HTC Sensation — Battery Life is Abysmal

I'm having the same problems. I've been running SipDroid in the background and thought that might have been doing the damage but after downloading the Battery Indicator app it looks like 61% of this battery juice black hole is made up of screen power.

The next runners up are Cell Standy at 12%, followed by Phone Idle at 10%. The rest of the use is all =<5% for various apps.

I'm going to try disabling the live weather wallpaper and lock screen. I'll be keeping the brightness down as much as I can, I've cranked up the auto-lock setting, and I don't know what else I can do. I'm not going to just use it less. Oh, and these numbers I came up with, I kept wifi, gps, and bluetooth off all day while doing this. And it STILL only lasted me about 8-10 hours. Just pathetic.

I'm also in the process of ordering two 1900mAh (stock is 1520 I think) batteries plus charger off eBay for dirt cheap. Hopefully the upgraded battery will help breathe some life into this thing, and if not, I'm keeping a charged spare on hand, and the stock battery as a backup backup!

The extra charger and battery, plus the extra 20% capacity on each one, and the reduction in screen power consumption, should be able to get me through at LEAST a full 24 hours! I hope! Hahah.

Have you guys tried this method out?

To also help with Battery Life you can do these steps exactly:

1) Turn your device ON and Charge the device for 8 hours or more
2) Unplug the device and Turn the phone OFF and charge for 1 hour
3) Unplug the device Turn ON wait 2 minutes and Turn OFF and charge for another hour Your battery life should almost double, we have tested this on our devices and other agents have seen a major difference as well.

Here's the rest of that link if you want to read, it's for HTC Sensation and Evo.. Just a suggestion.. :-)

Silly phone, did not include the link.lol
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=712990

— modified on Jul 31, 2011, 4:21:30 AM

Thanks for the tip ireneL! I'm definitely going to try that as soon as I have the chance to.

This morning, after charging to 100%, I decided to try turning off auto sync. I had tried display settings, exiting SipDroid, using SIP over TCP and lowering keep alive duration, I got rid of live wallpaper, set a black background, disabled WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and got rid of all widgets or widget settings that would be trying to pull data every time I viewed them...I think that's it! No matter what combination of those things, with auto sync enabled, I would still be losing about 11% per hour. That totally corresponds with Android Addict's device being dead by 7PM, as mine would last about a 9 hour work day before dying.

Back to auto sync! I disabled that this morning first thing and after an hour I'm still at 100% battery power! I've made a test call every 20 minutes to make sure my SIP phone is still connected and that's working fine too. I did leave background data on for this reason in particular.

So right now I'm thrilled! At this rate I'll be able to get the advertised battery life. The difficult part was finding a definitive answer to this battery life problem on the HTC Sensation. Many sites have lists of several things to try, but going through the trail and error process was a pain. At least now I know it's auto sync that really sucks the battery dry the most though, and hopefully this holds true and helps others too.

I'm definitely going to try your tip too ireneL. If that works for me like it has for others I might be able to get through the day without having to disable auto sync. It would be nice to just turn that back on without needing to tweak it.



EDIT: I did a whole bunch of testing today, 1 hour at a time, turning different features on and off. Here's what I found.

With GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, and Auto-Sync turned off battery loss was 3% per hour. This is with or without SipDroid on using TCP connection and 2 hour server side keep alive (notify).

With auto-sync on my battery loss doubled to 6% per hour. This was with all my regular apps syncing: Facebook, GMail, Calendar, Contacts, Sense, Show Me, Weather, and News. I disabled sync, unless push was available, for everything but GMail and still lost about 6% battery in an hour.

During one of those hours with auto-sync on I tested the HTC Sense locate from the web option, which enabled GPS, and my battery consumption jumped to 9%. I'm not sure how long the GPS was on, but I'm guessing 10-20 minutes.

— modified on Aug 1, 2011, 7:38:03 AM