Improve Battery Life for the Android Based HTC Hero Smart Phone

It is easy to say that I’m a very satisfied owner of the HTC Hero since a couple of weeks. Overall, the smart phone is great and having the ability to run apps and processes in background gives it a clear edge over the iPhone. On the other hand, there are several areas where the Apple experience is just so much smoother. Without going into details I hope the rumoured couple of Android updates still this year will help ease these early misses.

Regardless,there is one thing a smart phone just has to offer and that is getting through a full day or 2 without having to recharge the battery. This is an area where the HTC Hero is struggling a bit. I often end up having to give it some more juice during the afternoon or early evening with the default factory settings. That is fine for a laptop but not acceptable for a smart phone.

To solve this I’ve been fiddling with the settings quite a while to maximize the battery life and below is a short summary of how I’ve managed to get through a heavy usage day without having to recharge the phone. One of the not so secret ingredients to a long battery life is to minimize active network connections – that is also where I focus my tweaking effort below.

Read the rest of this entry »