We’ve spotted a number of you talking about the battery life of the HTC Desire, and I thought this might be of interest. We had a little play with the phone to work out how to make the battery last as long as possible – take a look at our list below. Depending on how much you’re using your phone, we’ve found that a combination of these can extend your battery life by a good couple of hours.
1. Disable ‘Wireless Network Positioning Services’ – Go to ‘Menu’, then ‘Settings’, then ‘Location’ and finally ‘Use Wireless Networks’ where you can choose to turn off the position service. You don’t need to turn off the GPS checkbox since GPS only operates in conjunction with services that access it.
2. Turn Off Wi-Fi – Select ‘Menu’, then ‘Settings’, followed by ‘Wireless Controls’ and then un-check ‘Wi-Fi’. Having Wi-Fi on permanently can really impact battery life.
3. Turn Off the Weather App – This is a function that constantly pulls data, which in turn drains battery. Turn this function off by doing the following: ‘Menu’, then ‘All Programs’, followed by ‘Weather’. Then choose the ‘Menu’ option from within the Weather program and choose ‘Settings’ where you can disable ‘Update Automatically’. Now you can just pull Weather information when you want it.
4. Set your other constantly updating applications to lower update frequencies – there’s really no menu to navigate here, it depends on the applications you’re using. For example you could set the Facebook app to only update once an hour rather than every 5 minutes.
5. Turn down screen brightness by navigating to ‘Menu’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Sound & Display’ > ‘Brightness’. You can drag the brightness down slightly to save on battery life. This is really a personally preference option, but factory settings offer a blaring brightness.
6. Try a 3rd party task management application from the Android Market such as ‘Automatic Task Killer’. But remember not to close tasks that are important for day to day use such as Email, Calendar or Clock.
7. The moving wallpapers on the Desire are a really nice touch, but if you think you can live without them then your phone’s battery will love you for it! Go to ‘Menu’, then ‘Wallpaper’, and select anything other than ‘Live Wallpapers’.
None of these are compulsory remember, and the battery life of any phone will always be dependent on your own individual usage. But let us know how you get on, and if you find any tips of your own.