Yep, you have to watch battery usage with the Droid, and never stray too far from a charger (or carry a backup battery). Here are some things that I have found help with battery life:
The biggest drain on the battery is almost always the display, so do what you can to minimize it. Here's two things: set the timeout low, to 30 seconds; set the brightness to the lowest setting unless you're going to be outside (or unless you want to show off the Droid's beautiful display to someone).
Leaving WiFi enabled when you're not connected is another big drain. Turn off WiFi unless you're actively using it.
GPS can drain your battery, especially if you have running services that use GPS data. Unless I need exact coordinates for something (e.g., Google Navigation), I leave GPS off.
Lastly, running apps can sometimes drain the battery even if you're not using them.
If you're not rooted:
- Use a "task killer" app like Advanced Task Killer to forcibly terminate apps that you're not actively using. Some of these also have an auto-kill setting that will kill background apps automatically on a timed basis. My personal experience is that this gets really annoying because you have to enter "exceptions" for all the apps that you DON'T want it to kill.
If you're rooted:
- Use a "memory manager" app that adjusts the device's memory management thresholds. I honestly don't know enough about what exactly these things do to manage memory, but I do know that since I started using AutoKiller, my Droid just seems to work a lot better -- and with these you don't have to mess around with "exceptions" because it doesn't kill processes, it just seems to limit the resources that background processes can use, and thus it seems to conserve battery.
- Install SetCPU, which is an app that allows you to overclock and *underclock* the CPU. In my experience, underclocking is the single-most effective way to conserve your battery when the phone is *not* in use. SetCPU allows you to make the CPU run a lot slower when the phone is asleep, and this helps battery life *tremendously*.
Can you tell I think rooting is a good thing? I hesitate to *recommend* it because it doesn't come without its risks, and there are warranty issues to consider. But for me, the benefits outweigh the risks. Look around this forum for discussions about the benefits of root to see if it's something you might want to do.
glad to have you join us !
i will keep note of that though and look into it, thank you for the tip.