I currently carry a Droid Eris from Verizon and have to say, I'm
pretty happy with it. Have heard a lot of complaints about the
battery life for that phone and the similar models (Sprint Hero etc),
but I have been pretty immune to any problems. That was until the
last system update was pushed out. Since that update, my battery life
has been noticeably lower. To the point where I couldn't make it
through until lunch without dropping below 60%. Obviously, I was
blaming the system update...but as I discovered, it was something much
simpler, but more insidious...
To make a long story boring, I ultimately did a full factory reset,
and over the course of a couple of hours, slowly reinstalled the
applications that I had loaded on my phone. Everything seemed to be
going okay - until I installed Remember the Milk. If you don't know,
Remember the Milk (RTM) is a pretty good task list which is web based,
but includes native applications for the iPhone and Android phones.
The phone app syncs with the web site giving you full functionality of
RTM on your phone. Here is where the problem comes in.
As I was digging deeper, I kept seeing the RTM cow icon appear in the
notification bar. Finally checked it when I saw the icon appear - and
discovered that RTM was syncing automatically to the website. No
biggie. Until I checked the settings in the phone app, and discover
that the sync interval that is the default for the app (at least for
the Android version) is EVERY FIVE MINUTES! Now I'm a busy guy, but
in no way, shape or form do I need to resync my todo list every five
minutes. Imagine the traffic and drain on my battery, doing a network
sync to RTM 12 times an hour every hour.
Moral of the story? Don't forget to check the settings in your
applications - there might be a black hole hiding in your apps drawer.
