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I was wondering if I could suspend my phone.

Let's say I'm running out of battery and I'm also expecting an important call in a few hours time. Instead of shutting down the phone and starting up again, it would be better if I would be able to suspend it like normal Linux laptops.

I'm using HTC Desire with official 2.3.3 update.

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Nice question.. Smartphones are smarter than traditional mobile phones, but not that smart.. :) – Sachin Shekhar Mar 7 '12 at 15:23

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There really is nothing a "suspend" mode would give you over simply shutting the phone off, other than maybe a slightly faster resume Vs. boot-up time.

With that said, most Android devices are engineered with battery life in mind. However a phone still must function as a phone, so cellular and data radios must be enabled, touch screens must respond to input, etc. All these things are a drain on the battery.

There are many apps on the Market that can help with mitigating this drain, especially when the battery is low on power. With an app like Juice Defender, for example, you can set up profiles that automate disabling data connectivity and only enabling it once in a while for short periods to check for e-mail, etc.

There are lower level tweaks as well. Custom kernels combined with 3rd-party ROMs allow you to underclock (opposite of overclocking) and undervolt the CPU when the phone is not actively in use, take advantage of different CPU governors that are more battery-friendly, etc. However these require a phone to be rooted, with an unlocked bootloader in order to install these custom kernels and ROMs.

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Yes you are right but even with all the power saving and CPU undervolting, the phone still consumes power. There are times when you really want to turn off the phone for that one important call. With your power saving ideas, you don't know when some unwanted calls come up or even with airplane mode on the battery will be consumed keeping the OS running. So my point is there is sometimes that you really want to turn off the phone, instead of that a sleep would be awesome. – roxan Mar 8 '12 at 16:02
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The Motorola Razr has a sleep option which works like that so it is possible to do though it probably has to be done at ROM level.

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Awesome!, I wonder if there is something like that for Desire running Gingerbread. – roxan Mar 8 '12 at 16:03

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