Battery hog

[dbatton]

I know that this post is probably near and dear to all of us.

I have had my Centro for about 6 days and I am very surprised at the lackluster battery capacity. I knew that it was much smaller, just did not realize how much shorter the life is on it.

On my 650 I would use it to play music for maybe an hour or two daily without any fear of draining the battery down. Not so with the Centro. I don't think it would make it through one mp3. Ok, maybe its not that bad, but it is not that good either.

Do you have any suggestions on how to prolong the battery life or when they might be coming out with a larger capacity battery that is the same size?

[cartogary]

Though I'm not a Centro user, my 680 suffers from power shortages often. Over the past 8 months reading many forums these tweaks may be applicable to the Centro as well. Systems Prefs: Set Date & Time to Manual, avoid Automatic Time settings; Beam = Off; and Bluetooth to Off, unless you can't live without it. These settings should save you significant power loss and let you play your mp3 files for a couple hours.

[stuartrayner]

Good post, Cartogary...as usual. I would add a couple things... first, the Centro battery should last a day or two depending on usage. Things that Cartogary mentioned will use it quicker. Heavy use of music and videos, push email, etc. can also quicken the battery drain. However, your post makes it sound as though you are losing power fairly quickly. I would recommend doing a warm reset and seeing how quickly the battery power drains then. There is a freeware app called BatteryGraph (not sure if it works on the Centro), that will tell you what the battery's usage is. If the battery drain is still fast in airplane mode (warm reset with no third party apps running), then you either have a hardware problem or a battery problem. I would recommend every Treo user have a spare battery anyway, so that way you have options if your battery runs out, or (in this case) if you need to test the battery usage of a second battery to see if you have a battery problem or a hardware problem. If the battery drainage is okay in airplane mode, then the next logical conclusion is that the rapid battery drainage is coming from the use of third party apps (most likely apps that work in the background). Keep us posted and we'll try to help you more, if the above doesn't quite get you there.

[psm9]

I had the same problem with my Centro (Sprint).
I started using Power Hero to disable Bluetooth when the phone was off and not plugged in (mostly all day at work).
It made a dramatic difference. My battery used to be empty by 3-4 pm, but now it's ~70% at that time. Bluetooth drains the battery quickly, as does the network connection.
Power Hero allows you to control the network connection also.

[dbatton]

Thanks for the posts. I will put these suggestions to the test.

[ktgoodaim]

Thanks for the post and the replies....has helped me too...I hate the fact that I can't disconnect the network thru the web browser like I could on my 650