Since I bought my Blackberry 8830 from Sprint, I have been on and off having a dead battery half way through my day.  In fact, just last week I thought of taking it back.

I had noticed that I would take my phone out of my pocket and it would be slightly warm, like it was working while I thought it was off.  That still didn’t lead me anywhere productive.  I would just pop my battery out and in, and it seemed to fix it.

Then yesterday, when I was closing my Sprint Navigation, I wondering if that was the cause.  I called my friend Alan, and asked him how he exiting out of it.

“I hit the ‘Back’ button, and it asks me if I want to exit.  Why, what do YOU do?”

With the Treo 700, the way I would exit a running application would be the red hangup button.  That was the only way to “close” it.

But the Blackberry also gives us the “Back” button, which sits next to the hangup button.

I told Alan that I had been using the hang-up button to exit.  It was then that I realized that this was just closing it allowing it to run in the background. When I would click back on the icon, it would start where I left off.

The back button, on the other hand, backs you completely out of the program and actually asks you “Do you want to Exit this program?”.

This was why my battery was dead half way through the day.  The GPS would run the entire day, and drain the battery.

So remember, use Back to exit – not the Hang Up!

Tags: blackberry, sprint