axxxo
VIP Member
Thanks to nodeffect at xda
These things are like pocket-sized laptops with a ‘Phone’ app installed. Gone
are the days of a week or two between charges. Expect to charge it up each
night. The odd setting change here or there wont make much difference on it’s
own, but combined it all adds up to getting you through a day even with heavy
use. Light/moderate users can expect two days. Here are my
recommendations;
1. Have screen brightness set to about 20% when indoors. The ‘auto’ screen
brightness setting is pony and never gets it quite right. It also means the light sensor
is then shut down, saving more power. Have a brightness widget somewhere to
manually crank it up if you need. (Use Tasker to adjust screen brightness for
different scenarios; on charge, in car, at home, battery running low etc...)
2. Don’t have GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc on unless you need to use them. Keeping
wi-fi on actually uses less battery than 3G so use that when in a hotspot/
home/office, and use the handy ‘Quick Settings’ tab in your notification area to
easily toggle the others on and off as necessary. (Use Tasker to automatically switch
Wi-Fi on when you get home, and turn it off when you leave?)
3. Use Tasker! Instead of spending £30 on a spare battery, spend £4 on Tasker. I
know I bang on about this app, but I currently think it’s the best thing since sliced
bread. I have got my battery time from 24 hours to 38 hours simply by setting Tasker
to shut all radios off (i.e. Airplane Mode) between midnight and 6am! It even texts my
missus when I’m half way home so my dinner is ready when I get in. £4!!!
4. Don’t leave the phone on full charge for excessive amounts of time. Lithium
Polymer battery performance will suffer if the battery is kept too hot for too long.
Unplug when at 100% for over an hour. (Tasker can set a warning alert for this!) I
use one of those cheap electronic timer plugs next to my bed that turns my charger
on between 1am and 4am. So if I plug it in before going to bed, it’s fully charged
when I wake up and has not been on charge the entire night and over-heating the
battery.
5. Careful what web page you are on if you drop out of the browser. Web pages with
fancy flash adverts running on them may keep the Browser app running in the
background, force partial wake lock, soak up data usage, and drain battery. Best to
keep hitting ‘back’ to back out of the browser instead of simply pressing the ‘home’
key. Don’t set i-Google as your home page. Normal Google is fine.
6. Check your sync settings. These phones can do an alarming amount of stuff in the
background without you knowing about it. Having the frequency high for checking
weather, updates etc can use up power. Make sure you turn this down to a sensible
frequency that best suits your requirements. Everyone is different so it will take sometime for you to find the best personal balance.
Lots of widgets updating will also eat
into battery life. Avoid ones you don’t really use much, even if they look nice. Make
sure you don’t have “Always On Mobile Data’ ticked in the settings.
7. New to HTC Gingerbread is a handy battery usage graph that shows how quickly
your battery is being used and which aspects of the phone are using it. You shouldn’t
have any troubles with it though as this ROM is pretty well made. There is the odd
partial-wake lock over night, but nothing major. Still trying to track the cause of that
one.
8. Build up a good collection of chargers. Have one at home, one at work and
definitely one for your car. Make sure the car one is a genuine HTC one as cheap
ones are not able to charge the phone at the required current rating. They usually fail
to short the two data pins so your phone thinks it’s still plugged into a PC and will
limit its own charging current. It won’t be enough to keep the phone going whilst
using Google GPS Navigation. It is possible to frig a USB cable to get around this,
but better to stick with HTC stuff.
9. Mains wall chargers will charge your battery twice as fast as charging from USB.
10. Cheaper non-HTC batteries may claim better capacity, but they rarely last longer
and do not live as long before you have to throw them out. If you want a spare
battery, pay a little more and get a genuine HTC one. It’s worth it.
11. For some reason, your phone will come out the box with a crazy option enabled
called “Always On Mobile Data.” This will permanently keep your phones 3G data
connection live when not on WiFi. It hammers the battery. Go to Settings> Wireless
& Networks> Mobile Networks> un-tick the ‘Enable always-on mobile data’. Now
when not on wifi, your phone will only use 3G when it needs to. Much better.
12. Another new idea from HTC is called ‘Pocket Mode’. Turn this off! All it offers is
the phone will ring slightly louder when in a pocket or bag. It does this by constantly
pinging away the light-sensor, proximity sensor, and accelerometer to determine if
it’s in a pocket or bag. It hammers battery life for a very small advantage. Menu>
Settings> Sound> Un-tick Pocket Mode.
13. New to Sense 2.1 is its own ‘Power Saver’ mode. I used to have Tasker do this
on my old Desire, but no you can quickly set this up with HTC Sense. It will turn
certain things off when you reach a certain low battery level to keep your phone alive
that little bit longer. Go to Menu> Settings> Power> Enable Power Saver, select
whether you want it coming on at 25%, 20%, 15% or 10%. Recommend 15% as my
phone shuts down at about 8% battery. You can choose to turn off Background data,
WiFi, Bluetooth, Backlight set to specified level, animations...You can’t turn off 3G
though, so Tasker still has something to do!
14. Watch out for a new feature also in the ‘Power’ menu called ‘Fast Boot’. It’s
enabled by default, and means that when you shut your phone off it’s not properly
shutting down, but going into hibernation. The benefit is your phone will then “boot
up” in about 5 seconds. I recommend turning this off unless you think you just can’t
wait 25 seconds for it to boot normally! Plus I like to know that when I turn my phone
off, it really is off and not slowly using battery power to save me a few measly
seconds later. There have also been reports of people removing their battery when
they think the phone is off, and causing SIM card errors. Off should mean Off!