I love my UTStarcom XV6700 but one of its weakest points is the battery. Man, talk about a quick drain on a busy day. Toss in Always Up To Date (AUTD) to keep your Exchange server and E-mail in sync and you can just completely kiss off the battery by lunch. Oh ya, forget phone calls in that mix.

When I used my Samsung i730, one feature it had was turning off the device (except your phone) when phone calls or any other communication event took place on the i730. This would prevent button pressings and waste of the battery. It worked well. UTStarcom seemed to kinda skimp on sensible tools and this is one such tool. I went looking for a similar tool and found pocketMax’s screenGuard. As a happy user of phoneAlarm, I was thrilled to see this application but quickly fell into sorrow when I saw “Windows Mobile 5.0 support in March”. It was already April. From the looks of the posts on the beta bulletin board, I wouldn’t hold out for this release.

On I continued my search and I found (in the screenGuard forum) another program called MortSaver 2.0. It didn’t look to fancy but what the heck, I had no other options so I downloaded it. After installing it and configuring it, I crossed my fingers and tested away in the real world the following Monday.

In a normal day, I’ll do about an hour to two of calls as well as view my e-mail off-and-on. That e-mail is synced using AUTD. I also get various reminders through my day. Add this all up and this is a lot of activity and opportunities for my display to come on. One note, too, I do keep my brightness to the first notch up during these heavy active times which is why I can get such a vast amount of talk time. Anyway, I would usually get about five hours of use from one battery in this type of day but Monday, I found to my delight that I could tack on another two hours of use. MortSaver really did a great job of conserving my battery!

Two things I found with MortSaver, one noted in its documentation the other not, that may interest you. First, once you deactivate the screen protection you have to restart MortSaver. Choose a button to launch it and use this instead of using the power button to turn off your device. Easy habit to get into.

Second, I was finding odd behavior with my miniSD card locking up the device. I sometimes could not get my XV6700 to turn on even after repeated pressings of the power button. Other times, incoming calls would not let me answer even while hitting the Answer key over and over. If I ejected the miniSD and then hit the power button, the device would come on. With MortSaver running, I haven’t had this problem. Don’t know why other than thinking that the device may come on while in my case and certain programs on the miniSD activate and then do not “sleep” properly when the screen finally shuts off. With MortSaver, those programs may never run since the screen is never unlocked. Either way, it’s been very nice not having to deal with this frustrating feature.

Make sure you choose that you have a Phone Edition when going through the settings. This allows for your two phone buttons to become active when the phone rings. Also note that your Bluetooth headset will still answer and disconnect calls as before but without activating the screen at all.

I’m very happy with MortSaver and unlike screenGuard, which doesn’t even work for my smartphone, it doesn’t even cost a cent! This bad boy battery saving item is free as can be. Nice!

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