Two easy steps to increase HTC Hero battery life.
I got the Hero on launch day and am trying it out for 30 days. I’m trying to decide if I am going to go back to the Pre or keep the Hero… at this point it’s looking good for the Hero. 
One thing I’m not crazy about on the Hero is the battery life, it’s about the same as the Pre, but I was hoping for better.
I started to do some research and have done two things that have DRAMATICALLY improved my battery life:
- Apparently there is an issue with the HTC SMS/MMS client. It does some “hokey” stuff behind the scenes and, long story short, keeps your phone from properly going to sleep.
- I fixed this by installing ‘Handcent SMS’ – It does all the same stuff as the built in client, but no issues with the sleep.
- I then went in and turned off the notifications for the built in SMS
- Go to Menu –> Settings –> Wireless Controls –> Mobile Network Sharing –> Enable always-on Mobile Network and disable it.
- So far the only negative I’ve noticed on this is that I have to manually refresh Facebook.. email, SMS, MMS, etc… all still notify on new messages.
Over the next few days I’ll try and collect some concrete numbers, but I can tell you after making these changes I still have significant battery life at the end of the day.
HTH
