[Atrix 4G General] irishtexmex:
I'll try to keep this short and sweet. I'm coming from a phone that was married to its charger (an overclocked-to-all-hell Pre) and I constantly micromanaged its battery by turning on data, wifi, and gps only when needed. With the Atrix's huge battery and the upgrade in phones I decided, "What the hell. Crappy battery life with this phone is still better than the best battery life with my old one. Enjoy the features." So I left Wifi, GPS, and Sync on 100% of the time. (I did, however, set all my apps to manual sync.) I have 3 homescreens and very, very few widgets. With a normal day's use this usually netted me about 14-17~ hours with about 2~ hours of screentime. Not the greatest, but amazing comparatively to the Pre.

Today I finally took the time go around and start messing with Tasker and other battery optimizing techniques. Here are a few thigns I did that have already netted me large returns:

The first is the simplest: I changed my screen brightness from Automatically adjusting to a static 15%. Though not the best, this is is bright enough for me in close to all situations and the ones where it's not I just change it back to automatic (this is done via the excellent Widgetsoid).

I use Google Voice for texts and that means I

always

need a data connection--this throws out things like JuiceDefender because it prevents me from receiving instant notifications. Between home and school I'd say I have a WiFi connection about 85% of the time, so i went into the Wireless preferences and turned my WiFi Timeout to "Never." In case you didn't know, a wifi connection is much more battery friendly than a 3G/4G one. Remaining always connected keeps my phone from cutting the connection and then rescanning for a network to connect to several times a day.

I used a Tasker profile I found online (it was either Reddit or Lifehacker, you can probably find it on both) that turns my GPS on only when I load an app that I've specified I want GPS on. I've known about this for a while but I was hesitant about instituting it because a luxury I wanted was to be able to open up Navigation, Yelp, or Foursquare and have an instant lock-on with my location. After testing today, between being generally located by wifi or cell-tower triangulation, and then having an exact location a few moments later with GPS, I found almost zero difference between leaving GPS on and having it enabled right when the app was opened.

Lastly, I downloaded the newest SetCPU here from XDA (it's free for XDA members. Search for it.) and had it throttle back the processor all the way while the screen is off. In addition, it will have the processor scaled back some when the battery reaches 30% and 10% respectively, and a few other instances such as the phone temperature getting too hot.

I'm laying into bed right now and according to Circle Battery Widget I have 37% battery left after 11 hours of being unplugged. Now, while this doesn't sound very great at all I want to specify that this is with my display having been on for 4 hours and 15 minutes. This is by far the largest battery hog (45% in this case) and there is no way my battery would have lasted before I changed these few things. I don't know how applicable they are to anyone else but they sure did help me and I felt I should let people know.