Android Phones
Follow Up: I reset my HTC Hero and started over, here are my results
January 19, 2010 | by Robert Nelson
Android Phones, Carriers, HTC, Sprint
A few weeks back you may remember that I was complaining how my HTC Hero was sluggish and not offering the best battery life. Given that I choose to do a factory reset and start over. I was also asked by several people to come back with a follow up, so without further adieu…
Basically, I restored the phone to factory new conditions and then reinstalled the apps I used on an as needed basis. I will say that my testing was kind of unscientific and maybe a little flawed because part of my results come from being home in Florida and part from being in Las Vegas during CES. My overall usage was the same, but the flawed part comes in terms of coverage which was good in Vegas and remains poor in Florida.
Basically, I found that after the restore my phone offered a little better battery life and was not quite as sluggish. I am chalking this up to the fact that I removed lots of unused apps, and was also able to keep the background checking to a minimum. In short, my restore helped but its not something that should have really been required if I had been a little more careful up front about what I installed and what I had automatically checking.
The interesting part, and the good news for anyone interested in an HTC Hero is that when I was in Vegas (note: Vegas has good Sprint coverage) my overall experience was great. I saw what I would describe as better (non-sluggish) performance and a better battery life. Those items I think can be credited to having a solid high-speed connection.
Bottom line, I think its safe to say that while some of my issues were caused by having more apps than I needed, a good amount of the issues were due to the fact that I regularly bounce from roaming to 1X to EVDO. I say that because since my return from Vegas I have gotten back to that not-quite-right feeling on my Hero. That said, I like HTC, and Sense UI and do not even mind still being on OS 1.5 so I am going to cancel Sprint and pick up a DROID Eris on Verizon.
I did the same with my uk hero and the battery ussually goes down 20-25% while in asleep even with taskiller on but last night it was only 3% !!!!! and the speed ive got back is amazing i also now only have one page on the home screen with the only widget being the clock if i was you id do it too
Signal Strength means a lot to a device's battery life – may it be the iPhone or the Android phone. The less the strength, the more the device polls for signal, the more it eats up battery.
Also, Android, for some strange reason, automatically runs a lot of the third party apps ON BOOT. Try it out – reboot your HTC Hero and then check it with Adv Task Killer and you will see apps running without you invoking it. Pitfalls of full multi-tasking AND letting the OS handle the killing of apps (Android needs to be more aggressive in killing background apps, or maybe give users a setting for this).
This might not be what you're going for as far as getting your Android device cleaned up, but many Hero users have success with Screebl helping to extend battery life. Screebl can be configured to start on boot (or not) and is loaded with tuning possibilities, but it IS a background process, and so its ability to save power depends on your usage patterns. Check out: http://keyeslabs.com/joomla/index.php/projects/sc…
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Battery life is directly related to signal strength, particularly with CDMA phones. If you are switching between 1x and EvDO coverage, your phone will constantly be using battery as it searches for EvDO signal, because the PRL is prioritized to connect to 3G signal.