Appendix A Maintaining Your Handheld

Prolonging battery life

Note the following considerations for the battery in your handheld:

■Under normal conditions your handheld battery should remain charged when you place it in the cradle/cable for just a few minutes each day. You can conserve battery life by doing any of the following:

–Turn off or reduce the brightness of the backlight feature. See “Using the backlight” in Chapter 2 for more information.

–Change the Auto-off setting that automatically turns the handheld off after a period of inactivity. See “Auto-off after” in Chapter 17 for more information.

–Turn off the Bluetooth feature when you’re not using it. See “Bluetooth Preferences” in Chapter 17 for more information.

–Minimize accessing the expansion card slot.

■If the battery becomes low in the course of normal use, an alert appears on the handheld screen, describing the low battery condition. If this alert appears, perform a HotSync® operation to back up your data; then leave your handheld in the cradle/cable to recharge the unit. This helps prevent accidental data loss.

■If the battery drains to the point where your handheld does not operate, it stores your data safely for about a week. In this case there is enough residual energy in the battery to store the data, but not enough to turn on your handheld. If your handheld does not turn on when you press the power button, you should recharge the unit immediately. The battery may not have enough residual energy to power the indicator light, which is normally green when the battery is charging.

■If your battery drains and you have the unit in an uncharged state for an extended period of time, you can lose all your stored data.

■There are no serviceable parts inside your handheld, so do not attempt to open the unit.

■If you ever dispose of your handheld, please dispose of it without damaging the environment. Take your handheld to your nearest environmental recycling center.

Resetting your handheld

Under normal circumstances you will not have to use the reset button. On rare occasions, however, your handheld may no longer respond to buttons or to the screen. In this case you need to perform a reset to get your handheld running again.

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