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just bought htc desire

Y

yvonnecain

Lurker
Its taking a bit of getting used to, but love the potential that Im sure it has, my battery is only lasting 7hrs is that normal, thats even without playing with it? I find Im scared to use it because of the battery life. My husband also has the same phone, we bought them together but his battery lasts longer than mine, like 10 hours also he has a little app called "places" that is like looking from google earth street maps, I wonder how to get that also, and why was it on his phone and not mine? We are both having trouble getting onto our email accounts, any suggestions please??:rolleyes:
 
Hey Yvonne, welcome to the forums - wall of text incoming!

This is from the guys at HTC, its instructions to increase battery life (and it does work):
1) Turn your device ON and Charge the device for 8 hours or more
2) Unplug the device and Turn the phone OFF and charge for 1 hour
3) Unplug the device Turn ON wait 2 minutes and Turn OFF and charge for another hour
Also, the battery will take some "wearing in" and you'll gain the extra 3 hours battery there, but you should both try those 3 steps.

If you hold down on the home screen you can use a widget called power control - it basically lets you toggle Wi-Fi, bluetooth, GPS and brightness. When you're not interested in using Wi-Fi or GPS just turn it off, you can always turn it back on but it should help with battery when its not in use. You can search the market for "Taskiller free" which you can use to kill background activities that could be draining on the battery - just make sure you put things like the clock, HTC Sense, touch screen and things which you kinda need on the ignore list (by holding down on the program in Taskiller and clicking ignore).

If you go into you're android market and search "Places Directory" its the only result you get - hope thats the app you were looking for

As for email - search the market for "K9 Mail" which is the best non-stock mail app and I prefer it to the default. You can use more than one email account with it, I use it to check about 5 and it makes the whole thing run smoother.

Tried to be as short as I can, shout if there's anything I've not made clear
 
Yvonne,

No 7 hrs is not normal, well, it can be but only if you're running it wrong. We'll get to that in a minute. Firstly I have to take issue with t3hbooth's advice and give you exactly the opposite advice. DO NOT INSTALL A TASK KILLER. If you have one uninstall it - it just confuses the situation and invariably uses more battery than it can save.

So, if you hit settings->about phone->battery->battery use you'll get a list of things that have been using the battery. It should be mostly Android System, Cell Standby and Phone Idle. Any other things in there are either apps you're running deliberately, in which case you're a "heavy user" and you'll get less up-time simply because you're using the phone, or app you weren't aware were running in the background and are dragging the battery level down. Work out which apps are draining your battery and either wind their update frequency/work load down or uninstall them if you don't need them.

Another useful tool is in the Testing application. To get to this type *#*#4636#*#* into the phone dialler (or download the Spare Parts application) and go into the Battery History section. If you select Partial Wake Usage you'll see a list of applications that have been using the battery in the background. Again, trim their usage or switch them off as you require.

If you find an application is running and you weren't aware of it and it won't shut down you can go into Settings->Applications->Manage Applications and select it from the list. From here you can Force Stop on the application (see I told you you don't need an app killer!)

If you have any specific questions shout them up here, there's plenty of folk with lots of helpful hints and tricks here - make sure you read the sticky threads first as there are a lot of FAQs and common tricks up there.

FWIW most people manage to get over a day from their battery. Most people charge theirs overnight - mine is usually anywhere between 30 and 70% when I stick it on-charge as I go to bed.
 
Don't use a task killer......waste of time using battery power to run an app intended to save battery power. Set your apps up correctly and use the power toggles to turn communications when you aren't using them, and the phone will look after itself.
 
Griff_LI said:
Yvonne,

No 7 hrs is not normal, well, it can be but only if you're running it wrong. We'll get to that in a minute. Firstly I have to take issue with t3hbooth's advice and give you exactly the opposite advice. DO NOT INSTALL A TASK KILLER. If you have one uninstall it - it just confuses the situation and invariably uses more battery than it can save.
Click to expand...

Ill third this. I have had my deisre for about a month now and naturally for the 1st few weeks installed everything I could to play with including a task killer. I have recently started to look into improving my battery life and after reading various threads in the forum deleted the task killer and found that I get an extra 2-3 hours without changing any other setting. 7 hours would seem right if you were using it most of that time but if you are sayign that you are not then either defecti9ve battery or most likelty all your setting are set to syny all the time thus not allowing the phone to stop. Think about how often you would like to sybnc with twitter, facvebook, email, stocks etc- all of these you can change the frequency to sync actually I have foudn myself with things other than email, turing off auto sync and then jsut checking things when I am interested. (stocks is always off for me but was set to always on when I first got the phone)
 
Welcome :)

Did scan through to see if anyone had answered the question on places but couldn't see that they had.

You need to download the latest version of Google Maps to get this. Go into the market and download the google maps. You should not have places in your apps menu :D

If its not there open google maps then close. Will be there then.
 
Thank you for that great advice for the battery life, we will certainly give it a try. Sorry Ive taken so long to answer, didnt know how to do it! I still learn something new everyday. We are both having trouble with our emails, we get the notification that we have email, we can open it to see who its from but dont know how to view the actual message?? any hints on that one please

thanks again

Yvonne
 
So you cannot see that actual message in the email application or is that just the widget?

It sounds like it is not downloading the message, just the title and who it is from. Go into mail > more > settings > Send & recieve and change the size limit.

Let me know if that works :D
 
Welcome to the Forum Yvonne
I agree with NOT installing a tasker. They work if used properly but really they way I see it is that HTC/SONY/GOOGLE or whom ever else has there finger in the development of android all seem to feel it is not needed. Surely they would know better then me and if it was needed put one in.

Enjoy the phone.
 
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