I have been frustrated lately by how fast the battery drains on my Pocket PC.  When the device was new, I easily got a day and a half to two days of use between charging.  Lately I was lucky if my battery lasted from a full charge in the morning until I got home from work in the afternoon.

How long the battery lasts obviously depends on a number of factors, including how much time you spend talking on the phone, web browsing, listening to audio, watching video, using Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth.

As I was thinking through what has changed about my use of my PDA since it was new, I realised that one major difference is that I use the 3G/GPRS Data Connection a lot more now.  I have a couple of applications that synchronise my Google Calendar, Contacts, and push my GMail to my Pocket PC and these use the Data Connection quite a lot throughout the day.

The first thing I changed was to update the settings in my applications to synchronise online less frequently.  However this alone has not made enough of a difference to the battery life.

One thing I noticed was that the Data Connection was almost always on.  This prompted me to do a search on how to automatically disconnect my data connection, and I finally found a good solution…

I found and installed the GB-SOFT Tweak which puts a new icon into your Settings on the System tab.  This provides a friendly user interface to set some registry settings that control how your PDA manages your data connection.

When I first ran the GB-SOFT Tweak, the only option that was ticked (enabled) was “GPRS/3G Always On”!  This was obviously not what I wanted, so I cleared that option and ticked “Turn off GPRS/3G if device not used for:” and I set the timeout to 1 minute. (HINT: To set the timeout value to 1 minute, swipe your finger pad if you have a Samsung Omnia, or use your D-Pad or whatever other navigation you have on your PDA to focus on the slider bar where you set the timeout, then swipe/move left one unit so that the value to the right of the slider shows “0:1 h:m”.)

Now, whenever my applications initiate a Data Connection, it does not stay on all day, but it automatically disconnects after 1 minute of inactivity.  This has improved my battery life considerably.

Your milage may vary, but I suggest you give the GB-SOFT Tweak application a try if you have similar issues with your battery life as I described above.