Power Hero Tips

Contents 1 Determine Your Power Usage 1.1 Enable drain rate logging 1.2 View the drain rate log entries 1.3 How the Sleep and REM sleep states affect drain rate 2 Lower Your Drain Rate 3 Log Entries

Determine Your Power Usage

Beginning with Power Hero version 1.18, Power Hero optionally logs the drain rate of your Treo/Centro every 5 minutes.

Enable drain rate logging

Launch Power Hero, tap the "Power Saver" button, tap the "Miscellaneous" tab, and select the "Log drain rate every 5 minutes" option.

View the drain rate log entries

Launch Power Hero and choose "View Log" in the Main menu.

Look for log entries labeled with "Drain" such as

2/8/08 8:20:15, 88.99%, 1781.5mAH, 4.08v, Drain 9mA
2/8/08 8:15:15, 89.03%, 1782.2mAH, 4.08v, Drain 6mA
2/8/08 8:10:15, 89.05%, 1782.7mAH, 4.08v, Drain 9mA

Now that you've found the Drain entries, what is a normal drain rate? Normal drain rates are generally 2 - 10mA with your phone radio on and your Treo in the Sleep state.

How the Sleep and REM sleep states affect drain rate

What is the Sleep state? Take the following entries as an example

2/8/08 9:10:15, 88.11%, 1764.0mAH, 4.07v, Drain 9mA
2/8/08 9:05:15, 88.14%, 1764.7mAH, 4.07v, Drain 9mA
2/8/08 9:00:15, 88.18%, 1765.5mAH, 4.07v, Drain 39mA
2/8/08 8:56:38, 88.21%, 1766.0mAH, 4.07v, Sleep
2/8/08 8:56:37, 88.21%, 1766.0mAH, 4.07v, REM sleep

When your Treo's screen turns off it enters REM sleep and then shortly enters the Sleep state. REM sleep is an intermediate state between being awake (screen on) and sleeping. Sleep state consumes the least amount of energy and you want your Treo to be in the Sleep state as much as possible.

Sometimes your Treo doesn't enter the Sleep state and remains in REM sleep. See this related article about how to diagnose which application is keeping your Treo in REM sleep.

Lower Your Drain Rate

Note the following suggestions may not have been proven to work by more than one person. If you find a suggestion works for you please make a note!

• Check out this article that explains how to look for apps that may keep your Treo out of the low drain Sleep state.
• Pocket Tunes - Disable background play. See this MTDN post
• Softick Audio Gateway with Bluetooth on - This combo may keep you out of the Sleep state. See this MTDN post

Log Entries

The following are descriptions of the entries you can see in your Power Hero log.

Entry	Description
Alarm cleared ([date] [time])	Power Hero cleared its alarm (date & time noted in parenthesis) because of some event such as hotsync starting or disabling of Power Hero.
Alarm set [date] [time]	Power Hero set an alarm for its own use such as a scheduled event, auto-off timer, phone service check, etc.
Alarm set [date] [time] ([date] [time])	Same as above except there was a previous alarm set as noted in the parenthesis.
App start	Power Hero was launched.
App stop	Power Hero exited.
Network on	The network was turned on. It may have been turned on by a Power Hero schedule, another application, or manually by the user.
Network off	The network was turned off. It may have been turned off by a Power Hero schedule, Power Hero's Power Saver auto-off, another application, or manually by the user.
Phone on	The phone radio was turned on.
Phone off	The phone radio was turned off.
Phone off by Power Hero	Power Hero turned the phone off either by a schedule or the user pressing the Phone button on the main Power Hero screen.
Time change	The Palm OS has broadcast that the time changed. It may have been by you or by the Treo itself as specified by the settings in the Date & Time Preferences. You will usually see an "Alarm set" entry after this because the OS clears all alarms on a time change and Power Hero must set its alarm.