HTC Desire Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
HOW TO: Improve Your Battery Life (Calibration Tutorial)
If you’ve been experiencing issues on your Desire where the battery doesn’t seem to last as much as it should then you can use this guide to extend your battery life. People have reported their batteries holding charge for double the time they used to after following these steps.
Obviously if your battery is performing well already then doing this won’t have any real benefits!
Instructions
- Turn your phone on and charge it for 8 hours or more
- Unplug the charger
- Turn your phone off and charge it for one hour
- Unplug the charger
- Turn on the phone and wait 2 minutes
- Turn your phone off and charge it for one hour
- Unplug, turn it on and use as normal. Your battery life should now be a lot better
You only need to do this once. If you keep experiencing issues with your battery you should contact HTC or your network provider for support.
Notes
Although this will calibrate your battery and cause it to hold charge better, your battery life will still be affected by the apps you use (needless to say really). Main battery hogging applications include Instant Messaging apps (MSN, AIM etc), GPS powered apps (CoPilot, Maps, Layar), video apps (RockPlayer, YouTube) and so on. Just remember that whenever you finish using these apps make sure you close them properly, using the quit menu if there’s one available. You can also visit my earlier tutorial on how to preserve your battery life here.
Credits
This tutorial is based on the original post by OneStepAhead on XDA.
This entry was posted by MrBrightside on August 18, 2010 at 8:40 pm, and is filed under Tutorials. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.
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This works! I had 50% battery after a day of ‘medium’ use compared to a usual 20%-ish.
Does anybody know if the Desire continues to trickle charge when the green charging LED comes on? Reason being if I charge my phone over night (so phone is still plugged in for say 3 hours after charge is complete) after minimal I use I loose one bar of battery. But if I charge my phone during the day, unplug and use straight away if takes much longer to loose a bar a battery.Like or Dislike:
0 
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Dazza, I’ve installed juice plotter, and if i charge my phone the whole night, i’ve noticed that after few hours of full battery, it starts to drop down to about 90%, and after that starts to charge back up. So if you unplug the charger when it’s allready going down or charging back up you would get these results.
Also i’m right now trying this trick, i’ll post back results later.
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
I tried it 2 days ago, and my battery life went from 3 – 4 hours between charging to approximately 12 hours. Note – I’m not sure what ‘normal usage’ is yet, since I just got this phone and have been playing and downloading things at a higher rate, but there is definitely noticable improvement. Thank you!
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Hi there,
I haven’t tried this yet but I don’t have a battery life issue. I have wifi on all the time and use midea player (MP3′s) for 8 hours of the day with as i mentined wifi and synch on all the time. I use gmail but have turned off the stocks synch and one of the face book synchs. All else is standard… ohh yeah i have set the screen timeout to 30 secs… I can’t understand how people say they only get 4 hours… I don’t doubt them for a min but I just can’t understand it. I’ll try this method and see if it makes a difference. One thing I did different was when the phone was new I charged it and actually let it discharge… till it turned off (normal usage) the first 3 charges.
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Battery Calibration is completly useless for Lithium based batteries because these types do not suffer of memory effect. (the battery has no memory, so it doesn`t save its “charge state” like Ni-based batteries.). Long charge cycles actually degrade a Lithium battery. Basicly you cannot do anything to improve battery life significantly, you can only preserv its life by doing short-time charges more often, not only when it`s empty or is close to empty.
- Source: http://www.batteryuniversity.comLike or Dislike:
0 0 -
Hi,
did this last night..it worked well on my Desire HD.
Im a light mobile user, only make few calls, some sms-es and syncing in the evening using wifi.
battery used to be left about 30% (or less) before I recharge it around 10PM..but after calibration, now it’s 8PM and I still have about 80%..amazing.
FYI im also using ultimatejuice before calibration.
Thanks for sharing!Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Calibration, by definition, means that a measurement is verified to produce accurate results. Battery calibration, as I understand it, is no more than letting the Android system figure out where 100% battery charge is. Example: once it has figured out that a certain charge level of a battery constitutes 100%, it will use that as a reference. If the battery, through some procedure as described above, performs better, the Android system needs to figure that new high-water mark out. Now, how that works inside Android is not clear to me.
There are various apps that work for rooted phones, that reset the Android stored values, and procedures are also described for non-rooted phones to achieve the same, but there seems to be no obvious and easy way to reset the stored values as far as I know.
The way I would hope the Android internal system works, is like a max/min thermometer, where the max indicator is pushed as far as it needs to go to indicate the highest temp encountered, and same for the min temp. I wish it would work that way, but I have no idea. Also it really should also be resettable, as with the max/min thermometer.
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
#27 written by kailash 6 months ago
Tried it on my HTC desire S and there is an improvement. am a varied user, i may spend hours on my phone doing fb wifi etc.. or on a work day i barely take my phone off my pocket. usually it ll drop to 50% by 3pm if i turn it on at 8am on my days off and 50% at 6pm on a working day, basicly had to charge it every day. had my htc desire for a month now and after calibrating it as above, 1st time i charged my mobile the next day!!!.. so HOLA n Thank you
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
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I was a little skeptical about the whole thing but it actually improved it. I got 7 more hours of battery with my normal usage (meaning taking 10 pictures, 4 30′ videos, reading a book for 1 hour, using the internet for and hour, downloading 5 apps, checking my email every 15 minutes on 3G, etc… you get the picture).
The battery clocked 31 hours of unplugged time and 7 hours of up time (not sleep).
Thanks for the heads up.Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
This works! I had 50% battery after a day of ‘medium’ use compared to a usual 20%-ish.
Does anybody know if the Desire continues to trickle charge when the green charging LED comes on? Reason being if I charge my phone over night (so phone is still plugged in for say 3 hours after charge is complete) after minimal I use I loose one bar of battery. But if I charge my phone during the day, unplug and use straight away if takes much longer to loose a bar a battery.Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Dazza, I’ve installed juice plotter, and if i charge my phone the whole night, i’ve noticed that after few hours of full battery, it starts to drop down to about 90%, and after that starts to charge back up. So if you unplug the charger when it’s allready going down or charging back up you would get these results.
Also i’m right now trying this trick, i’ll post back results later.
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
I tried it 2 days ago, and my battery life went from 3 – 4 hours between charging to approximately 12 hours. Note – I’m not sure what ‘normal usage’ is yet, since I just got this phone and have been playing and downloading things at a higher rate, but there is definitely noticable improvement. Thank you!
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Hi there,
I haven’t tried this yet but I don’t have a battery life issue. I have wifi on all the time and use midea player (MP3′s) for 8 hours of the day with as i mentined wifi and synch on all the time. I use gmail but have turned off the stocks synch and one of the face book synchs. All else is standard… ohh yeah i have set the screen timeout to 30 secs… I can’t understand how people say they only get 4 hours… I don’t doubt them for a min but I just can’t understand it. I’ll try this method and see if it makes a difference. One thing I did different was when the phone was new I charged it and actually let it discharge… till it turned off (normal usage) the first 3 charges.
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Battery Calibration is completly useless for Lithium based batteries because these types do not suffer of memory effect. (the battery has no memory, so it doesn`t save its “charge state” like Ni-based batteries.). Long charge cycles actually degrade a Lithium battery. Basicly you cannot do anything to improve battery life significantly, you can only preserv its life by doing short-time charges more often, not only when it`s empty or is close to empty.
- Source: http://www.batteryuniversity.comLike or Dislike:
0 0 -
Hi,
did this last night..it worked well on my Desire HD.
Im a light mobile user, only make few calls, some sms-es and syncing in the evening using wifi.
battery used to be left about 30% (or less) before I recharge it around 10PM..but after calibration, now it’s 8PM and I still have about 80%..amazing.
FYI im also using ultimatejuice before calibration.
Thanks for sharing!Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
Calibration, by definition, means that a measurement is verified to produce accurate results. Battery calibration, as I understand it, is no more than letting the Android system figure out where 100% battery charge is. Example: once it has figured out that a certain charge level of a battery constitutes 100%, it will use that as a reference. If the battery, through some procedure as described above, performs better, the Android system needs to figure that new high-water mark out. Now, how that works inside Android is not clear to me.
There are various apps that work for rooted phones, that reset the Android stored values, and procedures are also described for non-rooted phones to achieve the same, but there seems to be no obvious and easy way to reset the stored values as far as I know.
The way I would hope the Android internal system works, is like a max/min thermometer, where the max indicator is pushed as far as it needs to go to indicate the highest temp encountered, and same for the min temp. I wish it would work that way, but I have no idea. Also it really should also be resettable, as with the max/min thermometer.
Like or Dislike:
0 0 -
#27 written by kailash 6 months ago
Tried it on my HTC desire S and there is an improvement. am a varied user, i may spend hours on my phone doing fb wifi etc.. or on a work day i barely take my phone off my pocket. usually it ll drop to 50% by 3pm if i turn it on at 8am on my days off and 50% at 6pm on a working day, basicly had to charge it every day. had my htc desire for a month now and after calibrating it as above, 1st time i charged my mobile the next day!!!.. so HOLA n Thank you
Like or Dislike:
0 0
I was a little skeptical about the whole thing but it actually improved it. I got 7 more hours of battery with my normal usage (meaning taking 10 pictures, 4 30′ videos, reading a book for 1 hour, using the internet for and hour, downloading 5 apps, checking my email every 15 minutes on 3G, etc… you get the picture).
The battery clocked 31 hours of unplugged time and 7 hours of up time (not sleep).
Thanks for the heads up.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0