Sprint HTC Hero Battery Problem Fix!

• Rob Jackson
• 15 years ago

If you’ve got a Sprint HTC Hero and are experiencing ridiculously pitiful battery life you are not alone – an extremely irritating flaw has been identified and the community has banded together to find a fix in hopes you don’t chuck your phone against a wall. An AndroidForums member known as flipz was first to identify the problem and a truckload of people shared in his frustration. What exactly is the problem?

a bug has been found in the HTC sms app. For some reason when you SEND a text message it puts a lock on the dialer app. This lock prevents the phone from ever going to sleep, even when the screen is off. This is causing a HUGE drain on battery life because the CPU is still awake.

In hopes for an official official response/solution, flipz raised the question at Sprint.com forums where, after 16 pages of shared agony, an admin acknowledged the issue and said the tech team is aware and working on a fix:

Thanks for all the detailed posts.

I’ve been out of the office a lot the last week or so and am not really up to speed on what’s going on here. That said, I was told that they’ve identified the problem with the messaging client which prevents it from sleeping after its run. This is on the fix list for an upcoming MR. That’s all I know at this point, but as soon as I receive the details about tthe MR I will pass them on.

There is no timeline on an official fix/patch… so its good that the community has collectively identified the issue and offered a temporary fix:

The current workaround is to disable the internal sms app and use one of the free ones from the market instead. Thanks to mobilehavoc for testing out a new sms app and realizing that it didn’t create the lock.The current two recommendations are ChompSMS and HandCent. It is has been confirmed by multiple users (mobilehavoc, freshlyill, spork27, and myself) that the phone is sleeping properly if you don’t use the internal messaging client (and of course assuming you don’t have a different issue than described here!).

Between the two apps my personal recommendation is HandCent. It has a huge number of tweaks and can give you the same look and feel as the internal app.

Ahhhh the power in openness and the power in numbers. Love it! If you have questions about this hit up the Sprint HTC Hero Battery Life thread on AndroidForums and I’m sure that folks will be more than willing to help! Props to flipz (and Mrniceguy) for being so active in not only solving the problem for himself, but for helping others find and fix the problem!