Battery Saving Tips

There are some obvious ways to save your battery and some not so obvious ways to save your battery.
I'm going to cover some of both that I have come across.

Tip #1 - Power Control Widget. This is the most basic that you'll want to do as soon as you get  your phone. To add this widget to your home screen simply do a long press and add widget, scroll to the bottom of the list and select 'Power Control'. This will give you a shortcut to 5 of the most power consuming settings which includes wifi, bluetooth, gps location, sync, display. The tip is to have everything turned off until you need it. The display is typically the highest battery consumer, I usually have mine set to Automatic unless I'm indoors then its always on the dimmest setting.

Tip #2 - Task Killer. Now I don't know how much battery this actually saves but since I installed 'Advanced Task Killer' (which was about 4 months after I had my phone and my wife kept telling me that I should get it to save my battery cause my phone always died before hers, which she was right, moral of the story: my wife is always right) my battery life improved greatly. This is due to killing apps running in the background using the battery as well as transmitting data which uses battery too. I prefer 'Advanced Task Killer' because you can set a list of apps to ignore, i.e. a home launcher, messaging app, clock, internet, etc. Its helpful to set your most used apps to ignore because they will launch faster when opening them. Another thing I like about 'ATK' is that you can set the kill frequency, so you can have it kill apps frequently or not-so-frequently, I prefer frequently since most apps are always opening to send/receive data.  Another setting thats nice is the Security Level where you can select more "hidden" apps to kill. Currently (as of 8/16/11) I have been using a built-in task killer that came with my home launcher (GO Launcher EX), it does pretty much the same job as 'ATK' but its got a nice little widget that you can select the apps to kill on the widget itself, kinda cool.

Tip #3 - Accounts & Sync. This is one that I just barely found out about just recently, after having my phone for a year and a half. Go to Menu/Settings/Accounts & sync and deselect 'Background Data', you'll get a popup warning saying something along the lines of 'Disabling extends batter life and lowers data use. some apps may still use background data.' Select OK. Since I did this I've noticed a huge increase in battery life. On a typical work day at my office, 5-10 texts, a couple phone calls, a little facebooking my battery would typically be at 50%, since disabling background data, its now 70% or better, this is over a 9 hour period. Pretty good increase! Quick tip to turn it back on is to select the 'sync' on your power control widget (refer to tip #1)

Tip #4 - Battery Widget. This is more of way to keep track of your battery level a little more accurate than the battery icon in your notification bar. I like 'Circle Battery Widget' cause its really customizable and you can easily check what is using your battery. There are a lot of battery widgets out there, be sure to do a little research and read comments about the app before installing it. I personally will only install an app if it has 4 or more stars and thousands of downloads, just to steer clear of malicious apps.