(Last edited Feb 29, 2008)

This is part 8 of the Putting it all together series. If you haven’t read part one, please check it out here

Battery life is an important part of the Palm and unfortunately, many of us find that the battery life of the Palm isn’t as good as we had expected or hoped. Although there’s no way to really improve on the amount of battery short of doing major surgery and attach a high capacity battery on it, we can still try to improve battery life by applying some tricks or changing the settings.

Keep the battery charged

The first tip regarding batteries is that you should try to keep it charged often. Don’t worry, LiOn (Lithium Ion) batteries won’t overcharge and also don’t suffer from the memory effects like the NiCad and NiMh batteries. You can charge it without worrying about overcharging. And, you won’t need to completely drain the battery before you charge it either. Actually, it’s advisable to NOT to let the battery drain completely. Why?

Don’t let the battery drain completely

First, most of the data on the Palm is stored in RAM (Random Access Memory), very much like the RAM on your computer. It constantly needs a trickle of electricity to keep the data stored. Once there’s a loss of power, all data is lost. Just like with the computer, when there’s a blackout, and you didn’t save your work, whatever that was stored in RAM and not on the hard drive, is lost and irrecoverable by any method. So, it’s always a good idea to never let the battery drain completely.

Second, draining the battery completely affects the battery and actually shortens its lifespan. Check out Battery University’s article regarding this fact. I always try to charge it when it drops to 80%. I’ve owned the Zire 71 since Oct 2003 and it’s still working fine.

For more info on batteries, check out BatteryUniversity, which is sponsored by Cadex, a battery manufacturer, so I’d guess they know what they’re talking about.

Battery resetting trick

From time to time, the battery may seem to not be retaining its charge as well as it used to. Here’s a trick you can try to re-calibrate or reset the battery charging level.

Resetting the battery: (in cradle/charger) reset

1 - Put your Palm in its cradle or charger.

2 - Plug in the cradle or charger so that the Palm is charging.

3 - Do a soft reset (poke a pin or something similar) in the reset hole located at the back of the unit (for the Zire 71 and other slider units, you will need to open the slider to expose the reset hole).

4 - Let the Palm go through the splash screen. Don’t touch ANY buttons, turn it off, or touch the screen. It is charging so you don’t need to worry about the battery.

5 - Leave it charging and turned on for 3 - 4 hours. During this time, the Palm will reset its battery level mechanism and most times, it will allow the battery to retain a better charge. If you mistakenly touch the screen or button, simply re-do the whole process again, making sure that you don’t touch it or any buttons to “disrupt” the battery resetting process.

I have done this a few times and it seems to work well. But, if this trick doesn’t work, try doing this a few times and let it cycle through. If after a few cycles of this and it doesn’t seem to get any better, you may need to get a new replacement battery. Please refer back to my previous posting in part 6 regarding physically protecting the Palm where I’ve provided links to many vendors that sell parts including batteries.

Aside from these battery tricks, there are ways in which you can optimize the length of time you can use your device before you need to charge it. The easiest ones is to change the settings on the Palm.

Setting the Brightness to the lowest level

You can set the brightness level to the lowest setting. To do so, tap on the sun icon located near the top right corner of the numbers box in the Graffiti or silkscreen area. The brightness setting slider will pop up. Drag the slider to the left most side. That will be the lowest setting the the Palm brightness setting can set.

Or, with most Palm models, pressing the Power button and holding it for a second or two will activate the Brightness setting pop up.

Or, if you have assigned the stroke from the Graffiti/Silkscreen area up to the top of the glass screen to activate the brightness setting, you can access it that way. To assign the stroke as such, you’d have to go to the Prefs Application, Buttons, More… and select Brightness from the drop down menu options (Brightness, Keyboard, Graffiti 2 Help, Turn Off & Lock, Beam Data). Remember that if you specify Keyboard that it can only pop up if you are in a text based application where you can normally access the keyboard, otherwise, you’d hear the beep and nothing happens.

Unfortunately, even at the lowest brightness setting, it seems still quite bright, well, at least for me.

But there are better third party applications that can lower the brightness level beyond what you can do currently by lowering the backlight.

Third party backlight programs

Auto Dimmer

Auto Dimmer is a free third party Palm application that can customize the level of brightness on your Palm. To change the level, simply slide the slider to an acceptable level and you should notice some difference in battery life just by lowering the brightness level.

Simulation of Auto Dimmer

Alternative Flash links: ImageShack

The simulation will play through to the end unless I’ve inserted a pop up note for specific points.

To continue playing the simulation, press the button.
To go back to a previous paused segment, click on the button.
To pause the simulation at any time, press the button. To continue after it’s paused, press the button again.
To scroll forwards or backwards in the simulation, click anywhere on the left (to go back earlier in the simulation), or right (to go forward in the simulation) on the progress bar.

SilkDimmer is another free third party Palm application that can customize the level of the brightness on the Palm. This application is much simpler than Auto Dimmer and simply just adjusts the brightness level.

Simulation of SilkDimmer

Alternative Flash links: ImageShack

If you want something more than the freewares, here’s a brightness application that offers more features.

Energy Dimmer

Energy Dimmer offers the same slider customization of the brightness settings, but also allows you to set various different preset brightness levels. So, you can easily select your specific preset brightness level depending on the brightness conditions of where you are, to use a lower brightness setting when outside and a higher brightness setting inside for instance.

Simulation of Energy Dimmer application

Alternative Flash links: Image Shack

For some newer devices like the Tungsten E2, the above applications may not be able to lower the brightness setting below what the default Palm brightness can do. Here’s a freeware application called Brightness Fix that can do it. There are various versions for specific devices so check out which one will work for you.

More Backlight apps

Here are a few more shareware applications that can help you control the backlight:

myDimmer

mLights (Treo 650 keyboard and backlight manager)

Surrounding Prefs (aka BrightCam) (for Treo 600, 650)

Profeo LightControl Treo 600 keyboard and display manager

Profeo 600 Lite (Treo 600 Profile manager).

The following programs offer backlight control as well in addition to other features:

EasyLaunch5 (hack-like launcher app)

HandyAid (multi-functional utility application)

ClockPro (clock application).

There are lots of many other brightness or backlight adjusting applications available, most of them are not free. Search through the various download sites like Freewarepalm, Palmgear, Handango and others and you should find lots. I’ve just mentioned a few that are popular and free.

Check out my posting that focuses on backlight apps for more program suggestions.

Try out the apps before you buy. There may be something better

In my mind, if there’s something that’s free that works fine, I’ll go for it rather than spend the money. There are lots of Palm software out there and I’ve already spent a lot of money on them. A good idea is to check out the reviews and Palm forums to get a good idea of what’s popular and try them out. Most times, you should try other software just to see whether it suits you better. Take advantage of the trials and see if it’s worth your money. Sometimes, you may find that you’ve spent money on something that you don’t use all that much or that there exists something else that’s better. In my view, I find that the freeware versions are better mainly because the programmers are creating this not for the money and a lot of times, they’re much smaller in size and yet do the job. And they get a lot more feedback and usage. That’s what I love: small programs that are powerful, get the job done quickly and efficiently. I’m not much into how something looks, so skins and background type apps are not what I’m interested in so I don’t have any on my Palm. For me, it’s substance over style.

Please back up your Palm before installing any new files or programs. Check out this posting for back up program suggestions including freeware.

In the next part, I will continue to discuss battery related issues and other ways you can optimize battery life including over/underclocking applications.

Thanks for visiting and supporting Palm Discovery. If you are not reading this article from Palmdiscovery.com or palmdiscovery.net, the website you are reading it from is guilty of copying and posting my content without consent. Please visit Palm Discovery for the original source of the material.

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