HTC Shift. Improve battery life by 30 minutes in 30 minutes.

What’s the most disappointing aspect of the HTC Shift? Poor battery life perhaps? In the tests I’ve done with my production sample device (watch the video) I’ve been seeing around 10.5w average drain when browsing which gives about 2 hours life. In terms of efficiency its quite good and in comparison with a notebook PC its amazing but its still not class-leading and could (should?) be better.

One of the forum members on the portal, The Niles, put a few tips forward for improving the battery life so last night I decided to see just how much the batter life could be improved. I had already killed the Vista sidebar, the indexing and windows defender but there’s quite a lot more that can be done so I took The Niles’ tips, added my own and applied them. What I saw was quite an impressive improvement. Where I was getting 2 hours before, I’m now getting nearly 2.5 hours. That’s a 20% improvement with just 30 minutes work.

The first thing I did, and this is something I’m really surprised about, is to apply the Microsoft Vista patch here. I had heard of people seeing some small improvements with this in the past but in the case of the Shift, it dropped that average battery drain buy about 10%. I have no idea what MS have in this patch but it worked very well for me. I think this is one of the patches that’s will be rolled up into automatic updates and the first Vista service pack so its possible that you might already have the patch applied.

To complete the optimizations I went through my original list of 13 optimization tips and applied as many as I could. The result was well worth it. At the end of the process I’ve saved about 20% battery drain in WiFi browsing mode. 30 minutes makes a lot of difference! Here’s a graph of 10 minutes browsing over Wifi with the screen set to 30% and the system set to ‘Balanced’ power mode.

After optimisation: Average 8.6 watt drain. Previous tests showed about 10.5w

So here’s a rundown of the optimizations I did. Let me know how you get on with them. I’m sure that they would improve things in every case but as to what percentage improvement you’ll see, I’m sure it will vary.

Other optimizations

Remove background tasks. As you install software you’ll always get a build up of unwanted services and processes. Real, Logitech, Adobe and all anti virus packages put software in the background that at the minimum take memory but in the worst case take CPU and Internet bandwidth. If you’re on a limited 3G plan, the last thing you want is Firefox downloading 2MB of program file in the background. There are tools around to clean these processes up so its advised to use them. I haven’t done this on the HTC Shift yet as I’ve been constantly installing and testing software.

Readyboost. The HTC Shift has a SD card slot that completely encloses the card so it’s easy to insert a 2GB card and not have to worry about it sticking out. I am currently testing this out but I’m not really expecting a major advantage for battery life.

Pre-fetch/Super-fetch hacks. This is a tip I got from Origamiproject forums. I have tried on other UMPCs and I liked it. I haven’t tested on the HTC Shift yet. See here for more info.

The question I ask myself now is, ‘Would XP improve this figure?.’ I really don’t think so. The battery drain figures I’m seeing, the disk and processor activity figures, indicate that Vista is behaving very well. XP would bring a few advantages – 10GB extra disk space and better memory utilisation but apart from less CPU cycles bringing in a few more minutes, I wouldn’t expect any more battery improvements. I’d love to have the option of XP though and hope that HTC consider this.

Footnote.

Vista seems to take forever to settle down into a quiet state after boot up. After applying these changes, make sure you reboot and leave Vista for 10 minutes to make sure that all preparation activities are complete. All the changes done above were done on a production sample HTC Shift. Final retail builds may differ.