[Desire General] patp:
I also came from a Blackstone. I used to end the day with about 40% charge on it with pretty heavy use. It varied a lot depending on which ROM, some were drainers like the Desire, others were frugal. I've had my Desire almost a month now, it's as poor as the day I got it.

I'm not saying all Desires are like this, but it is certainly some people's experience and it's not helpful to suggest otherwise. I'm not an uninformed noob, I've been using smartphones since day 1 and I get this terrible battery life despite turning off networking whenever I turn the phone off and put it in my pocket, leaving the screen on "illegibly low", using wifi rather than 3G where possible, Opera Mini to reduce data bulk, no location services, and barely anything other than stock apps. It is absolutely worse than the Blackstone was, and that was with a 20m old battery. This is what I'm sending to HTC:

Dear HTC Support,

I am writing to draw your attention to problems many owners are experiencing with power management on the HTC Desire. While it is very difficult for a group of users to reliably identify problems due to variables outside of our control such as wireless signal strength, it is becoming clear that there are serious issues which need to be addressed.

The main concern is that many users can not get through a working day without their device running out of power. Personally I see a rate of discharge of 20% per hour when using the device interactively with either 3G or Wifi. My impression is that this is a common experience, but some get much better usage, while the worst I have heard of is a drop of 50% in 90mins.

In addition to this high power usage during interactive use, many people are finding that their device fails to sleep properly, so that the battery is draining quite fast while it is not being used. For many this seems to be a problem with the calendar app keeping the phone in partial wake state; for these users, killing the calendar app and associated sync service seems to temporarily solve the problem. Myself, I have the same issue from with Android System keeping the device awake rather than calendar. The only way I can solve it (temporarily) is to reboot.

I also find that charging is quite slow (around 20% increase in battery in an hour). I suspect this is partly because the phone is not in full sleep when charging, even if the appropriate setting option is chosen (unticking the "keep awake during charge" box, which allows screen off but not full sleep).

Finally, by no means all users suffer from these problems. I speculate that the following are sources of variation: some batteries better than others; signal strength; Android failing to garbage collect dead/hung processes in some configurations; usage patterns.

The Desire is an excellent device, possibly the very best smartphone on the market at present. However it is severely compromised by these issues. We are hopeful that you will be able to fix these problems. However, if this is not likely and the poor battery life we are experiencing is the best we can expect, please confirm this as I will then consider the design defective and seek a replacement under UK consumer law.

Yours Sincerely,

etc