Battery Knowledge Base

On the first day I got my Telstra HTC Desire, I wanted to see how the device would perform in my daily regime with the default settings. The only other apps that I downloaded and also ran throughout the day were Seesmic (Twitter Client) and Battery Widget (to monitor battery status on homepage).

I took the HTC Desire off the charger at 6am and was dismayed to find that by 9:13am Toshiba pa3285u-1bas battery life had dwindled to 60%! Had a feeling it was to do with the background services that were pulling updates down from Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds etc, but left them running to see how long it would last with the unaltered settings.

At 6pm, exactly 12 hours from time of full charge, it died.

And I thought the iPhone was bad!!

Now that the ‘out-of-box-settings’ day was over, I was looking forward to improving HTC Desire battery performance since many of my online friends were experiencing far better battery times.

After some tweaks at dawn this morning, things are looking up battery wise. It’s lunch time and the battery level is at 63%. That’s only after really changing the background data sync options. Rather than stop there, I spent around ten minutes trawling through the settings to create a list of ten simple ways you can get more time out of your HTC Desire battery. For those who haven’t adjusted any of the settings below yet, I’m confident you’ll be pleased with the results.

If you have any additional ones please post a comment below and I’ll update the list.

10 Ways To Increase HTC Desire Battery Time

1. Disable Background Data syncing : Settings > Accounts & sync > Untick Background data
2. Disable Auto-sync : Settings > Accounts & sync > Untick Auto-sync
3. Turn Vibrate Notification off: Settings > Sound & display > Untick Phone Vibrate
4. Turn Off Haptic feedback: Settings > Sound & display > Untick Haptic feedback : Vibrate when pressing soft keys and on certain UI interactions.
5. Reduce Screen Brightness: Settings > Sound & display > Brightness > Untick Automatic brightness > Reduce Brightness by sliding to left
6. Reduce Screen Timeout Interval: Settings > Sound & display > Screen timeout (default 1 min) > Reduce to less than 1 min (15 seconds minimum)
7. Disable WiFi : Settings > Wireless & networks > Untick Wi-Fi
8. Disable Bluetooth: Settings > Wireless & networks > Untick Bluetooth
9. Disable Unnecessary Running services: Settings > Applications > Running Services > Select and Stop any apps that you are not using
10. Customise Data Options of Individual Apps : normally in Setting options of each app. Change intervals / frequency of data pulls or disable background syncing altogether. Pay attention to Twitter clients, RSS apps and mail especially.

How To Check Battery Level On The HTC Desire

Settings > About phone > Battery : gives Battery Status, Battery Use, Battery Level, Up time and Awake time. I love the way it breaks down Dell Inspiron 1526 replacement battery usage too.

Here’s my breakdown of battery usage at the time of writing this:

• Camera 39%
• Android System 20%
• Cell Standby 19%
• Phone idle 15%
• Display 7%

Looks like I need to stop playing “Mobile Photographer”

Hope this helps you stay online longer on your HTC Desire.

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