Stoneycase: battery

Get the most of out of your HTC EVO 4G battery. Calibrate and increase its performance!

As a followup to my earlier post on "how to save juice", I offer two tricks for ultimately increasing battery life.

First trick, a one-time only calibration:

This is a one-time only procedure.

Turn the EVO on and charge it for 8 hours.
Unplug it and turn it off.
Plug it back in and charge for 1 hour.
Unplug it and turn it on.
Wait 2 minutes and turn it off.
Plug it back in and charge for 1 hour.

There is circuitry in the phone (any phone) that controls charging. The goal of this one time calibration is to help make sure the circuit ultimately understands the "full" point for the battery. Many people have found that their EVO's ultimately show as "full" when they are really not. If you're phone is showing juice drain immediately after it's unplugged, you probably are suffering from this issue. Calibration like this will help, though it can be time-consuming.

Second trick, repeatedly filling the battery to increase the full point.

This can be done repeatedly and it has been proven to work very well:

With the phone in the on position - Fully charge the battery (until the led turns green at the top.)
Once the LED turns green, unplug the charger until the led goes off. (this normally takes 5-10 secs after unplugging the charger from the phone)
After the led goes off, immediately plug the charger back in.
When the LED turns green, power off the phone. (this shouldn't take too long for LED to turn green))

Green LED = Finished Charging, Full

Now...with the phone fully powered off:

1. Unplug the charger.
2. Wait until LED goes off.
3. Plug charger back in until the LED turns green. When it turns green, unplug the charger again repeat the cycle. In other words, unplug charger, wait for led to go off, plug charger back in, wait for led to turn green.
4. Repeat steps 1-3, oh say, 10 or more times. This may take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 mins per cycle. (from when led green, unplug charger, wait for led off, plug charger back in, wait for led to go green again.) Typically only about 1 minute though.

Orange LED = Charging

Couple words on what the second trick is doing (this works for most any phone, really):

We are basically doing the opposite of a complete drain and recharge, which was common with old batteries (NiCad). We are continually "adding juice" by fooling the circuit. Notice that steps have you charge (orange LED) until full (Green LED). Then we unplug, and recharge (orange LED). The goal is not to empty the battery and recharge like ni-cads (those have memory, these don't). These are lithiums, so we need to do the opposite..We are trying to fill up the battery, i.e. make the "full point" more full than it is now. Think of it like like cheating in capacity. Since it's a "trickle charge" you don't really have to worry about overload - that's what the circuity is there for in the first place. We just want to fool the circuitry a bit.

This method seems to work pretty well, and you can easily notice that

You fill up the phone battery by charging it until the LED is green
When you unplug, and the LED light goes off
If you immediately plug the phone back in, the LED is ORANGE. Why?
Because the battery can take more juice - hence the 1 minute or longer cycle times
Each time you do this and it takes time to go from Orange to Green, you're doing good

You can find both of these types of tricks on mobile phone forums such as HoFo and XDA. I have found good success with both tricks on many phones, including my HTC EVO 4G (and an iPhone 3GS). I find the second trick is very effective and fixes the problem of losing battery immediately after unplugging.

A how-to guide on improving the battery life of your HTC EVO 4G.

This is Part 1 of a 2 Part series on HTC EVO Batteries. This post will provide 21 tips & tricks to improve your HTC EVO 4G battery life. The second post will deal with how to calibrate your battery to get maximum capacity (performance).

1. Lower screen brightness. Go to Settings - Sound and Display - Brightness. Reduce the brightness using the slide or select "Automatic brightness" box to let the EVO use its sensors to adjust the screen according to the ambient light. There are also widgets for screen brightness in the Android Marketplace. I prefer just setting to Automatic.

2. Add the widgets for 4G, WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth to a home screen. Use the + button on your home screen. There are stock widgets that let you turn these radios on/off. Also, there is a Power Widget that has a nice UI as well with the radios stacked across. Take your pick. This makes it really easy to quickly turn radios on/off, plus the widgets actually look pretty good.

3. Disable WiFi and 4G network notifications. Go to Settings - Wireless and Networks - Wi-Fi settings and for 4G, go to Settings - Wireless and Networks - 4G settings. Note, you need to turn on 4G to disable the notifications. Otherwise the option is greyed out. The logic is undeniable!

4. Disable "always on" mobile data. Go to Settings - Wireless and Networks- Mobile networks. Uncheck the box for "Enable always-on mobile data". So far I have no problems to report here, but please let me know if you run into anything in the comments! Note, a warning will be provided indicating applications will need manual refresh...mine did not. Mail is still received, SMS, etc etc.

5. Turn off background data. If you are really hard up for juice, go to Settings - Accounts and Sync and uncheck the Background data box so that applications cannot sync, send, and receive data automatically. Beware, this will impact HTC mail.

6. Reduce your screen timeout interval. The EVO's screen can be set to automatically turn off when you don't interact with it for a predetermined amount of time: 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, or never. 1 or 2 minutes is pretty effective. It gives quick reads on the phone without becoming too annoying like 15 or 30 seconds.

7. Manually turn off the screen when not in use. The power button at the top of the EVO turns the screen off. Push it when not using the phone. Come on, I know you can do it...

8. Turn off auto-sync. Go to Settings - Accounts and Sync - Auto-sync. This is also not really recommend as a "useful" tip. Keep reading for a better option.

9. Change auto-sync frequency (Weather, News, Stocks, Twitter, Facebook,etc).Turning off auto-sync is kind of ridiculous, so take a look at adjusting how frequently data is retrieved/updated. The settings vary depending on the app (and some don't offer the setting at all), but it's generally found in the same place: Settings - Accounts and Sync. Select an account from the list and then tap "Account settings" to change the sync frequency.

Stocks will have the setting greyed out, if you're stock
Facebook's lowest level of sync activity is "Once a Day" (fcuking facebook)
News can go to "Manual"
Weather's lowest setting is also "Once a Day" (I like every 6, or 12 hours)
Exchange ActiveSync will have the ability to set Peak and Off-Peak activity

10. Disable wireless network location services when not needed. Go to Settings - Location - Use Wireless Networks. Note that this (or one of the other options) needs to be enabled if you want to see and/or use your location in apps like Maps. So again, not really recommended.

11. Turn off window animations. I know it's nice to look at and fun to show off, but eye candy uses extra power (albeit not very much). To turn it off, go to Settings - Sound and Display - Animation - No Animations.

12. Don't use a live wallpaper. Live wallpapers do use more juice than static wallpapers. Personally, I like the Live Wallpapers.

13. Use a dark wallpaper. The theory goes something like this: bright white wallpapers are more bright on the screen, and are therefore using more juice. Dark wallpapers just that, darker and the screen is dimmer. Less juice.

14. Change WiFi sleep policy. So the idea is this: when WiFi sleeps, 3G/4G wakes up to sync, get email, and retrieve other data. Since 3G will eat up more battery than WiFi, we change the sleep policy, so that Wifi does not sleep. Go to Settings - Wireless and Networks - Wi-Fi Settings. Press the Menu button, then Advanced, then Wi-Fi sleep policy. Choose "Never".

15. Monitor your running services (or consider using a task killer). Android 2.2 Froyo has taken more steps toward allowing you what services to kill, but beware, some services just start right back up after being stopped. You can add the Running Services widget to a home screen and view what's running in the background. You can also download a third-party task killer from Android Market and kill selected apps to free up some resources and potentially save some power. ESTaskManager isn't bad, and it has it's own additional widget will allow you to kill services/tasks from a home screen.

16. Choose your home screen widgets carefully. Widgets that need access to the internet to update information (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Engadget, Slacker Radio, Weather, Stocks, News, Mail) can suck up a lot of juice if not managed well, so choose them carefully and set their sync/update frequencies to a reasonable interval.

17. Disable notification lights. This may not be practical if you're someone who really needs/wants to know when something happens on your phone when you're not looking, but for everyone else, feel free to turn off those notifications. Go to Settings - Sound and Display - Notification, and uncheck all the boxes if you can handle notifications being turned off (no more blinking LEDs for SMS, Mail, Missed Call, etc.)

18. Turn off phone vibration. Go to Settings - Sound and Display - Phone, select vibrate and turn it off.

19. Turn off audible touch tones. In Settings - Sound and Display, uncheck Audible selection and turn off Audible touch tones.

20. Turn off haptic feedback. Haptic feedback is on by default. It vibrates the phone slightly when using the keyboard. You can turn this off, go to Settings - Language and Keyboard - Touch Input - Text Input; Vibrate when typing.

You can disable haptics in other areas of the system by going to Settings - Sound and Display - Haptic Feedback.

21. Turn off GTalk Automatic Sign-in. Turn off Google Talk feature because it stays running constantly in the background. Heres how: Go to your Apps: > Open "Talk" > Press the Menu Button: > Press "More" > Press "Settings" > Un-check the "Automatic Login". All this is going to do is when you turn on your phone Google Talk will not Auto turn on and start draining your battery. If you use Google Talk then just open it when you want to use it. Be sure though when you are finished using it you go to"Menu" > "More" > "Sign-out"

So that's it, 21 tips and tricks for improving your HTC EVO 4G battery life. If you have any additional tips or tricks to submit let me know in the comments and I'll update this list!

Look for another post on how to calibrate the battery to get the best performance from your HTC EVO 4G very soon!