Database Users

Is 85mA normal current usage when idle?

I've had my Touch HD a couple of weeks now and I absolutely love it. My primary use of it is as a pocket pc and the phone comes in as a handy extra.
However, I seem to be getting battery usage problems that other people have been experiencing and I have a few questions.
I'm using Powerguard and AEButton Plus to show me my power usage. Both report about 85mA when no applications are running and no data connections are in use. I have my backlight turned down pretty low, activesync closed down and I don't use AEButton Plus to turn WiFi on and off as I don't use WiFi. Is 85mA about right? I've no idea what it is while it's in standby.
Yesterday I used my Touch HD a lot, playing about with GPS, surfing etc and by the end of the day I had over 60% charge left. Today, after a full charge overnight from the mains, I have used my Touch HD very much less but I'm already down to 56%. Powerguard still reports about 85mA when my pocket pc is idle but I've been able to watch the percentage power drop every minute or so. Then it would speed up and at other times slow down again.
Why would the battery drain so much faster today with the same or less power being drawn? AEButton Plus reports an uptime of only 1.5 hours yet almost half the battery is used up.
The battery is only a couple of weeks old. I cycled it about three times when I got it, ie letting it run down completely and then charging it back fully. I'm not charging it in the cradle but directly off the mains overnight. Has the battery lost it's calibration so quickly?
If I have applications or devices drawing more power, shouldn't I see that in a higher level current usage. When I have GPS on it goes up to about 300mA so I'm assuming that at 85mA there is nothing else running that shouldn't be running.
I have spent a lot of time installing all the applications etc onto my Touch HD and so only want to hard reset as a very last resort. I really need to be able to use my pocket pc and get on with my life now, but I can't if I'm worrying about whether it will last through a phone call.
I've got a spare battery on order, but I would really like find out why my battery is draining so much more quickly now.
Please help. I love my Touch HD. It does everything that I want and it's gorgeous, but I need it's battery to last at least a day.
Thanks,
Teresa

Sorry, I should also add that I'm using the stock V1.56 ROM.
Teresa

This is getting weird now. I've now started to use my Touch HD more. I made a 20 minute phone call, ran TomTom for a few minutes and now I've had google maps running with GPS for about half an hour and I've only lost a few percent. My power is at 50%. It seems that the more power I draw from the battery, the more slowly it goes down.
Do I need to cycle my battery again? I'm worried about doing this too often as it stresses the battery and shortens it's life.
Teresa

batt and batt % are not a reliable thing
you can't really rely very much on it
and it's never linearly

I know the battery usage isn't linear and it tends to speed up as more power is used. However, the pocket pc uses the value to decide when to shut down. My Touch HD has just run out of power with an uptime of only 3 hours and 50 minutes and it was fully charged only sixteen hours ago. This does not leave me confident in being able to use it for a whole day.
What can I do to improve the battery life? I have an HP iPAQ hx4700 with a four year old battery in it that still lasts ages and ages. I don't think I'll get anywhere near as long a life from my Touch HD battery. I only need it to last a day between charges with an uptime of at least six hours or more. As soon as the capacity of this battery starts to degrade, it will be useless as it's only just useful now.
Teresa

get dotfreds taskmanager too see what processesvare are running inthe background.
use advanced config to enable the power saving features

Thanks for the suggestions. I've already spent ages searching these forums so I have been using dotfreds taskmanager and all I see is idle running at about 80% because the other 20% is being used by the task manager. AEButton plus only uses about .1% every few seconds. Is 85mA usage high for idle?
I'll try advanced config to turn on the powersaving features.
I need my pocket pc and phone all day to day as I'm out and won't be able to recharge it after this morning. I just hope it lasts.
Teresa

Hi,
In this forum I saw many tips how to reduce the battery usage. You could search those.
For example turn off 'Receive all incoming beams' in Setting/Connections/Beam.
You also can flash one of the cooked ROMs that present here. I use onkolog's Lite ROM and battery usage is very low (10-20% per day with moderate usage).

Thanks, but turning off incoming beams is one of the first things I did. I think I've followed most of the tips I've found and I've even managed to stop that pesky activesync from keeping on coming back.
I'm not running Powerguard today and I'll just use my Touch HD normally and see how it goes.
I don't want to flash a cooked rom just yet as I've never done that before, but I'll try that eventually if my battery usage continues to be so poor. I have a lot of applications installed on my Touch HD, so building it takes a very long time. I use it for everything, from shopping lists, access databases, reading ebooks, playing games, satnav to plain old diary. These are all applications that ran quite happily on my old pocket pc without undue battery usage. The only main difference on my Touch HD is that I'm using TFDetacher so that I can still have my old Today screen as well as Touch Flo.

Hi, only if you run out of solutions, you could look at this thread for an extra battery (I've not tried it myself but it increases your battery life by 200%)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=529673

Thanks for that, smeddy. This looks like a really interesting product. I will look out for what people say about it.
My battery seems to be much better so far today. I'm still on 100% with an uptime of 25 minutes since I charged it up over four hours ago.

85mA while idling is reasonable if you have backlight level at >50%.
68mA is the lowest I've seen at minimal backlight level on my HD.

Hey TeresaTT,
Something I can tell you with a high degree of confidence is that you really cant trust the battery gauge on the HD that much, either under idle conditions or with higher battery loading. And just try doing a reset and I bet that it'll will come up on a different % value after you reboot!
Another thing is that battery consumption is quite dependant on not only how you configure various functions of your phone but also what ROM you use. My present ROM seems to be noticeable more battery effecient than many of the ROMs I tried before, and most especially the stock ROM that came with the phone, and the stock ROM I initially upgraded to.
EDIT:
Cant comment on the battery current consumptions as I've never felt the need to measure them.
LoopyLoo

Thanks for the info. My Touch HD draws 85mA with the backlight set pretty low, just one point off the lowest. Therefore it seems that the usage is pretty high. I'll have to look at other roms and try one or two, although I need to wait until I've got some more time free. I've already spent hours and hours on my Touch HD, but I do love it. It's a huge upgrade from my old HP iPAQ hx700.

Before my battery would last about a day but after flashing to my current custom ROM now lasts 2 to 3 days with moderate usage. If left on standy idle the % doesn't seem to go down. Probably last a week doing nothing...
I believe the official ROM I had before was buggy with power management i.e. even when on standby with screen off, sometimes it may not cut off power sucking features like WIFI, gprs/hsdpa, bluetooth etc.

Thanks for that ez2remember. It looks like my Touch HD is behaving normally with a stock ROM. I've had a quick look at the ROM forum and it almost looks like a foreign language. Even the dummies guide is a bit foreign with HSPL, USPL etc. Then I have to pick which ROM to use and hope it's stable and all my applocations work. I can see that this is going to take quite a bit of time for me to research. I'm fairly technical so I'll get there in the end.

Yes I agree flashing can seem a bit daunting. This is my first real WM device. I've played with one briefly before so found the conversion slightly complicated. I came from s60 devices. Dummies and step-by-step guides on s60 were really easy to follow. I just think WM users are far more technical so instructions seems more complicated than it actually is.
It's just a matter of getting the latest HSPL onto your device (one time affair) then you can flash as many custom ROMs as you want.

You can use nue ClockSpeed 1.3 to manage the clock of the processor.
www.nuerom.com
Also, Pocket Shield will switch off screen wile talking, and a lot of functions I don't use.

My garmin gps shut down few days ago and i had to use garmin in my HD for around 1.5hrs....
I think i lost only around 20-30% charge.
My battery lasts atleast 2 days with wifi on all the time ( wifi auto off in standby mode.)
I do make few calls and sms

Abysmal Battery Life?

Hello,
I understand people complain about the battery and search around here for issues regarding it and find many.
But mine seems to be shockingly bad. I have HSDPA on, weather, stock updates every 4 hours, twitter every hour, and tend to use Palringo on constantly (maybe this is the issue?). With about 2 hours of FM Radio, maybe an hour of music... the phones battery only lasts for about 7 hours which is not great.
Is this about right for the phone? Or is this shockingly bad compared to others? Its hard to quantify from searching about what the "par" for this device really is.

This is not much, but not shockingly bad. Have you enabled the power saving mode in Palringo?
(I actually don't know what it does, but there is one )

Palringo and beejive on my HD2 sucked the battery like a over active dyson vacuum cleaner!
Nimbuzz seems to be better for battery life but not perfect.
On sunday I managed to kill my battery <5 hours so 7 hours is better than what I get sometimes

another post. geeee
i had asus p750 which battery last for a day or so with minimal usage
i had se w910i while only on 2-3h of phone calls i had to charge the battery every 36 hours
i had an iphone 3g which i had to charge every 2 days with very gentle using
a friend of mine is using htc mda something with the hardware keyboard and has to charge the phone every day
anyway - i can charge my hd2 every night if necessary - it is a very good phone anyway

That might explain it then
I can appreciate that hammering the data connection or whatever Palringo does will not do the battery much good sadly. anyone else use Palringo and get better battery life?
I have the power / data saving mode enabled, although as you said, quite what that does I dont know
Thanks for the replies....

My HD2 is significantly better than my T-Mobile G1 I had previously - that phone definitely needed charging every day and I hardly used it really. I get a good 2-3 days with light usage from the HD2.

I had the same poor batter life before when I first had it. But last couple of days I finally realized that it's the 3G data connection sucking the battery life like nothing. No I only enable data connection whenever there's no wifi for me. But I keep the WiFi on constantly with push mail. The battery life lasts almost about 2 days. So I'm more than satisfied with it now. The iphone/ipod touch needs to be charged every single day mind you. So my advice is to avoid data connection whenever possible since wifi doesn't really suck much battery juice it seems.

Hi
In my case using palringo the battery drain is 8 % per hour. Without palringo running is 4% so double battery life. I ve repeated the test many times with same result...

danielherrero said:
Hi
In my case using palringo the battery drain is 8 % per hour. Without palringo running is 4% so double battery life. I ve repeated the test many times with same result...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks mate, this is exactly what I was hoping to get confirmed. I'm seeing something similar, I guess short of not using Palringo there isnt much to do. I do have a charger on my desk at work, so I'll just plug it in.
Interesting I did see that with it plugged in charging and turned on (set to Disk Drive mode) at work the charge barely increased 1% over a period of an hour or so. (I did check that the option to not charge when connected was not ticked). So it wasnt that, just caught me by surprise as it seems it barely charged.

Battery Drain HD2?

Anyone else experiencing excessive battery drain on their HD2?
I am interested to know if this is just my phone or if it actually just chews through that much juice.
I have had windows mobile phones for several years so I know all the basic ways to keep battery drain down.
Stuff that I have generally found:
1. If I keep the screen turned on without it going blank I lose about 1% every 2 minutes.
2. If I am browsing that figure almost doubles.
3. My old Touch HD used about 5% battery overnight when in standby but this phone will go through about 25%.
4. The phone gets really hot when browsing (much hotter than my old Touch HD)
I have tried flashing ROM's and Radios but nothing seems to help.
I am not running any software on the phone that I wasn't running on my old HD1.
I have only had the phone for a week so I am not sure if this is normal but I would be very surprised if HTC released a phone that lasts for only a few hours on one battery.

+1
-1% every 3 minutes
-4% during the night (when i'am sleeping)
MAXIMUM : 45/48 HOURS

Crash95 said:
+1
-1% every 3 minutes
-4% during the night (when i'am sleeping)
MAXIMUM : 45/48 HOURS
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I wish I got 2 days

we really need extended battery ,hd1 battery was much more better.

Good mate but yes i agreee HTC has come up with a battery eating device this time around. My device on full charge just gives in around 8-10 hrs. This might be dat my EDGE is on and 7 mails accounts sending mails back and forth.
but truly i think that HTC better look into this very seriously cause more and more ppl are suffering in this battery drain..
Any of flashing roms and radio not helping either... did a complete hard reset but no step up
HTC come with longer battery battery for bigger devices soon......
The only solution i see now is get one of those extra battery worth mind bogling £52.87

I've had this problem ever since flashing to 1.66, I flashed the radio to 2.07.50.27 as this was said to solve the problem but it hasn't made any difference after a few days of use. My battery life used to be significantly better when I was on the original stock ROM, so much so I'm considering going back to it
I also know all the tricks as to clawing back the battery drain, my phone is idle on my desk at work most of the time and I don't use Wi-Fi, all the location stuff is turned off as are weather, stock and other updates plus my screen is set to 30% then off after 60 seconds. Despite all of that I lose 1% every 2-3 minutes
It seems to me that perhaps the radio is checking for reception pretty much constantly rather than say, 5-10 mins perhaps? This used to be a problem on my old Blackberry Storm but a few fimware updates solved it, eventually!
The only other thing I've noticed since the update is that once the battery drops below 50% or so, the drain seems to slow, I don't know if this is perhaps because the phone goes into some sort of semi-power saving mode?
Suggestions/hints welcome! I've had a semi-thorough look into this on the forums and tried most of the suggestions but still the problem remains. Will battery life improve after a few charges perhaps as this was a trait of my Storm's battery, the more you charged it the better the day to day battery life was (and no it wasn't because I had it plugged in all the time! Over time the general charge just seemed to improve when roaming).
Thanks!

Piemole said:
Anyone else experiencing excessive battery drain on their HD2?
I am interested to know if this is just my phone or if it actually just chews through that much juice.
I have had windows mobile phones for several years so I know all the basic ways to keep battery drain down.
Stuff that I have generally found:
1. If I keep the screen turned on without it going blank I lose about 1% every 2 minutes.
2. If I am browsing that figure almost doubles.
3. My old Touch HD used about 5% battery overnight when in standby but this phone will go through about 25%.
4. The phone gets really hot when browsing (much hotter than my old Touch HD)
I have tried flashing ROM's and Radios but nothing seems to help.
I am not running any software on the phone that I wasn't running on my old HD1.
I have only had the phone for a week so I am not sure if this is normal but I would be very surprised if HTC released a phone that lasts for only a few hours on one battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You need to indicate what services you have running. Do you have any data services running eg: location services, push mail, weather? all of these have a bearing. In addition, network services can also drain a battery, especially if the signal is weak and the phone have to search for a transmitter, or 3g services.

Hexjibber said:
The only other thing I've noticed since the update is that once the battery drops below 50% or so, the drain seems to slow, I don't know if this is perhaps because the phone goes into some sort of semi-power saving mode?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is a very interesting comment. Although since upgrading to radio 2.07.51.05_2 I have had very good battery life, I too have noticed a slowdown after 50%

romac said:
You need to indicate what services you have running. Do you have any data services running eg: location services, push mail, weather? all of these have a bearing. In addition, network services can also drain a battery, especially if the signal is weak and the phone have to search for a transmitter, or 3g services.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nothing is turned on, everything is set to manual.
As I stated I know all the basic stuff. I understand that all these things have a bearing on battery loss.
Everything I stated in the first post is for when I have nothing running. The phone is just sitting there running sense, thats all.

I have had my HD2 for a few days now. I am on Vodacom in South Africa.
I have not had a problem with battery life.
Yesterday i unplugged from the charger at 07:00. I spent about 1 and 1/2 hours of talk time on the phone, it was permanently connected to 3g doing weather updates etc. Sent and received a couple of sms's. Also played with a few tweaks and reboots.
When i got home at about 18:00 i had over 30% battery. I then surfed the web for over 2 hours to drain the battery.

try setting Network Selection to Manual

Piemole said:
Anyone else experiencing excessive battery drain on their HD2?
I am interested to know if this is just my phone or if it actually just chews through that much juice.
I have had windows mobile phones for several years so I know all the basic ways to keep battery drain down.
Stuff that I have generally found:
1. If I keep the screen turned on without it going blank I lose about 1% every 2 minutes.
2. If I am browsing that figure almost doubles.
3. My old Touch HD used about 5% battery overnight when in standby but this phone will go through about 25%.
4. The phone gets really hot when browsing (much hotter than my old Touch HD)
I have tried flashing ROM's and Radios but nothing seems to help.
I am not running any software on the phone that I wasn't running on my old HD1.
I have only had the phone for a week so I am not sure if this is normal but I would be very surprised if HTC released a phone that lasts for only a few hours on one battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same here with and without stock ROM.

yeah.. the phone is a battery sucker.... another cons of HD2....

This is very interesting to read because I do not have this problem. When I left my HTC HD2 on last night (I woke up at 4 in the morning to get something to drink and unplugged it) and then woke up at 8, it was at 98%. That means it went from 100% to 98% in 4 hours. Not to bad imo.
I am now at work and it is 15:34, and I am at 87%. I have made some calls, watched some videos, send a few text messages. Not much (I am at work so I got other things to do). So 08:00 (98%) - 15:34 (87%) - that's 7 and a half hours, with some calls, text messages and a video.
I am pretty sure when I get home at 18:30 the battery will still be above 75%. Then I connect to my wifi at home, refresh twitter, weather, browse the web a little bit, check e-mail etc. So that will drain my battery a little more.
But overall I have not had any problems with my battery life. I always make it trough a day, and never have a problem like 'damn my battery is almost done and I am not near a charger'.
Some info that might help:
I do not sync ANYTHING automatically. I still have some things to do with my Vodafone contract and do not have an unlimited plan yet. I only sync at home on my own wifi connection. For me this is not a problem, because I only need to refresh the weather each morning to see what the day is going to be like. Twitter I only do when I have the time. Stocks I do not use.
I have screen brightness set to automatic.
I am on 3G most of the time.
I am running the official 1.66 Dutch ROM.
I have some tweaks, games and programs installed.
I hope you all solve this issue, because it just can not be that my HD2 has a good battery life, and your HD2 not
Kind Regards
EDIT @ 17:00 still 87%.

I am in a 3G 2100 only network (I don't have 2G functionality).
ROM: Artemis 3.0
Radio: 2.06.50.23_3
Customization: Seiya 6.5.5
I don't leave any automatic updates on, except for my e-mail account every 2 hrs.
I never close my connection.
The drainage overnight is -3% (8hrs).
The battery lasts at least 12 hrs of intense usage.
Normally I have to recharge every second day (e.g. I charged last night, I answered a few calls, I did some IM and browsing and I still have 73% left).
For a phone with a 1 GHz processor, a 4.3" screen and a tiny 1250 mAh battery I find the drainage is rather decent.
Mind you, I ALWAYS do at least one full charging cycle to my battery after flashing a new ROM. I mean: full discharge, battery out 1 min, full charging in OFF mode, battery out 2 mins.

27firesnake said:
Mind you, I ALWAYS do at least one full charging cycle to my battery after flashing a new ROM. I mean: full discharge, battery out 1 min, full charging in OFF mode, battery out 2 mins.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have seen this process recommended a couple of times now. What is the theory behind it if you don't mind me asking?

maybe its also becouse some of us couldnt wait using the hd2 when they got it (like me) before it was fully charged for the first time
anyway my battery life has improved a little bit, i was at 74% this morning and did a lot of browsing, installing, tweaking and now its at 3%. it used to be much worse

I have battery consuming problem from time to time.I did everything:
installed new stock rom 1.66;
transfered all data which phone is using from card to phone memory(pictures,icons,sounds.etc...)
all updates are done manually;
Gprs connection is swiched off on the idle after one min;
One night it is loosing from 2 to 4%;
another from 30 to 40%
and it is eating memory from 10 to 15mb
I think that it is radio which is causing battery drainage so fast(to much communication wit a base stations,because when I am checking spb wireless monitor in the morning,there is no any data traffic.
I hope they can solve problem,because it is getting me mad and crazy

Try setting the screen brightness to 10-20% (on battery powered)
and dim backlight after 10 seconds (on batter powered).
It helps a lot, at least for me.

creed said:
I have seen this process recommended a couple of times now. What is the theory behind it if you don't mind me asking?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
as far as i know, the battery has an integrated digital circuit (ic) which estimates the state-of-charge (soc). the procedure resets/calibrates the ic to obtain a more accurate estimation. since the radio rom is in charge with the power management (among other things), by changing it you decalibrate the "gauge".
i don't know if i've got the theory right but i tested this myself and it surely works.

Battery drain and 3G

G'day everyone,
I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar issue to what I'm having on my x10i.
I use to unplug my device from the charger around 7am (100% - fully charged) and the battery dies around 7pm. The main usage of my device is for making a couple of short phone calls, sending/receiving tens of SMSs, regularly checking my facebook, twitter and email account. Not a heavy usage I think, around 85% of the time is put on standby. I was really unsatisfied because my other device "HTC hero" stays for over two days. A few facts about my HTC Hero: 1) It is way much older and nearly damaged, 2) I am using it mainly for family/personal really long calls (30-45mins per call) and 3) Always connected to my car's built in phone system (Bluetooth is up all the time).
Since I bought my device 2 months ago, I was in a continues contact with SE the Middle East regarding battery issues. Honestly, they were very informative and respond quicker than any other company I dealt with before. They replied to me with really useful tips that extended my batter life to stay alive till the mid night (extra 4-5 hrs). Tips given were: Brightness automatic adjustment, Disabling auto Wifi detection... etc. Though, I was still not quite satisfied.
One day I decided to do my own experiments to observe the real problem with my x10 battery. This was 3 days ago. The first thing I started with, and apparently the last, was disabling the 3G service. I turned off the 3G service, and turned on the 2G (Edge) instead. Believe it or not, the first day my device's battery status was about ~85% when I got back home from work, ~70% at the mid night, ~55 percent when I woke up the next day, ~25% when I got back home, and dies around 8pm (from 17hrs to 37hrs). It was a straight shock to me. I already know that enabling 3G would shorten the battery life for both the short and long term, but honestly I wasn't expecting this much of difference in the daily usage. The other thing, I didn't notice any huge difference between before and now. Internet surfing is a bit slower, couldn't notice the difference. Twitter, Facebook and email worked just the same since I check them whenever I got notified. The last thing is I'm using mobile messenger now, i.e. eBuddy, since the battery is giving me longer time, and all my messenger accounts are on all the time.
Please, if you are having the same issue, let me know because I was assuming that there's something wrong on my device, either on the battery itself or the build software (build # R2BA024)
Regards

The improvements you're seeing are probably due to you living in an area with poor 3G reception. The poorer the signal is, the harder the phone has to work to maintain the connection, thus, eating battery faster.
Although, it shouldn't be THAT big of a battery loss... I'd look at what programs you have installed and running and see if any of them are secretly eating battery behind your back.

You should try installing and running "Data on demand" It switches your data connection off when the phones screen is off...

Its well worth upgrading to 026, i saw a huge increase in battery life from that.

iead1 said:
The improvements you're seeing are probably due to you living in an area with poor 3G reception. The poorer the signal is, the harder the phone has to work to maintain the connection, thus, eating battery faster.
Although, it shouldn't be THAT big of a battery loss... I'd look at what programs you have installed and running and see if any of them are secretly eating battery behind your back.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Absolutely correct. At home I can leave my X10 for days without it dying with 3G enabled. At work there are dead zones that'll suck a phone dry within an 8 hour shift though. It's almost always a coverage issue.
For any battery issue I suggest a factory reset and THEN make the appropriate adjustments. Sounds useless but sometimes you can emulate all the same settings and things still don't happen as anticipated.
Use a 3G toggle widget for long periods where you KNOW it won't be necessary. Root your X10 and add SetCPU to that bad boy. Screw using task killers because the Android OS is *nix based and handles memory just fine - I only kill tasks before putting my phone away when I know I won't use it for an hour or more. Other than that, don't use task killers, battery monitors or anything that'll keep your phone from sleeping. Use Spare Parts if you need help identifying an annoying program too.

Thanks all for the useful comments.
Now, I feel more confident that I can keep the battery alive for even more than 2 days. Thanks for your information and knowledge : )
[Q]: Is there any application that shows (in bars or digits) the strength of 3G signal?

Just had the best battery life I've gotten with this phone, and here's how I got it

I'll try to keep this short and sweet. I'm coming from a phone that was married to its charger (an overclocked-to-all-hell Pre) and I constantly micromanaged its battery by turning on data, wifi, and gps only when needed. With the Atrix's huge battery and the upgrade in phones I decided, "What the hell. Crappy battery life with this phone is still better than the best battery life with my old one. Enjoy the features." So I left Wifi, GPS, and Sync on 100% of the time. (I did, however, set all my apps to manual sync.) I have 3 homescreens and very, very few widgets. With a normal day's use this usually netted me about 14-17~ hours with about 2~ hours of screentime. Not the greatest, but amazing comparatively to the Pre.
Today I finally took the time go around and start messing with Tasker and other battery optimizing techniques. Here are a few thigns I did that have already netted me large returns:
The first is the simplest: I changed my screen brightness from Automatically adjusting to a static 15%. Though not the best, this is is bright enough for me in close to all situations and the ones where it's not I just change it back to automatic (this is done via the excellent Widgetsoid).
I use Google Voice for texts and that means I always need a data connection--this throws out things like JuiceDefender because it prevents me from receiving instant notifications. Between home and school I'd say I have a WiFi connection about 85% of the time, so i went into the Wireless preferences and turned my WiFi Timeout to "Never." In case you didn't know, a wifi connection is much more battery friendly than a 3G/4G one. Remaining always connected keeps my phone from cutting the connection and then rescanning for a network to connect to several times a day.
I used a Tasker profile I found online (it was either Reddit or Lifehacker, you can probably find it on both) that turns my GPS on only when I load an app that I've specified I want GPS on. I've known about this for a while but I was hesitant about instituting it because a luxury I wanted was to be able to open up Navigation, Yelp, or Foursquare and have an instant lock-on with my location. After testing today, between being generally located by wifi or cell-tower triangulation, and then having an exact location a few moments later with GPS, I found almost zero difference between leaving GPS on and having it enabled right when the app was opened.
Lastly, I downloaded the newest SetCPU here from XDA (it's free for XDA members. Search for it.) and had it throttle back the processor all the way while the screen is off. In addition, it will have the processor scaled back some when the battery reaches 30% and 10% respectively, and a few other instances such as the phone temperature getting too hot.
I'm laying into bed right now and according to Circle Battery Widget I have 37% battery left after 11 hours of being unplugged. Now, while this doesn't sound very great at all I want to specify that this is with my display having been on for 4 hours and 15 minutes. This is by far the largest battery hog (45% in this case) and there is no way my battery would have lasted before I changed these few things. I don't know how applicable they are to anyone else but they sure did help me and I felt I should let people know.

The battery on this phone is freaking AMAZING!! I use my phone a lot! Prior to this I had the Captivate and I would have to charge it around 3 or 4pm cause it was already at less than 15% and dropping quickly.
On 4/26 this phone lasted me 11 hours with lots of usage around 3 hours of display time.
On 4/27 I unplugged it at 10 and it died today at 1am! That to me is sick!! I charge every night so lasting a whole day of use is fine for me!
Oh and I have my brightness at a bit more than half, which I could have never done on the Captivate lol

my experiences have been rather positive as well.
4/26 unplugged at 12am.
4/27 flashed ginger-blur, restored apps, ubuntu webtop mod, all of the other mods.
@6pm i had 7 hours and 16 minutes of screen time and 1 gb of data used. I was at 15%
my only issue is that i only get battery updates every 10%. any idea why?

songokussm said:
my experiences have been rather positive as well.
4/26 unplugged at 12am.
4/27 flashed ginger-blur, restored apps, ubuntu webtop mod, all of the other mods.
@6pm i had 7 hours and 16 minutes of screen time and 1 gb of data used. I was at 15%
my only issue is that i only get battery updates every 10%. any idea why?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you need the circle battery widget to get 1% updates. There may be a couple other battery apps that do it as well, not sure.

Ive got a 120 apps installed and get close to 14hrs of battery life with screen on time of 4-5hrs

LancerV said:
Ive got a 120 apps installed and get close to 14hrs of battery life with screen on time of 4-5hrs
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm pretty sure the only way I could get 5 hours of screen time is in airplane mode.

Coming from the Pre ( I still love that phone OS) I can testify to glorious battery life on my Atrix. I don't even charge it at night, I run all day long and charge it usually at my home office desk before I go to bed.
I do miss my Pre. My wife has one and it gives me sad puppy eyes every time I look over at it.