The idea that I am so worried about battery life is a negative indicator of what we deal with with smartphones. Everybody worries about it though: palm, rim, Apple, HTC .. and non smartphones too : Samsung, Nokia. 4 years ago, I had a Nokia candy bar the had to be charged every night and it was JUST a phone and camera.

So getting accustomed to charging every night or even twice a day is a bit different than my last Sony Ericsson which I would have charge nightly if I left the mp3 player on all day.

Last week, I did a test to see how long the ego was lasting with \’normal\’ (no hq YouTube) use with a little 3g, some 4g, but mostly just evening WiFi and commute mp3s. It lasted pretty well, above 20%, over 17 hours from leaving work until lunch the next day. Of.course, that\’s with settings optimized.

So \’somebody\’ also tried rooting their phone and under clocking it during sleep -link- which seemed help some, but ultimately led to SD card failure due to not getting the over the air update.

But 17 to 19 hours is pretty decent for a smartphone, but I always worry when doing 4g speedtests and watching hq YouTube that I\’ll be stranded several hours later.

Here is some of the stuff that you can do to save battery:

• Turn the brightness down. First of all, the automatic brightness is like blinding in any dim situation. But turning it up in the sun is a pain, so find a middle ground.
• Turn off your screen when you\’re done, it\’s kind of like keylock.
• Decide which accounts you want to sync and how often. While there are times that you want to be alerted when you get new email, I feel like most of the time I check my phone anyway (especially as I have 3 accounts.) so pushing the sync button when I\’m checking it anyway isn\’t asking much. This saves a ton of power. Do you really need twitter and the weather to sync every 5 minutes, or just every time you check it?
• Turn off always on Mobile Data. 3g can sleep really well and connect back really quickly,  no reason to stay on it all of the time.
• Task kill any task that has ads
• [Underclock you cpu when it it is in standby to the 245mhz level -- this will make your phone trickle very little BUT THE CURRENT ROOTING METHOD DOESN\"T GET THE SDCARD UPDATE AND WILL MESS UP YOUR PARTITION TABLE.]

Half a week after buying using my new phone, I dropped it a few inches and the screen protector got a small scratch on it – and my rushed install wasn\’t exactly perfect. So, I\’ve been on #2 since and it already has a few scratches.

It\’s not like a put my phone in my pocket with my keys or drop it all of the time, and I\’m skeptical that not cutting my fingernails early led to some of the scratches.