HTC Diamond Battery Life

[Guest andybarker]

Activesync is designed to be 'always on' due to the connection model used in WM5 onwards. There have been major discussions about how to stop it, but whatever you do, it will try and restart ;)

It is a very small process though, and has marginal effect on battery life.

I've never had ActiveSync auto load all the time except with the Diamond (had two other HTC devices with WM5 and WM6).

I found there is a setting in the Advanced Config program (can be downloaded from various sites) under Data Connections called "GPRS auto attach". If you disable that, it won't automatically try to start up with a data connection and ActiveSync.

[Guest xanadu]

Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi are the biggest drain on the battery. It's best to use external power when using these.

I get about 2 days from my Diamond battery with light use, and it's on for 24hrs/day.

Currently using Swift V7 ROM and Radio .05

[Guest julius3000]

Light use? But I don't understand? You buy a fully optioned phone to just show it to everyone and not use it? I bought it to use it. I use TomTom, GPS tracking, internet, mail, photocamera, games, agenda, notes, music, radio, shared internet, etc etc. And of course making calls and sending sms-es.

I think it's a lot of money for a fully optioned phone you only use for a little bit of phoning and smsing...

[Guest Confucious]

Biggest drain is 3G / HSDPA - lots of use will drain my athena battery in a couple of hours!

[Guest Neil5459]

Biggest drain is 3G / HSDPA - lots of use will drain my athena battery in a couple of hours!

They seem to have fixed that with the latest ROMs, or possibly with the increasing coverage of 3G/HSDPA.

I'm with Orange, and now find I can get an HSDPA up into the Essex/Cambridgeshire borders, from London, with a few notable blind spots. My Diamond with radio fro .05 onwards shows no difference in battery use between GSM and 3G.

Thinking about it, my Athena is also showing much less variability, so I presume it must be the better 3G coverage ;)

@Julius: 4 hours of GPS usage without being connected to a power supply would be considered heavy usage. Even dedicated PND's would struggle to get more than 6-8 hours and they have much bigger batteries. As most Say Nav usage is for turn by turn navigation, or vehicle tracking, the makers assume you would be using a car adapter to maintain power.

@Dr Who: Likewise- 3-4 hours of calls per day is very heavy usage, without the data elements. No compact phone could be expected to fulfill all the PDA functions and cope with that level of usage without running down quickly.

[Guest captainsensible]

I returned my due to poor battery life, no other reason. Had to charge it every night with moderate usage. Have since spoke n to T-Mobile and they claim to have fixed heat problem which was affecting battery life. Tempted to get one again, but waiting to see how much Vario IV is on upgrade. But also heard battery life not so good on that either.

What T-Mobile 'claim' to have done and what they have actually done are two wildly different things...

The new Compact IV's still get very hot, like all the other ones do.

[Guest xanadu]

Light use? But I don't understand? You buy a fully optioned phone to just show it to everyone and not use it? I bought it to use it. I use TomTom, GPS tracking, internet, mail, photocamera, games, agenda, notes, music, radio, shared internet, etc etc. And of course making calls and sending sms-es.

I think it's a lot of money for a fully optioned phone you only use for a little bit of phoning and smsing...

If you want long battery life, then don't buy a Diamond. It's as simple as that.

I didn't buy a Diamond. It comes free with my job. ;)

[Guest julius3000]

If you want long battery life, then don't buy a Diamond. It's as simple as that.

I didn't buy a Diamond. It comes free with my job. :(

Long story, but I got it for free :wacko:

After I heard the iPhone 3G suffered with same problems I wasn't interested in that one anymore ;)

[Guest wildcardspv]

As well as the obvious stuff like closing unused apps and keeping wifi/BT etc off unless using them, try this too - it may sound daft/obvious, but doesn't seem to have been covered in previous posts, and helps for me and everyone else I know with a Diamond.

After locking the device and the screen dimming, the screen will not go completely dark if pressure is applied to it (test using your thumb), so before putting it into its case, wait for the screen to go completely dark as the case can (and 99% of the time does) supply sufficient pressure to the screen to keep the screen on, which uses considerably more power. I know we shouldn't have to do this, but it does help, and is'nt too much of a pain.

If you forget to do this, you may get lucky and find that the screen turns off in the case anyway (which is very, very rare) so in order to aid this try the following:

if you feel inside your case for where the 'ribbon' (which forms the base of the case) is attached, you should notice that at one side it sticks out a bit, but at the other side it is pretty much flush with the case - always make sure your screen is to the flush side, as the other 'sticky-out' side applies more pressure to the screen and is pretty much guaranteed to keep the screen on.

Doing this, I've gone from about 12 hours of life to more like between 24-36 hours, without changing my usage. Definitely worth it in my opinion.

I hope this helps you a bit more ;)

EDIT - Actually I should have said after locking the device, just press the power button to switch the screen of rather than waiting for it to happen 30/40 secs later - much more convenient!!

Edited September 26, 2008 by wildcardspv

[Guest Metoo]

EDIT - Actually I should have said after locking the device, just press the power button to switch the screen of rather than waiting for it to happen 30/40 secs later - much more convenient!!

I use S2U2 which locks automatically on power off or backlight timeout. I've got into the habit of pressing the power button as soon as I'm done using the phone. Auto lock, mimimum on time = maximum battery. Mind you, even with that, and 3G off, my compact IV still doesn't make it through the day. Reminds me of the form-over-function of early Samsungs. But at least they gave you two batteries and a spare charger...

[Guest Pepijn26]

Does anybody know if the G-sensor is impacting battery life? Like if I move the phone around a lot, does that decrease battery life?

[Guest MadMatt2002]

Hi,

Had my Compact IV for about a week now - still finding the battery life appalling! I unplugged from its charger it at 7:30 this morning, charged it for 45 minutes in the car on the way to work - and it's down to 10% already.

It's set for push email, but that's it. It hasn't used any GPS are anything clever.

It hasn't received any call at all either.

Using S2U, with all the backlight set to minimum delay etc.

So it look like it'll only last about 7 hours - which is useless!!!!!

I'm still running the ROM it came with.

Are any of the other ROM any less battery hungry?

Thanks

Matthew

[Guest Metoo]

Hi,

Had my Compact IV for about a week now - still finding the battery life appalling! I unplugged from its charger it at 7:30 this morning, charged it for 45 minutes in the car on the way to work - and it's down to 10% already.

It's set for push email, but that's it. It hasn't used any GPS are anything clever.

It hasn't received any call at all either.

Using S2U, with all the backlight set to minimum delay etc.

So it look like it'll only last about 7 hours - which is useless!!!!!

I'm still running the ROM it came with.

Are any of the other ROM any less battery hungry?

Thanks

Matthew

I gave up on the Compact IV for that very reason. A debrand and ROM upgrade helped, but not drastically.

But there are a few things to try.

Firstly, turn of 3g, it's a battery killer. If you're using push to get emails in the background, you don't really need it anyway.

2nd, turn of Bluetooth and WiFi if they're not being used.

Finally, try uninstalling S2U. It has serious battery drain issues with some phones (but strangely, some are perfectly OK).

If that still doesn't get through the day, you only options are to change the phone, or settle for extra or extended batteries.

Unfortunately the custom design of the IV back cover limits your options for this.

Personally, if the phone was bought retail & new, and especially on a lengthy contract, I'd return it as being unfit for purpose, before you get stuck with something that's never going to meet your needs. If not, always carry a spare charge lead and battery!

[Guest Neil5459]

I'm still running the ROM it came with.

Are any of the other ROM any less battery hungry?

Thanks

Matthew

Some Compact IV's are still being supplied with ROM v 1.37 and Radio 1.00.03. Both of these are seriously out of date and both cause much greater battery drain. Paradoxically, repaired Compact IVs are being returned with ROM 1.93 installed, but T-Mo have not released this to it's customers.

A decent ROM and Radio and judicous useage should see a marked improvement, but to acheive this you would need to install HArdSPL and install a different ROM, which would theoretically invalidate your warranty.

I use my HTC Diamond lightly as a phone- about 10 minutes calls per day, 3 to 4 SMS messages and Push Email/Calendar with about 50 new/modified entries per day. I also use it for about 20 minutes web browsing and 3G is on all the time. I'm getting 2-3 days on a charge at present. When it was new, I was lucky to get one day.

[Guest andybarker]

Definitely look at a Radio upgrade. Firmware wouldn't do any harm, and will make some applications run quicker and easier.

Here’s the guide...

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=416211

I am using the SwiftBL ROM. Dutty’s is more extreme version (more free memory, etc), but I find it too different from the basic ROM.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=408109

[Guest Mr Alom]

My Diamond battery life last from 8am - 9pm with data connection always on. B)

[Guest drillbit]

All Brits here? Hailing from America or at least a territory of it.

I always have a data connection on, but then again, the US Sprint version of the HTC Touch Diamond runs at the 800Mhz frequency on EV-DO, not 2100. So I guess using a lower frequency that part doesn't eat as much of my battery life as a higher frequency doese. I also noticed that the Diamonds here comes with a 1340mah battery instead of the 950mah on the non US versions. But the catch is that the increased battery has to also deal with the increased RAM on the Diamond versions here, which is 288mb over the 192mb used on the non Sprint versions.

Despite the 1340mah battery, its still horrible so I keep a 1200mah battery that manages to fit the phone. Actually that battery is for the AT&T Fuze, which is one of the three US versions of the Touch Pro in another name. I also keep micro USB cables off the USB hubs on my PCs and laptops, and even on my car, so I recharge and recharge often. Its a good thing that the phone can charge off from that without the need of a proprietary charger. I actually never used the charger that came with the box. In fact, the phone will recharge off the USB hub even if the PC that is connected to the hub is not on, so long as the hub has its own power supply.

I tend to use my phone rather lightly. I tend to message and email more. But when I start browsing, I can do that for half an hour. Maybe more, since I can browse while eating an entire meal.

One way to increase battery life is to disable automatic push email, as well as automatic updates on the news reader. One day, I had the phone fully charged and placed it on my side pouch. An hour later, the phone is all warm and half the battery is drained when I picked up the phone. During that time it turned out, the RSS newsreader that came with the phone starting updating automatically well over the nearly two to three hundred sites I subscribed.

I would also suggest disabling the automatic weather updates. Like email and news, turn the weather updates to manual.

If you go wifi, it would drain your battery faster because wifi runs at least a 2.4GHz frequency or higher. I almost never Wifi without plugging in my usb cable to the phone to charge its battery.

Edited April 5, 2009 by drillbit

[Guest sucro]

Agreed- and step 8 may be true in theory, but as the device in WCDMA mode will keep hunting for GSM in a weak signal area (and there are LOTS of those) the battery will be hammered. For best battery keep it in GSM mode, no question :(

It's not true! Read this from xda-developer:

"

# Battery: 900 mAh mAh rechargeable Li-polymer battery Standby time: Up to 396 hours for WCDMA Up to 285 hours for GSM

# Talk time: Up to 270 minutes for WCDMA Up to 330 minutes for GSM"

battery-htcdiamond

and here

http://www.htc.com/mea-en/faqs.aspx?p_id=1...80&id=54706

Edited February 27, 2010 by sucro

[Guest AlleP]

Is anyone having battery life problems? mine has lasted from 730am today untill 6.30pm with not much use other than a few texts. not even any data use. is it worth sacrificing the thickness and going for the extended battery?

Yes, I agree. It is really boring, but it is so because of all running functions and aplications. I have solved my problem. I bought an extra battery that helps me a lot. Have you tought about that solution?  Edited June 3, 2014 by AlleP