[XPERIA X10 General] JamesBarnes:
Ive spent the last few days fiddling and testing stuff to increase battery life. Here is what i have learnt...

(Im running R2BA026)

Firstly, personally i do not want to lose any functionality/performance in order to gain battery life. I think that if you are going to spend the money to get a phone with awesome hardware it should be able to run at full whack.

This guide will not be useful to all, but hopefully it will be handy to those in my situation.

This is a guide for what i have found to be the best compromise between battery life and user experience, with the emphasis being on user experience.

My specific goals are:

- I do not want to lose any performance i.e cause any slowdown/choppiness.

- I am only looking for a 24h battery life as i can charge every night.

- I want to be able to use my phone without worrying about battery. Specifically I never want to think "i shouldnt do that it might run down my battery". I should be able to use all the features on my phone without questioning if i can afford to.

-=-

In my experience using a task killer resulted in only minimal gains to battery life but it meant that opening up apps could be a lot slower and apps could be choppy just after opening them.

Additionally the idea of setCPU is a good one however when coming out of sleep or opening an app it takes a little while to get back up to speed. This also causes choppiness. Personally I find lag/choppiness a real pet peeve, it irritates me alot, so I do not use setCPU either. It is true that with careful set up the lag can be minimised but then the battery life gains are also minimal, so I choose to keep full performance and dispense with setCPU. Bear in mind that the hardware platform is already very efficient and well optimised so a software solution will pretty much be a straight trade of performance for battery life.

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With those two common options out of the way, what else can be done to save juice?

Well generally the biggest consumer of energy is the screen. The simplest option is just to turn it down to minimum brightness, but in my opinion that is not a good solution, its too nice a screen to have dimmed all the time. Thankfully the auto-brightness does a pretty good job of keeping the back light at a good level. It can be a bit disconcerting if you enable it when using full brightness as the drop can seem somewhat dramatic but don't let that put you off, give at 1/2 a day or so and you wont even notice.

Other easy but important things you can do are turning the screen timeout to minimum and always turning off the screen (power button) as soon as you are finished. They are tiny changes but really do make a big difference.

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Onto wifi...

I think there may be a bug with the firmware because if I disable wifi I get a HUGE increase in battery life when Im at home. I have good 3g coverage here and a 3GB allowance so I only need to turn on wifi when Im browsing the web or market, seeing as it takes seconds with the widget this option suits me fine.

I suspect that when the phone is connected to wifi it doesn't sleep properly so drains very fast.

Only turning on wifi when i want it made by far the biggest difference to me, and as it doesn't affect my user experience in any appreciable way I am happy to do it.

I think its a good idea to mention app/widget updates and refreshes here, personally i have all my widgets and apps set to refresh only once a day, that suits me fine because I can refresh them all manually very easily if I want to to be absolutely up to date and I'm not a twitter or facebook addict :) Most of my widgets are news/article based so once a day is perfect.

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GPS, again this is rather obvious, if you don't use it, turn it off. Personally i use latitude so I have it turned on all the time. Android seems very good about only using it when it is needed and the phone seems to get a fix very quickly so in reality it doesn't spend much of the day being active.

Same goes for bluetooth, although I don't use it so it stays off.

-=-

Nothing i have said here is particularly revelatory mostly common sense but I have always had battery issues often with the battery lasting ~12 hours before asking to be charged.

Updating to 026 made a big difference and following these rules means my battery drains on average 2-2.5% an hour under normal use.

Normal use for me:

-Wifi Off

-GPS on (With latitude widget)

-Gtalk always running

-3 news widgets + timescape

-frequent texting

-moderate calls

-frequent fiddling ;)

The phone is very very snappy, everything apart from timescape opens as near to instant as makes no odds, the phone is a pleasure to use. My battery life has comfortably doubled without the use of any apps or any loss of performance.

Mission Accomplished :)