[Nexus One Accessories] d0ugie:
tips

Thanks! As I said I am brand new to Android so I can't tell you what software to use on the phone, including roms and screen brightness managers, to make a single charge go another few miles. I can however, and this may have been what you were asking, tell you that the more you use the battery at lower charges, like below 30%, the faster you'll eventually wear it out. So the more you charge the better. Another thing I can tell you is that the hotter the battery runs the sooner you'll kill its longevity. So heavy things like tethering and youtube for extended periods will lead you to having to buy another battery significantly quicker than if you ran up your miles (milliamp hours) on lower currents. For individual discharges, one thing you may not know is that when the phone is on 3G and you're getting a weak signal or the phone, in GSM world, is on 3G but can only find itself an edge tower, the phone beefs up its transmitting power a lot. If you don't need 3G, especially if you're in a rural area where your signal isn't always strong or you're not getting any 3G (or in an unlucky corner of your office), maybe flip off 3G. I don't know if there's a setting for this on Android like there is on WinBlow but keep your wifi power setting on the lowest unless you know its affecting your wifi negatively too much.

Whenever you've got a data connection open, you're losing a lot more juice. So if you care more about your charge lasting than you do about constant immediate emailing, really frequent RSS updates and so on, go easy on the frequency so that you're using data only when necessary. If you go that route, remember to change all your synced stuff accordingly otherwise it won't help much if you switch your Gmail cycling down to a half hour but forget to turn your Facebook syncing off immediate.

There may be something like this for Android and if there is someone please mention it, but for WinMo, WMLongLife by Chainfire, author of WMWifiRouter, is a radio management program that very smartly decides when to ramp up and down to and from 3G and when to kill the data connection. If something like that does not exist and you're a programmer, check the thread for inspiration. Great if you want to save juice without devoting your life to toggling 3G all the time yourself.

Back to heavy use, if you do have a spare battery, I would advise designating one of them with a sharpie to be the battery you use during periods of your life, like watching videos on a long flight or running GPS software (especially Navigation since it uses not only a lot of processor and does the GPS math but it also uses data) when on road trips, even and especially if you've plugged it in to your cigarette lighter, go with the designated batter for those purposes, that way you can preserve one good battery to make it through a long day of work with no problem without much degradation. Your other battery will wear out faster of course, so for that consider a cheapo no name which, once I get my hands on some cheapo no names, you can buy wisely from information I give you. Don't trust their information, their ratings have no bearing on reality whatsoever. I'll give you actionable data as soon as I can test them.

Third party standalone chargers = BAD idea. Odds are, and certainly if the charger has two pins instead of four, that it gives a constant current charge unlike the OEM which goes hard when it's safe (when the battery's got empty room and is not hot) and then scales back when it senses that it needs to. That means the OEM charger that came with your phone or your phone itself when you plug in another source whether it's the wall charger or USB, or a standalone if you find one that's definitely HTC. The constant current chargers give a weaker charge than it could during most of the charge and then too strong a charge during the final clip. So that way, even though it may fill the tank up all the way, it takes longer to charge and it will hurt your battery's longevity. By how much? Can't tell you, but because of the threat of one of these dinko chargers not even having something to detect the cutoff voltage, ... bad idea, don't trust them unless you're using it on a $6 cheapo.

And thank you.

When I test batteries with this thing, I charge the battery and hook it up to the tester, not the tester into the phone to see what's doing with the battery as its being used by the phone. So I'm not testing to see how much different software, whether it's a strobe light program, HTC Sense, a custom rom or an underclocking mod, let you get the same happy phone experience while putting a lighter load on the battery. Rather I hook the thing up and tell the tester what load to put onto the battery (I use 250mA) and collect the data in the exact same way as I do for every battery I test. I'm brand new to Android and, though I'm loving it, I haven't even tried to root it yet, let alone experiment with different kernels.

From my experience with WinMo custom roms, I have never found a custom rom that had more battery drain than it would to its stock counterpart -- if that counterpart was running similar things like Sense instead of the old TouchFlo. I imagine your chefs or whatever you call them are pretty competent when it comes to making battery tweaks and trade-off decisions, however some roms will likely burn more rubber in order to deliver you more eye candy. In my old world there are barebones roms that have everything stripped down just to the point where the thing can boot, thereby delivering the best speed, most free ram, program stability and battery performance. Were I to flash one of your custom roms, once I got over my eye-candy phase at least and prioritized battery performance, I'd go for the new kernels with the least frills and install the frills myself as needed.

So I got my N1 last Friday and was immediately addicted, wailing on the thing, wishing I had immediately gone Android the moment it was first released instead of trying to run messy ported on my WinMo phone which is now collecting dust. That phone, parenthetically, takes a 1500mAh battery whereas the N1 takes 1400mAh. In spite of that, and in spite of the N1 having a larger screen, crazy fast processor and just being much more badass in general, lasts significantly longer than the WinMo phone on a single charge. Both are HTC phones so, unless the screen technology is really a whole lot different, to account for that I can only account for it with superior software. It's been so good to the point that I have been unsure that this project would get much attention from you folks than it's been getting from the WinMo crowd as they may be much more starved for battery information than you.

I love this thing.

If any of you have more advice than that please dump it here.

Doug