Hey there, I wanted to post some findings I have had today on the battery life. This was my first full day with the Diamond. This morning it came off the charger, fully charged. I had a couple short phone calls (ie <20 minutes), a text or two, exchange was pushing email in outlook, and by noon I was down to nearly 30% battery left!! I also had Bluetooth on, even though I did not have anything connected to it.
I put the phone back on USB to Desktop charge from noon until about 430pm. I did not really make any phone calls this afternoon; however I did make the following data impacting tweaks:
1 - shut bluetooth off
2 - went into settings for the weather application and turned off "auto updates." When ever I want to view the weather, i will simply click "update." It only takes miliseconds to update/refresh, so this is NOT an inconvienence at all.
3 - Changed my push email to only push during peak, and every 4 hours off peak. Peak hrs are M-F 8am to 6pm.
4 - Although I have not ever launched RSS feeds, I did read that people found it was set to auto update upon launch. It is pre-loaded with several channels, and therefore I wondered if that thing had pulled down any updates. When I looked there was a ton of info readily available for reading (it loaded to fast to have been downloaded right then and there, i think.) So I changed the "auto update" setting to "no auto updates."
5 - Uninstalled the freeware app "sensor lock." While I thought this was really a unique approach, it was hokey and troublesome to hold the phone at just the right angle to unlock it. Also vibrations do cause the battery to drain faster than just a ring tone or pop up of the screen. And I tend to unlock my phone alot in order to glance at something while away from my desk at work. I replaced this with the VGA version of Slide 2 Unlock, and I could not be happier. This app has come a long way since my Mogul days and has MANY options to play with!
Long story short, I am hoping that a screen up/guesture will use a tad less battery than an accellorometer guesture + vibration. Every little bit helps when it comes to saving your battery, right? LOL
So, although these may not be HUGE life saving changes, I can report that after 4hrs of stand by I am still at full bars, same as 430pm when i took it off the charger. I know it is not a true fair comparison because my usage was less; however I would consider most of my AM usage today to be mostly stand by as well. 20 minutes on the phone, and 5 or 10 text messages really isnt alot of activity. I guess I will find out for sure tomorrow, huh?
I made the registry edit suggested in other forums and is included in some of the custom ROMs availabe (ie change the IntervalPoll from 5000 to 20000, which means the battery polls for the charge remaining every 20 seconds or minutes (not sure which) rather than every 5.) Of coarse, I saved the instructions to a txt file on my hard drive and cant find the original post to give credit or information on that.
I called HTC to see if they had anything additional to add (btw, there is a good tidbit on battery conservation on their support site for the HTC Diamond FAQs.) I got the canned, "we are aware of the battery problem and are working to address it. however at this time there really isnt anything we can do."
I also have an interum back up plan to avoid thethering to a charger an extra few hours during the day. As D/\SH knows, I bought one of those hokey craddle/battery/charger things off ebay. The cradle wont fit the CDMA Diamond; however I got the idea to take the battery cover off and guess what? it is a perfect fit! It will sync and charge great. Most importantly, however, the one thing it really is good for is charging the OEM battery and the cheap 900 maH battery I got with it. Now the cheap 900maH battery will power the phone, but you will get an exclaimation point battery icon (ie =!) the whole time. So you cant tell if/when that battery is getting low. (is that a feature of the cheap batteries from China these days? Battery Lottery? LOL) However it will give you a chance to put your OEM battery in the charger while, meanwhile you can at least run that errand or two without being tethered to the car charger for your quick fix charge between destinations.
I have seen a couple OEM looking 1350maH batteries online you can buy (for about $44!) that would probably work better. Once I find out they are going to be the 'real deal' and they are in stock, I will probably throw that crappy 900maH battery in the drawer and pick up an OEM 1350 battery. That way I can always have an OEM 1350 charged and ready to swap to at any point during the day, and put the dead battery back on charge for when the current one dies. This was once of the greatest things with the Instinct. You got a spare battery + battery charger with the device. It made life so good to always have a battery to swap and go with!
Anyway, I know this will seem very elementary to alot of the experts in this forum; however I wanted to at least share some of the ways I am dealing with the issue that does not involve flashing to a custom ROM. Not that I have anything against it personally. I have read where many people are happy with many of the custom ROMs offered on this site and others. So this is BY NO MEANS a dig at the developers of those. I just wanted to throw out a few options to "get by" or "conserve" by reducing some of the unattended data dips. To the casual PDA user, installed a custom ROM to better battery performance (and nothing else) is like taking a sledge hammer to a nail.