Get the most from your HTC Sense enabled phone

So you have a shiny new HTC Sense enabled phone (or any other recent Android phone)? Now what? Out of the box, after setting up exchange etc you'll see that the battery life is pretty poor. 

What to do? The #1 thing to do is change the update frequency of your apps. The default for exchange is to update in real time - this absolutely kills the battery. Changing that to 10 or 15 minutes fixes this. Same for twitter, facebook, weather apps etc. Extending the time between updates is the best way to get more up time from your device.

Essential apps? I'm repeating myself somewhat here, but I recommend you get :

• audio manager 
• way better than going into settings->Sound & Display
• Bonus: it is the only way to turn down the phone dialer volume (at least on the Incredible)
• battery snap
• great historical graphs of battery usage (how much did watching that video kill it?)
• realcalc - a sci/eng calculator, even has RPN mode!
• Listen - for podcasts etc
• Pandora, or whatever you use for streaming music
• y5 Battery Saver – remembers wifi spots you connect to, manages waking up wifi, looking for those spots and keeping wifi off when those hotspots aren’t available. 
• Weather Channel. Disable the HTC sense weather widget (by removing it from your home screen) and get the weather channel's app - it uses less battery, and can monitor more places more intuitively. It also has many more choices for home screen widgets. 
• Bonus: it has weather maps in motion and you can set alert levels (and the method that alert is signaled) for severe weather.
• Skyfire - an alternative browser with a neat trick for streaming Flash that the phone doesn't yet support (like comedycentral.com).
• Traffic! - I know google maps supports traffic, but last I checked it doesn't give very good details on why a place is congested and how long the travel time is through the congestion. This app does that.
• If you listen to music on the phone - get the Cubed Music Player - visually the best one I've seen. Functionally good too.
• For the best outlook experience, if you don't mind spending the money, get TouchDown.

Got one to add to this list - put it in the comments!


Update: I just got a travel app called Kayak. This app (and web site) make all the other travel sites I've used (orbitz, travel.yahoo.com etc) look like junk.

Engadget Droid Incredible review, plus it does tethering

Engadget gives the Incredible a generally very positive review. Particularly the Sense UI. They did not review:

• Tethering
• Friend view
• Footprints
• FM Radio

Here are some notable comments:

HTC has included a handful of its own widgets alongside some of the familiar stock ones which Google offers. Of course, the widgets (and their corresponding apps) which HTC offers generally offer far more functionality than Google's options, and they're also tied together with Sense in way that makes the experience of using them within the OS feel complete -- something notably missing from the Google-only experience. To say that this UI is competitive with something like iPhone OS 3.1 (or 4 for that matter), or Palm's webOS is an understatement; in many ways it's superior to what Apple and Palm are offering.

Besides just the cosmetic stuff, HTC has also done seriously heavy lifting in the details department, continuing to improve the music, video, and photo browsing options on their devices, as well as making their fantastic on-screen keyboard even better in this higher resolution version. We found finger tracking and typing speed to be considerably improved, as well as word prediction and correction. Apple, watch your back... HTC has done a damn good job of sneaking up on your tech, and maybe improving on it. We can't stress this enough: HTC has made a really good OS (Android) into a truly amazing and competitive OS.

Overall the experience with 2.1 and Sense was a complete pleasure -- using the phone felt fast and efficient. We'd like to point out that we've been running the Incredible without any third party task managers, and without manually killing any applications. Android is designed to multitask without the need for utilities of the sort, and based on Steve Jobs' words from the recent iPhone OS 4 event, we were extra curious to see how this brand new build of the software would fare. We can tell you this -- it hasn't let us down yet, and we're not seeing any sluggish behavior or force closes on apps. If this OS has a need for management of its processes, we haven't experienced it yet.

Still no official word on cost (or lack of cost) for tethering, but it is something the phone can do and Verizon is saying so publicly.