If you couldn't tell from my last post, I was a little bit dissatisfied with the HTC Hero's battery life. I'm keeping a log of all of overnight idle-drain tests. I started by following the suggestions I've found online for how to increase the battery life for the Hero. Things like turning off radios, disabling background data, disabling weather, killing applications that you aren't using anymore.

I started last night with as much stuff turned off as I could possibly find. I used "Advanced Task Killer Free" to clean up the running tasks:

• Disabled Always On Mobile Connection
• Disabled GPS
• Disabled Wifi
• Disabled Bluetooth
• Disabled Background Data for Google
• Disabled Weather updates
• Location - no wireless networks, no GPS
• Facebook - Update @ 8 hours
• Email - Update @ 1 hours, 5kb, past 3 days
• Apps running: Battery Widget

Then I turned off the screen, unplugged the phone from the charger and let it sit on my desk. 9.85 hours later the battery was at 83% - that's 17% of the 1500mA battery, or 255mA - an average battery pull of 25.89mAh.

It seems like we should be able to do better than that. My original idea was to turn as much off as possible, then turn on a few things at a time - such as turning on wifi but leaving the rest the same, to see how much it is effected. But according to Jeff Sharkey's presentation at Google I/O 2009 (amazingly I know, there was more at that conference than just the wave presentation), the handset should not be using that much power... unless HTC added some funky bloat to the device... anyway, more testing needed.