I was a bit late into work this morning.  This was indirectly caused by information overload.  More directly, it was caused by the battery totally dying on the mobile I have been using as an alarm clock, but information overload contributed to that.My old mobile, the one that now has no active SIM in it still works fine as an alarm clock, but I have been in the habit of using that one to wake me up and then for the new one to actually tell me to get up.  Those few minutes of slumber after being woke up feel more restful than the rest of the night somehow.

I think it is safe to say that battery life on BlackBerry Curves is not brilliant.  The battery is 1150mAH which doesn’t sound like a lot to me. I have had a look at RIM’s advice on extending battery life and followed it as far as I can.  I have now set the device to turn off at night and turned down the backlight level and the amount of time the backlight stays on.  That will probably have the biggest effect.

I have turned the level of ringtones down and turned vibrate off.  This will have much less of an effect because I don’t get called very often and I already had most of the alerts, for SMS, BBM, e-mails and the like either silent or very quiet.  Again, I don’t get a lot of SMS or BBM messages so it won’t make a lot of difference that they are all silent.  I treat BBM and SMS as something I don’t need to be aware of immediately anyway.   Thinking about it, I’m sort of surprised that the kids’ BlackBerry’s don’t need a recharge every few hours with the number of texts they get and the ear-splitting volume of the alerts.

Blootooth was already turned off, and I am now wondering about wi-fi.  If I am doing a bit of casual looking up on Wikipedia or whatever I prefer using wi-fi connections because they are faster and not using up any of my monthly data allowance, but apparently it uses a lot of power, especially when you are not getting a signal and it keeps searching for one.  I have the access points at work and home set up, but maybe I should get in the habit of turning wi-fi off when I am away from both. Either that or leaving it off an only turning it on when I am at home or work and want to use the internet.

One bit of advice I am not sure about is to delete original messages when replying.  I can’t see how retaining a message increases battery usage – but I tend to delete most messages anyway.

What might help a lot is receiving fewer messages.  I found myself in the position of sometimes getting three different notifications of some events.  This was because of having notification settings in TWitter and Facebook that pre-date me having a phone that could access them directly.  For example, if somebody I follow on Twitter snet a reply to me directly I would get an SMS message about, an e-mail notification (and that would go to the phone, having been forwarded by my mail server) and an update through the Twitter app on the phone.  When there is a bit of dialogue going back and forth it can get ridiculous.  It is similar with Facebook.  I have now turned off the notifications and we will see if that helps.

Having looked into it I am now getting a bit paranoid about how much communication the handset is doing without me actually doing anything.   I’m also wondering whether I should turn off GPS except for when I actually want it.

Anything other than having to resort to something ugly like this. It reminds me of the old 2CV when you could buy an extended boot.