Wednesday 8 September 2010

Where's your icons now?

In an attempt to figure out what the frak in my "Display" is draining my Heroes battery I've removed all widgets (except for this awesome clock, TAJM). Now I can't remember which screen any of my on-screen apps are on.

(Still haven't figured out what in Display is killing my battery, looks like it's time to buy a new phone that smoothly runs Froyo.)

My name's Robbie and I like cheese :)
or: simply 'gold boy'

Posted via email from itsmoirob's posterous

6 comments:

seaempty said...

Have you got your display set to auto brightness? I found having that on makes a big difference.

The battery life since the 1.2 update sucks. I've just accepted that I'll get a day's use out of it, and have done. No point having a pohone, and not using the features!

Another thing which saves battery life, is having the wi-fi set to never sleep on the advanced wi-fi settings. Using mobile data uses more battery than wi-fi, so if your wi-fi sleeps, the background updates will used 3G and therefore more battery.

My battery life is so much better when I'm at home at the weekends due to this.

Robbie said...

Yeah, autobrightness is off with brightness turned to about 5~10%

Have never tried never sleep wi-fi, on the face of it sounds counter productive. Will give it a whirl.

My dad has the same phone and berates the battery. Always complaining about it. But not being as tech-headed he is probably unintentionally wasting lots of battery life. But it's good to hear that official 2.1 isnt much better then a day. Thats all I can manage with 2.2.

Guess the Hero wasnt designed for this amount of work. Definitely going to be getting a new phone soonish. Going to wait until all the new dual core and Android 3 phones start coming out. Cant be that far away, end of year perhaps?

seaempty said...

I would turn the auto brightness back on - I think it is the most efficient way of doing it.

Anmd the wifi thing does sound couneter intuitive, but it does work. Whilst wi-fi uses battery to search for a signal, having it disconnect (sleep) when it has, and forcing it to use the 3G uses more.

There's a good app that I use called y5 battery saver (or something similar). When you connect to a wifi access point, it remembers your location using cell towers. When you move away from that loaction, it turns the wi-fi off.

Robbie said...

The forums for VillainRom/Froyd (the custom ROM I'm using) are detaing over whether autobrightness saves or kills the battery. It seems to be 60/40 in favour of it goes against battery.

Theres an app called Tasker that does what youve suggest but does about a quadzillion other things. Anything you could think you want you phone to do and stuff youd never imagine chances are Tasker could do it. You should try it.

seaempty said...

Yeah, I've seen that, but it costs £3.99, and I'm too cheap to buy it :D

Robbie said...

Seriously try it. It does everything for me from mute when flipped over (I know HTC have a mute ringtone for incoming call when flipped but for those times when you just dont want to be reached a quick flip and your done)
It tells me my location if lost if I text it. Reads out text messages if I'm in driving mode. Switches GPS on when opening Maps/Navigate.

And I've only scratched the service. It's worth your threehundredandninetyninepennies.