Erin, when are you looking to upgrade? Right now, T-Mobile has a lot of their 4G Android smartphones for free.

Not until March. I'm an early researcher. I know that comes as a shock...

But you like the Androids?

What is the difference between sleep and hibernate? I mean, I know that they're different, but...what is the purpose of each? In fact, what is the purpose of ever turning off the computer instead of hibernating?

When your computer is asleep, your session is kept in RAM, and it is still drawing power (although much less than when your computer is awake). If your battery dies completely (or you remove it), your computer's RAM will be wiped out and your session will be lost.

When your computer is hibernating, the contents of the computer's RAM is written out to disk, so the system can lose power completely, and your session can still be restored.

The drawback is that it takes time to write the RAM to disk (and read it back), while sleeping and waking up can be nearly instantaneous.

It's also easy for things to go wrong coming out of hibernation since it's trying to bring up all the drivers while maintaining state. I generally prefer either to sleep or shutdown depending on the situation.

Waking from sleeping isn't instantaneous in my install of W7. All I can say effectively is that it uses more juice and it doesn't require me to enter a BIOS password, just my Windows one.

But hibernating does use some.

So my boss (intially typed that as bios) is having the same iPhone issue. Finally figured out that it's the Exchange account causing the problem. No solution yet, though.

But you like the Androids?

I do, just don't expect a long battery life. Downloading Juice Defender was the smartest thing I did. But I like it so much better than my old BlackBerry.

can you delete the exchange account and then add it back in?

How do you define long battery life? What's standard for non-Android smartphones? And what services do you have running?

One thing misleading about Android--your average task killers are not good for you. Don't use them. I think Juice Defender just works on the big battery killers and leaves your standard apps alone. So it's good.

can you delete the exchange account and then add it back in?

I did, multiple times. I'm forcing IT to reboot the mail server overnight.

How do you define long battery life? What's standard for non-Android smartphones? And what services do you have running?

I wasn't expecting to have to charge it on the way home from work, with mild usage during the day. The HTC Amaze is a notorious juice hog. Once I tweaked a few settings and added Juice Defender, things got much better. I lowered the brightness, shortend the screen timeout and changed the autosync settings.

I purchased Juice Defender Ultimate for $1.49 from the Amazon App Store a few days ago. (It's normally $4.99). It's worth every penny. It's a CyberMonday week deal. Bluetooth automatically turns off after two minutes if there's nothing attached. Wifi automatically turns on when the phone senses I'm at home (I still need to train it to my other frequent wifi locations). It allows me to set schedules, so connectivity is disabled while I'm sleeping, running at my selected interval during peak hours, and a much longer interval at non-peak hours. I can also set weekend peak/non-peak, in case it's different than the work week. There's lots of things I'm forgetting too.

I'm at 83% right now--with moderate phone and data use--and I pulled it off the charger yesterday morning at 7:30. Juice Defender says that I've increased my batter life x 2.12 in the last 48 hours. I'll take that.

Wifi automatically turns on when the phone senses I'm at home

I thought Wifi was one of the things that used up a lot of battery. Does it use less battery than the normal data connection?