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HTC Desire S Owner’s Guide – V1.02 | wnp_79
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!