SAVING THE BATTERY

One of the strong points of the BlackBerry has always been outstanding battery performance. Even with such great performance, there are things that you can and should do to further maximize the battery life.

The simplest of these is to configure it to automatically turn off at times when you are not likely to use it, or do not want to be disturbedsuch as when you are sleeping.

Let's not forget how this can save your marriage, too. So what does this have to do with your marriage? Well, just leave your pager on at night and let your spouse be awoken at 3 a.m. by the handheld buzzing away on the nightstand to let you know that you just received a piece of spam email. See where I'm headed here?

So take care of that right now by opening the Options application and selecting the Auto On/Off item. As you can see in Figure 4.8, there are two parts of the screen. The top part sets up the On/Off behavior on the weekday and the bottom part is for the weekend.

Figure 4.8. Configuring the Auto On/Off screen.

note

The Auto On/Off times are always the local time on the handheld. Changing the time zone does not cause these times to change.

The On and Off times should be something sane that reflects your work habits. For most people an On time of 7 a.m. and an Off time of 10 p.m. should work out fine. Lastly, change the Disabled Field to read Enabled. Make similar changes for the On and Off times during the weekend.

One last thing to remember: If you get a lot of messages, you should be prepared for a number of alerts to hit in succession when the handheld is automatically turned on.