[HTC Vivid, Raider, Velocity] citsong:
Ok going to try and start a conversation here to get feedback from everyone on what you guys do to get the most out of your battery. I see alot of people always asking what kernal is best for battery life and some people seem to have horrible battery life and some have exceptional battery life. I personally get decent battery life. Nothing super amazing but that comes down to the way I use my phone.

My current battery I'm using - Andida 2000mah battery

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/280843217453...X:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649#ht_4497wt_1396

I also have - GTMax 3500mah battery

http://www.amazon.ca/GTMax-Extended-Battery-3500mAh-Microfiber/dp/B006VAP102/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_4

The Andida gives me generally a extra 2-3 hours more over the stock. I had to cycle the battery 4 times before I started seeing any real improvements. If I take these off the charger at 6:30am I can ussually make it to around 10pm without needing to charge.

The GTMax get me through a day (630am - midnight) with around 50% left.

Now keep in mind this is based on my usage habits, and when I'm at work my signal is horrible so it drains a bit harder for the 8 hours I'm at work.

I don't have LTE where I live or work, I do get LTE in areas close by but on a regular day I don't see it. With the bad signal at work I've started to switch to gsm only mode (phone was constantly switching from Edge to 3g/4g and wouldn't provide a stable connection most of the time). This seems to have helped my battery at work.

When I flash a new rom I always give it at least 2 good full battery cycles before judging the battery life on it.

Ok onto some apps. My first foray into getting better battery life started with wanting to control my data. I used Juice Defender to that but I found that having to wait for the data to turn back on was at some times taking way to long and even sometimes I would have to reboot to get it back. Tried a few others and had similar experiences. When it works its nice and I did see some gain from it but at the same time it seemed bloated and slow and I decided I like having my data on and readily available quickly. After some searching I found an awesome app...

Better Battery Stats

Play Store link - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.asksven.betterbatterystats&hl=en

XDA Forum link - http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1179809

I highly recommend reading up on this app and trying it out. If your seeing a big drain on you battery while the screen is off, it's probably because there is something that is keeping it from going into a deep sleep mode. This won't save you any battery just by installing it but with a little work it can make a pretty good difference.

Ok now this is where I'm looking for suggestions, are there apps that you find specifically run smoother or are lighter than their stock counterparts or rival apps that put less of a strain on the battery?

Instead of the stock messaging app I run Pansi SMS. It gives me a few extra options but I never really used the stock mms on ICS so I can only compare it to Handcent SMS and I think it is definitely lighter and a lil bit more battery friendly. It's not a huge difference but I try and squeeze everything I can w/o giving up functionality.

For a launcher I'm running apex right now, but for a lightweight launcher I'd recommend FTL. Runs really nice and smooth, nothing fancy about it, just fast and light.

Some apps sometimes can just be poorly coded and thus have a bad effect on battery life. Alot of people seem to feel the Facebook app is one such app that suffers from that. The app that gets the most recommendations as a replacement and being a bit easier on the battery is Friendcaster. I tend to agree with that, and would recommend trying it out.

I'd really like to hear about what everyone else does to try and squeeze out the most of their battery. Theres more stuff that I do, such as reducing the amount of things that are synced to only the stuff I actually want, default settings just sync everything and I don't feel I need to sync my contacts on a daily basis as I rarely change them around. So share your tips, experiences good and bad with apps in regards to your battery, and if theres enough feedback I'll try and re-organize this into a bit better structure.