Xperia X10 mini
So I’ve been using my X10 mini for ten days now, and it has been quite a bumpy ride:
Last weekend I had to charge it about every six/eight hour. I have to admit that I did use it a lot in the beginning, but i was still shocked to see how bad the battery
After I got back from my weekend I decided to change back to my Nokia 5800, just to have a phone I could use over night without charging it. At the same time I also sent an email to CDON telling them that I wanted to return the phone. (yeah, I know it’s a bit strange to bue a phone from cdon…) CDON was really nice and explained to me (without question) how I could return the phone. Even though I had given up on the battery, I really thought the phone was excellent, so the next day I decided to start reading reviews and blogs to figure out if there where anything I could do to extend the battery life. I also asked a co-worker who gave me some information I found hard to believe….
Even so, after a day of reading and charging the phone, I figured out that it wasn’t all that crappy as expected and I’ve now managed to get the lifespan from eight hours to more than two days! So this is what I did:
- Co-worker + blogs stated that the battery actually gets better over time! I have no idea what kind of crazy chemical reaction is involved, but it must be true: Swapping software just can’t make such an improvement by it self (?)
- “Supercharged it”. Meaning I charged it to full and then simply kept on charging it. I pulled to cord out a couple of times, but plugged it in again when I saw that the battery indicator dropped instantly.
- Replaced whatever SE got pre-installed with “helix” launcher.
- Installed “Advanced task killer” and killed a lot of SE background processes I didn’t need anyway. ATK also periodically kills background processes which is just idling.
- Installed “BatteryTime”. Doesn’t do much for the battery time, but simply more detailed information about how much battery/time is left to use for various tasks.
- I got bluetooth, GPS and wireless turned off most of the time. I know this kind of sucks, but since I hardly ever use bluetooth, nor wireless anyway it’s not so bad. I will try to use GPS more, just to see how it impacts the battery, but for now I got it turned off and use AGPS instead.
The crappy thing about the bullets above is that I did it all at once, so I cannot really tell which one worked, but at least doing them all works for me and I’m now quite happy with the phone! Of course having a smart phone, battery lasting for days, big screen, small form factor…. It’s just not possible these days for me to achieve the ultimate phone, so I need to settle for something.
Other useful/cool applications
- Bump – Share data (pictures, apps, contacts++) by bumping two phones with “bump” installed
- ConnectBot – SSH client. Pretty useless on x10, since of the screen size, but still a nice SSH client.
- Goggles – “Use pictures to search the web”
- Google Sky Map – Move your phone around to see how the universe looks from your perspective.
- GPS status – Digital compass and speedometer.
- Opera mini 5 beta – I would like to replace the “internal browser” with Opera, but I still don’t know how. (TODO)
- Startup manager – Make sure not too many useless processes start when the phone boots.
- SyncMyPix – Sync between facebook and address book.
Todo
Root the phone. Replace the rest of the crap with Android 2.x.