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HTC Desire S Owner’s Guide – V1.02 | wnp_79
To get the most from your battery.....
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 hot-
spot/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 some
time 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.