[Nexus One General] c0wb0ycliche:
If you just wanna see my tips then skip over the next few paragraphs lol!

Hi! I am not sure if this exactly has been posted already, or if it's common knowledge and I am just slow lol, but the last couple days I found out how to maximize the battery life on my phone by (imho) a huge amount. And I wanted to share with the community.

So before I did this, I'd generally get maybe six to eight hours of uptime before the battery was critically low. This was really frustrating because by the time I got home from work my phone would be almost dead. So I'd charge it in my car for a little bit, but then when I went out I'd have to turn off Wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, brightness all the way down etc. just to have enough battery to survive the night.

But now I managed to get 18-24 hours out of a single charge, without having to manually touch the settings too too much (GPS/Bluetooth when I need them.) Now I think a lot of this depends on your personal usage, but for me this worked great. And here is how I did it:

1. Disabling/making less frequent updates in apps. For me this was Twidroid, Facebook, and NewsRob. I realized that I keep notifications off for these apps (I don't need to see a notification everytime someone I follow tweets you know?) and that even when they were all set to auto-refresh every 30 minutes or whatever, I STILL always hit refresh when I went in anyway. So I disable automatic updating. Obviously this depends on your usage, but for me, I didn't need up to the minute social networking information, and manually refresh anyway. But I went through all my apps that updated automatically and changed the setting.

2. Task Killing. In a perfect world, Android would efficiently manage it's own app load, but unfortunately the world isn't perfect. I found that if I know I'm going to be putting my phone down for a while, take a second and kill all the runnings apps. I use Astro, but there are countless apps that can do this for you. This is something I don't do frequently, but for example, if I'm going to go to bed and I don't have my charger, but want my phone on in case of an emergency, I'll kill all the running apps.

3. Brightness. After weeks of changing it back and forth because I don't really love the way it auto adjusts, I just said f**k it and put in auto. While sometimes the level of brightness it selects seems a little whack, it's definitely saved battery life. And saves me the trouble of changing it myself. I also found that setting the timeout to 15 seconds seemed to improve battery life.

4. Juice Defender. You can find this app on the marketplace. It has two modes, easy and advanced. If you want, you can go into the advanced and set schedules and all kinds of stuff. But for me, I just went into easy and hit enable. From what I understand, what this does is that if the screen is off, it disables network access for 14 minutes, turns it back on for 1, then off again for 14 etc. So, something like Gmail which is push will only be able to access the network every 15 minutes. Unless you are on WiFi. Now, if you NEED push e-mail and don't have WiFi, this isn't a very good solution. But according the stats in the app itself this has given me a 99% increase in battery life, and I believe it.

5. The trackball. This is perhaps the weirdest of my findings. The trackball light apparently can DESTROY the battery life. The other morning at around 80% I let my alarm on the phone go off and didn't stop it, so the trackball was flashing really fast. Without a couple hours the phone was completely dead. Nuts right? So I found that if I disable the trackball light when I know that I won't be able to dismiss my notifications quickly (like in a meeting or sleeping or whatnot) I'm able to avoid this happening.

6. GPS/Bluetooth. Again, this might seem very case specific, but I use bluetooth ONLY with my rokr headset when I'm on campus at night, and I use GPS only for navigation. So I keep the off when I'm not using them. With the power strip widget this isn't very difficult.

Anyway, that's it really. Like I said, maybe this is all common knowledge and I am just stupid haha. But I figured if not, I was pretty thrilled to go from 6 hours to 24 hours without having to do too much. BTW, some weird things I found didn't have an effect as much as I thought they would - 2g/3g, I actually got MORE battery life when I had 3g enabled. And WiFi was the same way, even when I didn't have a wifi connection, the difference in life with having it on or off was negligible.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful! If I remember anything else I'll add it.