Anyone got the new HTC Diamond yet?

[MikeL]

Boz and neilm,

Thank you both for your replies.

Boz, you say ' The average battery life should be around about a day'. In the instructions it says 'Standby time: Up to 285 hours for GSM
Up to 396 hours for WCDMA', which should give far more than a day unless making a lot of phone calls, or using GPS, bluetooth etc.

The phone has been like this since I purchased it. I have not tried a hard reset, and I am slightly unwilling to as setting the phone up as I want it takes some time, but I may have to do that.

I do not think the GPS stays on all the time, but I have wondered if it stays on after I have used software that turns the GPS on as it seems to stay hot for a long time after stopping using GPS software.

I am careful to properly exit all programs after using them, and never use WMP on the phone. I have started doing soft resets after using GPS to see if that helps.

I contacted Orange, who told me that I had to contact the Carphone Warehouse where I bought the phone from. At the Carphone Warehouse the manager first started trying to tell me that it was battery memory effect (I did point out that Lithium family batteries are not like NiCds and do not have memory effect!). He told me that I had to let it discharge and re-charge for 16 hours. He also said that the Diamond was slow as it did not have as fast a processor as the TyTN II - which seems strange as my TyTNII has a 400 MHz processor and the Diamond is 528 MHz. He refused to exchange the phone.

About thirty minutes after leaving the shop, and having sent one text, the battery indicator on my phone had gone down considerably and the battery was warm. I returned to the shop and the manager then gave me a replacement battery, which may or may not improve battery life, but will not make the phone any faster!

[neilm]

The battery figures are plain nonsense. WCDMA (=3G) will always be 30-50% LESS than GSM as it uses more power even in quiescent mode.

Standby times are not relevant on Pocket PC devices, as the device is always powered up doing something. To achieve anything like they suggest it would need to have all services terminated, receive and send no calls/SMS and not use any data.

Most of us get around 1 -2 days of average use from any of our PPC devices- more if 3G is turned off, and I've found the Diamond to be no different. It has a smaller battery, but also a new lower power chipset.

VGA screen do take more processing power than QVGA, so a like for like processor speed will make a VGA device slower; the Diamond's 524MHz chip should perform about the same as a 400MHz QVGA. At least the Diamond has some dedicated video memory to ease the pressure.

GPS power is controlled by calls to the COM port. If there is no activity on the GPS Port within about 2 mionutes, it turns off, but there have been reports that some apps fail to properly terminate, leaving the GPS on. I'd try VisualGPSCE and see if it reports any problems.

You mention that you shut down apps when not needed- how do you do that? Is HTC Task set to close apps on your system? It can be set to either close or minimise.

I would seriously try a hard reset to see if it sorts the problems, but remember this clears all your user data (from main memeory) and installed programs.

[MikeL]

Thanks for your reply.

Around 1-2 days was what I was used to getting from the TyTN II, but this is far less - I have taken it off a full charge at about 9.30 and it has been fully discharged by 4.00, with one or two two minute calls, brief use of bluetooth and GPS.

Visual GPSce looks interesting I will install it and see if GPS is still on when the app (Tracky) is terminated.

I shut down apps from the Quick Menu, which terminates, rather than minimising apps.

PS have just installed Visual GPSce, but get an error message 'Could not initialize communication buffer size' when launching the app.

[neilm]

Presumably WiFi is turned off as well?

6hrs from full to empty is simply unacceptable.

Don't know about VisualGPS on WM6.1 / VGA - I need to do some background reading!

[MikeL]

I very rarely use WiFi, when I do I turn it on and after use turn it off straight away, likewise with bluetooth.

Visual GPS seems to be quite an old app for PocketPC 2002 & 2003 so may not work on WM 6.1.

[boz]

The only other thing you could try is running the Diamond without the storage card inserted, if you haven't already tried it, and see if that makes any difference. If not then you need to return the device full stop as you have no other options left I am afraid, and whatever Carphone Warehouse say start quoting the consumer rights act at them!

[windows]

Storage card on the Diamond? Erm no..

[boz]

Hehe, I was going through the general procedures for all devices and forgot that fact!

[neilm]

I'd suggest HR before trying to return it, just in case there's a rogue driver/app somewhere?

Start/Settings/System/Clear Storage

[MikeL]

Today from a fresh, fully charged battery, with no bluetooth, no Wifi, no GPS, 6 min of phone calls and four texts I managed to get 9 hours before it gave the low battery warning and switched itself off.