Basic Battery Question (Please forgive me if my question has been answered already)

First, I checked the FAQ section, and could not find my question there.

1. In regards to an Incredible, what should I expect the average battery life to be based on real user experience, not what HTC says it should be?

2. Do task killing apps, such as EZ Task Manager, really increase battery life?

3. I have noticed that applications that I have never used, such as V CAST Apps and VZ Navigator, run in the background. I tried to delete VZ Navigator from my phone to discover that I can not delete any of the preloaded applications from the phone. Is there anyway to prevent apps like that from running in the background? Is there anyway to delete preloaded apps? Does any of this really affect the battery life?

4. Beyond the obvious (turning off blue tooth, wifi, mobile network, decreasing brightness of the display, and shortening screen time out) is there anything I can do to increase the battery life?

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Originally Posted by Faunal Fantasy

In regards to an Incredible, what should I expect the average battery life to be based on real user experience, not what HTC says it should be?

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As always: battery life is greatly impacted by your specific usage. The specs should include talk time and standby time if you want to use those numbers but they're really not that meaningful.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Faunal Fantasy

Do task killing apps, such as EZ Task Manager, really increase battery life?

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If they do it's because you're using an app that's killing your battery. In such cases you need to address the problem (the app). A task killer is not the way to address battery life issues.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Faunal Fantasy

I have noticed that applications that I have never used, such as V CAST Apps and VZ Navigator, run in the background. I tried to delete VZ Navigator from my phone to discover that I can not delete any of the preloaded applications from the phone. Is there anyway to prevent apps like that from running in the background? Is there anyway to delete preloaded apps? Does any of this really affect the battery life?

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There are a lot of threads/guides/FAQ's on Android multitasking. Background apps do not use battery unless they're busy transferring data in the background. You can remove these apps and there are apps to disable them from starting up bit I'm not sure if rooting is required for either.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Faunal Fantasy

Beyond the obvious (turning off blue tooth, wifi, mobile network, decreasing brightness of the display, and shortening screen time out) is there anything I can do to increase the battery life?

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Don't run with "the obvious". Run your device normally and use the battery usage screen and monitoring apps to find and address your battery hogs. I leave WiFi, BT and GPS on all the time and have no battery life issues. Don't randomly apply "fixes" any time you're troubleshooting.

Takeshi,

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that it is the applications I am using, not the GPS,wifi, etc, that are running my battery down. For example, my battery only last 5.5 hours yesterday before it needed a recharge. When I checked the battery usage, the major battery drain was the jogtracker app that I had used to track my jog for about an hour. If I had just had the GPS on, and not been using that app, the battery would not drain near as much, correct?

5.5 hours of useage time before needing a charge is not bad considering the size of the battery and all the hardware and software that it has to supply power to. I have a home charger, car charger and always carry my usb cable to work so I can plug in when my device needs a boost. Long gone are the days of charging your phone on sunday and using it all week before it must be charged again.

I do keep my WiFi, GPS and BlueTooth turned off unless I need them.

Battery life on my motorola Droid is about 3-5 hours in active use (wifi sirrfing, watching movie) to 24-30 hours in not hard use (listening to music, making calls, standby)
I tryed to use memory boost and apps killing programs to improve battery life but them helps only in one case - if programm works as it should.
In most cases theese programms only make battery life shorter.