 3G a shot, only enabling it in order to do web browsing and video streaming.
 
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Post explaining how SMS app is draining battery, change the app and it is supposed to improve. I haven't tried it yet.

Sprint HTC Hero Issue Results in Battery Drain - A problem with the SMS app - Softpedia

Does this apply to sim-free European GSM Heroes? The posts I've found on this topic only mention the CDMA version.


My OH has a UK T-Mobile branded Hero (yep his & hers :) and she gets a couple of days out of it without trying too hard. Mine loses 40% battery between home and the office in the morning (1 hour commute, GSM only, in retro mode), and I have everything obvious disabled and kill unused apps etc.


I'll investigate the SMS app issue and update if I find anything.
 
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So I've been fiddling about a bit more, using the "switch everything off, and I mean everything" strategy.


Starting point for Partial Wake time -
Android System = 50%
Everything else = negligible


Change Hero so that:
All data / network connectivity - off
Every widget and link on the home screens - removed
APNs disabled with APNdroid
And reboot and play around enabling disabling widgets.


And I think I've narrowed it down to two widgets which look innocuous: Clock and Calendar.

Clock - I had this on centre home screen, running in the "Number" rather than "ClockFace" option (time in digits, takes up two screen tiles, optional location+weather) with no location/weather updates.
Calendar - had this on Left-1 home screen taking up the whole screen, no weather updates.


So now I have falling % total wake time, and crucially partial wake against Android System is 'stuck' at 12 seconds after 2 hours since boot.


I'll keep this updated.
 
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So I just got a new Hero a few day ago and basically I find that I have to charge the phone every night - which is some terrible battery life.

I think its mainly due to the fact that a lot of Apps seem to turn on by themselves. All these apps on my android system turn on by themselves even ones that don't have widgets. Like my mail or peep app which I havent even setup yet or have a widget of just randomly start appearing in my tasks list unnecessarily slowing my phone down and draining battery. I don't want to use a few Task manager apps because even running these apps drains battery.

Anyone know how to use solve this issue?
 
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