drop in battery overnight???

[liquidmonkey]

have an HTC DESIRE and am wondering what your overnight drop in battery power is.

on a typical night my power drops 20-30%. is that normal?
when the screen goes black does LIVE WALLPAPER and other apps stop working?

just now i installed that super mario bros live wallpaper and noticed 15% drop in 2 hours. WTF?

like everyone i want to get the most out of battery life, any tips?

 

[takeshi]

Dunno. I charge mine nightly so there's no drop.

when the screen goes black does LIVE WALLPAPER and other apps stop working?

Depends on the app. There's no one-size-fits-all answer. What do you have running?

like everyone i want to get the most out of battery life, any tips?

Start with the battery info screen. Tackle those battery hogs first.

 

[SeeK]

The Desire comes with a power control widget which I'd recommend putting on your home screen. When you're moving about or just want to conserve battery, turn everything like WiFi, automatic updates and GPS off unless you need it. If you go into Accounts & Sync, there's a tickbox called Background Data - turning this off seems to help a bit (the phone itself states that it might). This'll stop all running programs from fetching new data to update their status, but it'll help your battery. Pressing the Auto-update button on the aforementioned widget turns it back on and all your apps will start updating again.

You can also go into Sound & Display under Settings and turn off things like Haptic Feedback, set Animations to Some animations and disable the LED Flash for notifications. Everything helps a little bit while you're on the go.

As far as battery usage during the night - most likely apps updating themselves or something more specific running in the background that chews your battery. Like takeshi says, use the Battery Usage app included in the phone to see what's using battery. Only Cell Standby, Phone Idle and Android System should be running at night really, anything else'll eat battery even though you won't be looking at the phone for another eight-or-so hours.

 

[liquidmonkey]

thanks for the awesome advice!
i'm not one of those 'always connected people' so never have wifi on or background data stuff either.
turning off the vibration and animations is a good tip and i'll give that all a try.
i actually noticed that those settings are NOT saved with a scene which is a bummer. i have a 'camping' scene with nothing fancy at all and would be cool if those options saved too.

and yes, i noticed that phone idle and android system do take quite a bit of juice when the phone is not being used but maybe i'm being too unrealistic and want 3 days out of my desire when its in airplane mode and hardly used

 

[SeeK]

Yeah, I was a bit like that with my Desire as well. I guess it's a tradeoff between having what I think is a good replacement for a laptop, and being able to use it for several days. With normal usage though, and using some of the tips I listed, you should always make it through a day and then some on one charge. The longest I've had my phone running so far is just over 26 hours and even then it still could've kept running for a bit if I'd left it alone.

Something I read quite recently though - the WiFi uses less power than the 3G, so whenever you're at home or when you have access to a wireless network, you might want to enable WiFi and the phone'll automatically disable the 3G radio.

Lastly, if you've not seen this yet, this is a very good read.