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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

The Evo sucks down battery. I found that by disabling background data transfer the battery life improved Tremendously, to the point where it's not an issue anymore and I can go 1.5-2 days between charges.

However, I would love to be able to install Froyo and remove Sense. I imagine each of those steps would help to improve battery life even further.

Aside from being aesthetically ugly, Sense is so tightly embedded that it's impossible to fully disable it. I'd prefer some nice HTC branded wallpaper that could be easily disabled in a few minutes.

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I doubt Sense makes a difference in battery life. It's also my understanding that it's just a home screen; change the preference for which app manages the home screen, and you are back to plain Android.

What's irritating about Sense is that it basically precludes any updates. My guess is that the Evo 4G gets Froyo never, which is why I think I'm just going to get a Nexus One. Or wait for a Nexus Two.

Hmm, well it's not possible to remove Sense and it continues to show active processes with the word sense in them even after I stopped using the various home screen stuff.

> I doubt Sense makes a difference in battery life. It's also my understanding that it's just a home screen; change the preference for which app manages the home screen, and you are back to plain Android.

Absolutely not. Sense includes replacement applications for loads of stuff (contact list, phone, etc...) as well as a specific keyboard, it's a complete revamp of the Android UI.

But all that stuff is configurable, too. I use plain Android, but I have used other keyboards. It's just a preference to change somewhere.

If you can tell me where to navigate to remove it please do. I have looked :)

Far's I understand, you can't remove it but you can replace (most of) it. By other stuff.

Yes, you can configure different crap than the Sense one, but the point is Sense is in no form of shape a vanilla Android environment.

In fact, that's one of the parts which feels a lot like fragmentation (of the bad kind) in the Android ecosystem.

You have Android on one side, and HTC's Sense on the other side, and they sure as hell don't cooperate, and though the applications are common as far as user knowledge and UI go they might as well be different OSes.

Will there be a Nexus Two? Only about 135k Nexus One's have been sold. Google is shuttering their web store that they were selling the Nexus One at. While a technical and usability triumph, it has to be said that the Nexus One is a bit of a boondoggle, considering how much Google and HTC probably spent developing it.

The big problem for Google is that they wanted to change the way people bought cell phones, but it just didn't take. The phone companies control the sales channel (except for the Apple store) and they probably won't want to sell a Google-branded Android phone without all of their silly carrier-specific modifications (NASCAR? Really, Sprint? NASCAR?!?). If there ever is a Nexus Two, Google has to figure out where they're going to sell it.

There seemed to be some kind of media backlash against this phone in the US but they're selling it unbranded on Vodafone in Europe and the HTC Desire appears to be fundamentally the same phone (sold with the Sense UI, but again without carrier branding). I can't see how the phone hardware, as opposed to the attempt to change the sales channels in the US, can be considered any kind of white elephant.

That's a good point about the Desire. If Google does make a Nexus Two, I guess that's how they'd do it - ride on the back of an already-developed smartphone.

Still, the web store for the Nexus One is going away - that seems to indicate that Google has lost interest in selling Google-branded phones. We can always hope they'll change their minds...

When is it going away? Will unlocked nexus ones still be sold?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20005015-265.html

I don't think the article mentions when it's being closed. And considering you can typically get any GSM/HSPA phone unlocked somewhere, I'm sure the Nexus One will still be available. Most 'unlocked phone stores' have gruesome markups though, and it was something of an anomoly that you could get such an advanced phone as the Nexus One unlocked for just $530. Just looking at a couple of online merchants, both Plemix.com and exoticphone.com both have the audacity to sell the Nexus One itself for a hefty markup!

$629 http://www.plemix.com/phone-htc-nexus_one-phone

$749 http://exoticphone.com/htc-google-nexus-one-unlocked-p-2065....

The Plemix.com one is especially amusing - it claims that $629 is a mark-down, and that the original price was $854! Keep in mind that Google has always and still is selling the Nexus One for $529 in their web store.

I do not think you understand what I am saying.

In half an hour I took a fifth of the battery. With everything turned off. Even if there was some residual background stuff we missed, that is not acceptable performance. It wasn't flash, it wasn't fancy HTML5 demos, it wasn't even super-complex pages... it was regular web use. Sites like reddit, this site, my tumblr, etc. Some twitter on the side.

I agree the performance is totally unacceptable, and I'm actually trying to sell the Evo. I just wanted to mention that turning off background data transfer helped a lot for me and made the phone at least moderately usable while I find a buyer.

If you haven't found a buyer yet, let me know

I supposedly have one, but if you make a higher offer I will have to inform him of the bad news.

Here's my craigslist ad:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/mob/1777291180.html

The winning offer is lower than the $550 price, though I'd certainly accept that amount for it.

just sold it.

What is the consequence of turning these background dts off? Does that mean it won't poll facebook/twitter? Because I don't use those at all. Which means battery life is fine :)

Yes, it stops polling facebook, twitter, gmail. It was polling twitter twice b/c I installed the regular twitter app (it won't let me uninstall HTC's bundled twitter app).

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