One would give up and accept this futility but I had 2 reasons to keep trying to figure out why:

• my co-worker's battery would consistently hold twice as much charge as mine – by the time I was at 50%, he was at 75%
• a wide range of responses on Internet forums and blog posts suggested some people experienced excellent battery life, while others, like me, did not have as much luck

I thought I tried everything:

• I kept WiFi and Bluetooth off when I didn't need them (I even got an app that turned WiFi on and off on schedule – Timerriffic; unfortunately until Hero gets Android 2.0 we won't see automatic Bluetooth scheduling)
  
• I tried to use the Spare Parts app which provided insight into battery usage history. I did not, however, find out anything significant
  
• I tried to avoid using GPS altogether – at one point Spare Parts told me GPS usage by Google Maps, Camera, and Bump were 5-6 hours each, even though I turned the GPS off. I think it's a bug in Spare Parts itself or what Android was recording but it made me paranoid.
• I switched to using Handcent SMS due to the bug in default Message app (which was later fixed in the firmware upgrade).
• I got a task manager (Advanced Task Manager) to see what apps are running and make sure especially heinous is eating up my resources. It would also automatically kill long running apps and certain apps I know I don't use and which I can't uninstall, such as IM, Gmail (I use Mail), and Finance.
• On some days, I stopped using the phone altogether, just to see how long it would last. The result, however, was the same.

Nothing worked. Consistently, my phone would run down to 80% by the time I got to work and by about 3pm, it would be at 50%.

The Solution

Finally, a few days ago, when comparing my phone with my co-worker's, I noticed he didn't set up automatic email checking, opting in for the manual method instead. I, on the other hand, set up my email the day I got my Hero and never revisited the settings since. "How much power can downloading emails suck out?" I thought. Boy, was I wrong…

Turns out a LOT. I had 3 email accounts and they were checked at the following intervals:

• my gmail was being checked every 5 minutes – I wanted near real-time notification but could not even fathom the consequences at the time
• my beerpla.net account was hit every 15 minutes
• my Plaxo work Exchange email fired every 30 minutes

In order to change these intervals, load up each email account's inbox, click Menu, find Settings, go to Send & Receive and then Set Download Frequency.

After I set each email account to check every hour instead, my battery life improved dramatically. To be fair, I watched the battery use for the last 3 days without changing my usage habits and recorded the results.

Here they are:

• by the time I left for work in the morning, before the change I would oftentimes be between 85 and 90% battery. After the change, I was at 95-97%.
• by lunch time, my phone would usually run down to 50-60%. After the change, the battery had 75-80% juice.
• by 9-10pm, after I came back from work, I would usually need to put the phone on a charger because it was <15%. After the change, I was at least at 50%!

The Side Effect

Lately, I started to realize that having email notifications pop up this often was actually more distracting than useful. I was losing concentration and constant context switching made me less productive.

The fix for my battery problem was, incidentally, also the fix for my concentration problem.

Conclusion

Be very much aware of your email polling intervals or they will suck all the life out of your phone.

I would love to hear about your experiences with tweaking email settings and the effects those tweaks had on your battery life, as well as other dramatic Android battery saving tips. Feel free to share in the comments.

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Introduction

The tricks I am going to describe allow you to create unique gmail addresses that still hit your existing gmail inbox, without actually making new gmail accounts.

This can be useful in a variety of situations when you need to use multiple email addresses without having the pain of maintaining them, such as

• using unique emails while registering for the same service more than once (say, paypal)
• giving out a unique email address to see if you start getting spam to it later – that way you know exactly who to blame for it
• more generally, easily create email rules to sort incoming emails into folders, delete them, mark as important, etc.

The hints are not new by any means but it seems like most gmail users are not aware of them. So, without further ado:

Gmail Ignores Dots In Gmail Addresses

Did you know this? I sure didn't, until today, when I read a blog post by a fellow Russian blogger streetmakarov. Apparently, gmail completely ignores dots, so you can insert them anywhere you want in your email address.

Thus, foo.bar@gmail.com is the same as foobar@gmail.com, which is the same as f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com, etc – they will all arrive in the same inbox.

This begs the question – what if I registered foo.bar@gmail.com while someone else already owns foobar@gmail.com? Well, some digg and arstechnica users got their panties in a bunch over this a while ago, just to realize that gmail doesn't allow registering accounts that would clash in any way – so if I already own foobar@gmail.com, nobody can register foo.bar@gmail.com or any other combination.

You Can Append a "+ANYTHINGYOUWANT" To Your Username

I think this trick is even more awesome and flexible than the previous one. If your email is foobar@gmail.com, then you can use foobar+blabla@gmail.com, foobar+monkeybananas@gmail.com, etc and those will still land in your original inbox.

This makes it even easier to track the addresses you give out. For example, when I register new twitter accounts, I enter my email as myrealemail+mynewtwittername@gmail.com and then set up a filter in Outlook to filter those out to a separate folder. Simple, painless, and effective.

The only downside to this method is some sites foolishly (or purposely) disallow plus signs in email addresses. Oh well, you can use trick #1 for those.

Conclusion

Do you know other tricks related to "uniquefying" your gmail address? Feel free to share in the comments.

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The monitor is free, can track up to 1000 domains and send email (and RSS) alerts when it detects any status changes. Here are the advertised features:

• Domain Status like "registrar-lock", "redemption-period", and "pending-delete" changes will be sent to you so you can take action when your favorite domains are about to be released.
• Domain Registar changes are a sign of domain transfers which are detected by Domain Monitor.
• Expiration dates are monitored so you will know when a domain has been renewed.
• Domain Name Servers changes also trigger email alerts.

I think now I won’t forget to renew (which is what happened to zhopik.com last year). Take a look at this self-explanatory screenshot:

Proceed to: http://www.domaintools.com/monitor.

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The main reason to use Digsby

1. Digsby saves all information, including IM names, groups, nicks, its own client settings, themes, etc (of course this excludes the password). If I'm logged in from two places, Digsby shows both away messages (at least in the widget). It just god damn works. Remember Trillian or Pidgin? You make 10 groups on your home PC, stick 50 people in each, then go to your laptop at work and nothing is the same as it is at home! Digsby to the rescue.

Notice how I'm logging into a Digsby account, which will be used to retrieve and sync all of my settings.

Other reasons (everyone on Digg loves top 10 lists, right?)

2. Digsby seems to have great fast developers really in touch with the community. Any time there is a problem, they push a message to all users that comes in a form of a Digsby announcement popup. They try to fix problems and usually do it fast. There are bugs here and there but they're nothing critical. If you tried Digsby a few months ago and didn't like it for some reason, I encourage you to give it another try – they really do develop fast. From revision numbers, it seems Digsby developers use SVN in the 15,000 revision number range (that sounds pretty active) – hooray! I can monitor how relatively active Digsby is by comparing this number from time to time. When was the last time Trillian released anything that wasn't a miniscule bug fix? Trillian Astra reminds me of Perl 6 (ha ha, programmer joke).

3. For the first time ever I feel comfortable combining the same people that have multiple IM accounts into one entity (and renaming them whatever I want). I don't really care what IM pops up on their side as long as it reaches the destination. I can also arrange the IM accounts for that person in the order of IM preference, so if AIM is on top and MSN is on the bottom, Digsby will show the AIM icon next to their name, and if they're not on AIM, then MSN. You get the point. I can always pick which account to send from and to at any point during the conversation.

Thaya, you're now popular (Sorry!). And a freak, with so many accounts. Do I give a crap which of his 7 accounts Thaya is logged into? That's right, I don't.

4. Digsby supports Facebook chat just as if it were AIM or MSN (except people sign on and off a lot more often and you can't delete them from the list). It also supports Facebook, twitter, and MySpace (ugh) mini-feed-like updates straight to my desktop. In fact, I get to actually see every Facebook update, which is not the case with the mini-feed (it filters way too much). Additionally, I can set my current status without logging into facebook.com.

5. The Digsby widget, yeah, check it out on the right. There's no need for you to be logged into anything to send me a message. And the cool part is that all visitors show up right in my list the moment they enter the site and disappear the moment they leave, so I know how many people are online at any given time. Feel free to try it out. I already had a few interesting discussions with visitors who are complete strangers and I'm loving it. You can even consider it a mini live tech support.

6. I LOVE how you can customize where and which icons show up in your IM list. Online status, IM network, and a mini buddy icon, left, right, any combination. Such a fine grained seemingly small feature but a very nice touch.

7. Reply box in IM popups. I just type my short answer in there if I don't want to bother popping the main chat window back up. Now if only there was a keyboard shortcut to activate that little box (who wants to mouse any more?)…

8. The first client where updating my Winamp status to all the networks actually works. Yes, others may have it too but so far everything I've tried was buggy. For example, Google talk updates once, and then forgets about it. Digsby never forgets.

9. Skin support with many customizations. http://digsbies.org/site/project/Skins is a good place to start.

10. New email notifications support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, IMAP, and POP3. The last 2 are of special interest.

Now my wishlist

Come on Digsby, you can do it!

• a Linux client. It's supposedly coming soon, but how soon? Windows is the only platform supported today.
• Edit: steve from digsby messaged me with this: MSN reconnect bug is fixed and will be pushed in the next update. Reconnect doesn't always work when I get my network back or come back from sleep mode. Just make it work, Digsby. Especially bad is MSN, it just never wants to reconnect (but hey, that was my main complain with Trillian for the past 3 years). I see this a lot:

• RSS feed integration, similar to how Facebook integration works. I want to read planetmysql.org posts as soon as they get there.
• transparency. What's up with that? I want everyone to at least squint trying to read my messages behind my back. Ideally, a window would solidify when it gets focus and go transparent again when it loses it (put it all into settings, though, let me control it).
• I can't italicize, bold, etc a word or a selection. It just does it to all the text I'm typing. That should be common sense.
• Added 06/15/08: off the record mode + encrypted conversations would be really sweet.
• sometimes the contact list changes don't sync fast enough, so if I close Digsby and reopen it, they won't be there. I'd like to see a live save status, something that turns green once everything is synced.
• minimize to tray. I can already close to tray, but I want to minimize to it too – hey, I'm used to it from AIM. Wanna fight about it? Fixed a long time ago.
• I'd like to have a setting to not show Digsby in the task bar, like Trillian. There’s a setting for this already that I missed, it’s under ‘Buddy List’, thanks steve from digsby.
• It's not always obvious inside the chat window when a friend goes offline, for instance for AIM. It's also not always obvious if you're IMing someone who is not available (there should be a warning back in response to an IM).
• it's not clear if a person who IMed me is in my contact list. I'd like to know that, as well as which group they belong to.
• the close button that suddenly shows up on each tab when I hover is very annoying and sometimes I close IM windows by mistake.

So take Digsby out for a spin, I guarantee you'll like at least something about it.

• How To Fix Palm Pre's "Error Sending Mail" Problem
• [Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• How I Doubled My Android Phone's (HTC Hero) Battery Life or Just How Much Email Polling Affects Your Battery
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