So I couldn’t wait any longer to join the touch screen revolution. I was getting tired of my blackberry and made the jump. I quickly unpacked the new HTC Incredible with high hopes. The speed and UI was awesome but I pretty much couldn’t do anything without plugging it in every few hours. It was literally just completely dying.
I googled, read forums and all I got was mixed reviews and feedback.
So I started tinkering with the settings and I’ve found a technique which literally improved my battery life by at least a half day.
With normal usage I can literally make it a day and a half without recharging.
Naturally if you are obsessively using foursquare or other apps that tap into the GPS you are going to want to purchase an extended battery.
To really maximize the battery life there are a few key tweaks you can make which will make a world of difference.
- Get an App Killer. While most Verizon or other Cell phone stores will tell you to grab the little green guy (Advanced Task Killer) I have found that Task Panel X is a great deal more effective for killing apps. The only application I’ve needed to put in the ignore list is “clock” in fear of not having my phone wake me up in the morning. I’ve set it so when I lock my phone it auto-kills applications.
- Change your Screen timeout. Goto Settings > Display > Screen Timeout and change the setting to 15 or 30 seconds. The less bright your screen is the less it will suck from your battery. When you don’t need the brightness at 100% don’t leave it there. I use the “power control” widget which lets me quickly toggle Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sync and brightness depending on my situation. If my phone is sitting in my pocket not hooked up to anything its pointless to leave sync services, wifi or bluetooth running so simply toggle them off.
- Now comes BY far the biggest tweak which made an instant noticeable difference. Change your Sync Settings. If you are using Microsoft Exchange or even Gmail your phone is consistently looking for new emails. Why does your phone need to look for new emails when its locked and sitting in your pocket? The second you pull your phone out and go to check your emails your phone will in seconds pull in the latest emails. Even someone like me who is processing 200+ emails a day only needs to have the setting running every 15 or 30 minutes. To get here goto Settings > Accounts & Sync. If there are things like Stocks or Twitter for HTC sense that you are not using make sure you disable them too so the green icon is not highlighted.
- Train your App Killer. Goto your phone and literally open and app, then hit home and open another app. Open up Task Panel X and look at all those applications running! hold down each of them and be sure to “Add to Auto Kill list”. There are some applications that will run as a service such as Qik, Hootsuite or Kik Messenger to name a few of mine. Services you will have to manually terminate but to be quite honest you don’t really need to do this. For those of you that wish to do this goto Settings > Applications > Running Services > from here you can see all the services and click on them to manually kill them. Do not kill the Google Services Framework, Transaction Service or any other applications that mention the Android operating system.
So there you have the short list of things you actually should pay attention to for increasing your battery life.
If you have tested this and found success please share this post with your friends and comment so when I stumble on random stuff like this I’ll keep posting it.
