Breakthrough in Hero battery life issue

Posted at 3:51 pm CDT, October 15th, 2009 by John Walton

A resourceful user over at community.sprint.com has discovered the cause of, and solution to, a major juice suck evident in HTC’s Hero. Apparently, sending an SMS sends a signal to the dialer, then a bunch of complicated stuff happens, and your phone never goes to sleep. Thanks a lot, messaging app.

To see how this is affecting your battery usage, go to:

Menu < Settings < About Phone < Status < Awake Time

For more detail, download a free app from the Market called Spare Parts and go to:

Spare Parts < Battery History < Partial Wake Usage < Since Last Unplugged

Is your dialer out of control? Mine too! Time to download ChompSMS or Handcent SMS.

images from community.sprint.com

bad

It will take me a day or two to determine the practical difference resulting from a switch to ChompSMS, but I do text quite a bit. So… I’m hoping for substantial improvement.

Big thanks to @erickarlpeters, @the_real_Newman, and everyone else who sent this to me.

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Categorized in Tips & Tricks Tags: CDMA, Hero, HTC, Sense, Sprint

Ish

Well thanks John, that makes a bit more sense now that you've explained it a little bit. I will definitely wait for HTC to hurry up and fix it before I decide on which phone to get, the moment or the hero when my upgrade comes.
Ed Brophy

you forgot to tell everyone to disable message notifications and auto retrieve.

Messages > Settings deselect Auto Retrieve and Notifications
Zeke

if i'm using a different messaging app besides the stock app, how i turn off the stock app without uninstalling it
George Blair

Click on messages app once in click menu>settings>uncheck notifications box.
Divide

So I tested this out a bit tonight.

My Hero was charged to about 80% when i left home at about 8pm. It's now about 1am and have 70% battery left.

This seems to have done the trick, I hope HTC releases a fix soon. I really like the stock text message app.

Up time 5:02
Awake Time 0:55
Ish

So I'm guessing that the more up time you have vs awake time is always better I'm guessing? And will HTC fix that error because if not then I'm not sure if I will get the Hero because I do heavy messaging and I can't have my phone dying on me every day.
John Walton

You want the awake time to be a fraction of the up time. Up time is how long the phone has been on.

I'm told (very unofficially) that someone is franticly working on a fix.
@the_real_newman

I have been contacted by HTC and they are working hard on getting this squared away. They will post on their twitter page when the update is available. Big thanks to Flipz for the workaround!
breon

I used to use chompSMS. Now I use Handcent. The notification options are better (no that it matters on the Hero, with the bi-color LED and inability to change the blink rate. boooo).

The Messages app still appears in Taskiller, even though I don't use it.
Feech

I use Google Voice any way so it hasn't affected me. I did make the mistake of using the handsets dialer today for text and it hasn't slept in 3 hours.
midnight314

i tried doing it but i still got the 100% can someone please help me.
George Blair

Dude sweet find! I hear a lot of people like handcent sms. I personally have not tried it yet.
Divide

I checked mine and it said,

Up time 40min
Awake time 40min

No more wondering why my battery drains so quick now.

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Breakthrough in Hero battery life issue

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