I wrote this a while ago and didn't know if it needed its own thread.
Extending battery life, HTC Thunderbolt
I’ve scoured articles and the internet looking for tips and tricks to extend the battery life for Android phones (especially newer HTCs). Some people need to constantly be syncing Facebook/ Twitter/ Email/ Weather every five minutes while downloading files, listening to Pandora, and surfing the net. Others just want to check their mail, weather, and the news once or twice a day, and then there’s everyone in between. For the heavy users not much can be done to extend battery life aside from buying a bigger battery and following a few of the below tips. I’m not saying you should do everything listed below. If you do, you will somewhat negate the advantages of having a smart phone. Just try and find a balance that works for you.
To start
-Download Battery Status Bar (by Modded Logic); It displays your remaining battery life (in percentage) in the notifications bar. Very useful app.
-I’d suggest creating a control panel on one of your home screens. This isn’t necessary but this page is useful for turning on/off battery sucking processes as you need them. On the control panel put the following widgets:
__Toggle for Wifi on/off
__Toggle for GPS on/off
__Toggle for Bluetooth on/off
__Toggle for 3G data on/off
__Toggle for 4G data on/off
__Toggle for Airplane mode on/off
__Stock HTC Battery Use shortcut => Menu / Settings / About Phone / Battery / Battery use. Very useful for observing what is using your battery
__Stock HTC Sound Profile widget. For easy switching between ring, vibrate, and silent.
__Brightness Level app (by Curvefish). For adjusting your display brightness.
General tips
-Turn off GPS when not needed.
-Turn off Bluetooth when not needed.
-Turn off 3G/4G when on wifi (3G/4G typically suck more battery than wifi, turn 4G back on if you need a speed boost depending of your wifi speed)
-Airplane mode turns off all wifi/3G/4G/1x radios and is useful if you have terrible service and your phone is just looking for towers the whole time. Wifi can be re-enabled from the “control panel” if you have wifi service.
-Set wifi to never sleep => Menu/ Settings / Wireless and Networks / wifi Settings / Menu / Advanced /wifi Sleep Policy/ Never. If you have applications/email/weather that need to sync when the display is off then use this setting. If you don’t need anything syncing then by all means use a different setting.
-Turn off wifi when out of range of a wifi network since it will waste battery searching for signal.
-Turn off wifi and 3G when you are sleeping since you don’t need your phone to update your email or friends’ status when you’re asleep. Just turn it back on when you get up. You will still receive texts and phone calls.
-Don’t use live wallpapers.
-Dim brightness to 25% and adjust to a higher setting when needed/outside, or use auto brightness if you’re lazy.
-Set screen timeout to 30/60sec or less, and even with the screen timeout set low, try and hit the power button to sleep the display whenever you’re done with your phone.
- Don’t keep a large number of messages per conversation, turn on auto delete; go to => Menu / Settings / Delete Old Message and set a limit, 30,50,100,etc whatever you want (40 for me).
-Delete old emails, I also adjust my email settings to only show the last 7 days.
-Extend or eliminate your sync times => Menu / Settings / Accounts & Sync. Adjust all of these as you need. Maybe you don’t need to sync Facebook/Twitter at all? Remember you can just click on the app to force update it. Constantly syncing apps eat battery.
----Sync mail every 15-30 minutes during peak hours and 1 hour off peak. (Go into mail program to adjust sync times)
-Weather to sync every 3 hours
----Facebook/Twitter to sync every hour
-----Google contacts/calendar to never sync
-----News and stocks to never sync
-Manage apps that are taking memory, go to Menu / Settings / Applications / Manage Applications / Running. Only force stop apps you have downloaded (or things like Facebook). You don’t want to stop processes that will make your phone unstable or crash.
-Sometimes occasionally, after a major update, or after initially setting up your phone you may want to completely shut off the phone and turn it back on. This will hopefully fix any rogue apps. (This is a good thing to do if your battery life is really bad)
-Turn off “Enable Always on mobile data”, this turns off your 3G radio when the display is off for more than a few minutes, so if you’re not connected to wifi you won’t have anything syncing while the display is off, also apps like Pandora will lose connection after display is off for a few minutes. As soon as you turn the display on, 3G will activate ie: your email services will update, etc. => Menu / Settings / Wireless / Mobile networks. I don’t use this because I like having more control over my data but others have had very good results. I say again, if you are not connected to wifi you will not get emails and syncs until you turn on the display. Therefore the little email indicator light that blinks when you have an email will not blink. Using an App like “SuperPower”/”UltimateJuice” (described below) will accomplish a similar operation to this setting but with more control.
-Turn off “Haptic Feedback”, this takes battery. => Menu / Settings / Sound settings / Haptic feedback. Also go into your text message application’s settings and disable it there too.
-Just some notes on Lithium Ion Batteries:
Don’t completely run them down; phones have circuitry to prevent you from doing this to a certain degree but don’t think you’re helping your battery by draining it to 2% every time. Charge when it’s approx 20-40 percent if possible. The only reason to run it really low is if you’re trying to somehow recalibrate (power cycle) it by running to empty then charge to full (and maybe Bump Charging too at the end).
Apps to help or monitor battery life
“SystemPanel”
Displays what applications are occupying your RAM and how much they are taking. It also shows the amount of time apps spend using the CPU. You can kill apps that are taking resources, but don’t kill vital applications (also a lot of the bloat ware comes back right after you kill it so don’t bother). Paid version has a lot more functions.
“Spare Parts”
An app that displays what processes are utilizing power and how much percentage they’re taking. Pretty intuitive app. It’s only real useful for monitoring and looking for rogue processes or apps. If your phone seems to not be sleeping use this app to monitor.
“JuiceDefender” and “Ultimatejuice” (paid version of JuiceDefender)
Allows you to change settings so:
If wifi is available then 3G is always off.
Turns off 3G and wifi (paid version only) when the display is off. You can allow wifi and/or 3G to turn back on at set intervals for a few minutes to allow for applications to sync. You can also allow for some apps to have priority and connect whenever they need to (such as Pandora).
“Superpower”
Very similar to JuiceDefender but with more settings/options and turns off 3G and wifi when the display off. Also you can make Superpower turn off wifi if you’re not connected to a network for more than a minute or two (I don’t think free JuiceDefender has this option). It’s a beta version so the potential for bugs is higher.
Regarding JuiceDefender (Beta only works currently) and Superpower:
These apps allow for you to set intervals that data turns back on to allow apps to sync (Example: 1 minute of data on for every 15 minutes off). But if you have your email to sync every 15 minutes and your weather to sync every hour then the 1 minute window may not coincide with when the email and weather want to sync depending on the way the app was coded (Note: push email should sync in that 1 minute interval). For these situations you can set provisions that allow apps to connect whenever they want. I used Pandora as an example above. I believe free JuiceDefender only allows 4 provisions. With these programs syncing issues can be encountered and you need to just experiment with the settings to see if they’ll work for you. By having the radios off during sleep you can save a decent amount of battery. Pull email accounts probably wont sync when running JD, push will sync in the intervals selected.
Task killer apps
These are debated heavily. Some love them and some hate them. When properly set up they will work, but a lot of people don’t set them up right or just try and kill everything they can. This is bad and will cause stability issues. I personally don’t use one. I manually kill data/RAM hogging apps using “SystemPanel” or the “Manage Applications” menu that is native to android located at => Menu / Settings / Applications / Manage Applications.
There are a lot of good articles on (auto) task killers out there, read them and decide if you want to mess with it. They’re mostly not necessary with Android.
Bump charging (BC)
-This was a big thing with the Droid Incredible (and EVO), I’m not sure if it’s necessary with the Thunderbolt. Many people did/do it.
-Basically it involves charging the phone untill the notification LED turns green, then you unplug the phone, turn it completely off and plug it back in. Now it should charge for another 20-30 minutes until the green light comes on.
Unplug and turn the phone on. Once it’s on again, plug the phone back in until the green LED comes on. Now keep repeating this cycle until the green LED comes on almost instantly; after that you’re all charged up. Most people report a large increase in battery life; typically the phone would go from 100% to 90% within an hour without BC (bump charging). With BC the phone stays at 100% for near an hour. On average you’ll see the most benefit from doing only one of these cycles (phone on and charge to green, then unplug/turn off and charge to green, done). Further cycles don’t see much more benefit. When I BC on occasion, I only do it once.
-The reason this works is a possible software defect that can’t tell when the battery is fully charged. Now there are some debates as to whether this is good or bad for your battery. Some say it over charges it (thus decreasing the lifespan) and can lead to a shorter battery life or something as extreme as battery meltdown. If you’re nervous just do it a few times a month in order to “reset” the battery. This is a YMMV/take at your own risk practice. I still have not heard any definitive answers, for all we know this may not be over charging at all.
The reason I’m typing all this is since the Thunderbolt is the Dinc’s/EVO’s big brother, it probably will suffer from the same issues.
-One thing to note is when owners were using separate charging docks to charge batteries there was no need to BC.
-Another fix was if the phone was rooted a simple modification of some code would reset the battery stats and correct this. But that’s another discussion…
Rooted phones:
-There are/will be many custom roms that will conserve battery life.
-Regarding the above mentioned code modification, I don’t know if this is an option/necessary for the Thunderbolt yet.
-“SetCPU” app on rooted phones:
This app can set the clock to a specific speed depending on battery remaining. Example: 100-80% battery remaining => CPU=995MHz, 79-40% battery remaining => CPU=750MHz, 39-0% battery remaining => CPU=550MHz.
Another feature is to set the clock to a lower speed when the display is off. The phone does not need to be running 100% speed when the display is off since chances are it is only playing music and/or downloading an app at most. This is a big battery saver.
Played angry birds, browsed the net, dled more apps for about 45min. 
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram