Judging by my site stats, Tips and Tricks Volume 1 got your attention. So, I’ve collected more tips for your HTC Desire. Here are 10 tips to improve battery life:
- Turn off Wi-Fi and GPS if you’re not using them. This will improve your battery life a lot (tested and confirmed!) You can easily toggle those settings with Power Control widget.
- Live Wallpapers – yes, they’re cool, but they also consume a lot of your battery power. Turn them off if you don’t need them.
- In Maps application disable Latitude option. Use it only when you need it.
- Use some task management application (search Market for Application Task Killer) to turn off apps you do not need.
- Some apps such are Maps, Facebook, Flickr, Footprints, Friend Stream use Maps (and GPS) and drain your battery. Turn them on only when needed.
- One of my friend has turned off GPS, Wi-Fi and Internet. He uses them only when he needs them. Battery life – 3 days and counting!
- Use Bluetooth only when you need it (once again, you can easily switch on/off with Power Control widget.)
- If you access to a access point (Wi-Fi) you should disable 3G. There is no need to have them both turned on.
- Lower screen brightness (once again you can use Power Control widget or manually check settings -> sound & display -> brightness.
- Disable always-on mobile data and you’ll save a lot of your batter power. Check Settings > Wireless and networks > Mobile Networks and then uncheck “Enable always-on mobile data”.
Feel free to leave your comments below. Let me know if you have more ideas how to improve Desire battery life!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
A task manager can actually use even more juice if you use it incorrectly (as most people do).
Most applications you see in those managers are in a static state in the background, meaning they don’t use any battery power because they are saved to the ROM in the state you left them in.
If you kill those, they will use more power by having to initialise everything again, this is especially true for deeply integrated apps like GMail, because a lot of apps depend on the activities in them to function, thus initialising them again and using precious battery life.
The correct way to use them is for misbehaving apps that are in a loop that doesn’t show anything useful but uses a lot of resources (an app that keeps connecting to the GPS and to the internet without any way to stop it for example).
Another case where a task manager might help is when you don’t feel like bothering in the UI to turn off music (in which case you can kill the player which will shut the MediaPlayer down).
Hey BlackDragon!
First of all, thanks for fantastic comment. I’ve read a great article about Android task managers – Why You Shouldn’t Be Using a Task Killer with Android. They think the same way that you do. But, I’ve decided to post that tip because HTC customer service recommended one application which I’ve mentioned in my post.
Great article..
I was watching an informative vid showing all the HTC apps that run in the background but dont show up on the running apps list. I checked and sure enough, just about every HTC, or Google service app, was running (you can select the “force stop” button).
It made me wonder.. with all the cool apps out there, hasn’t anyone made an app that will let you select all the apps you want to stay closed, it will either watch them and “force stop” them when they open, or it just send “force stop” to all the apps you selected at intervals (like every few mins).
Anyone out there seen an app like that.. please shoot me the link. thanks. look412_2001@hotmail.com
Hey Max!
There are some (hidden) apps which run in the background all the time, but you can’t see them in the list (read about it here and here).
Back to your question – I’m not aware of such application. “Force stop” to all selected apps every few mins would drain more battery than running those apps in background. Btw, if I found application you’re looking for I’ll contact you. Cheers!