Okay, I've flashed a new ROM after the disaster with ArHD7 + Franco kernel the other day.
The battery results are looking pretty awesome to say the least.
Rough usage:
- Wifi on for 50%~ of the time, rest of the time was on 3G/H
- Over an hour of listening to music (via PowerAmp)
- Over 1.5 hours watching 720p mkv files (stock player)
- A handful of pictures taken
- 20 minute phone call, lots of texting, the usual
- Rest of the screen time was browsing/Twitter/Flipboard
- Sync - weather, Twitter, Facebook on hourly syncs, Viber running
Here's the good part:
Auto brightness! Quite a lot of use outside in the sun (so it's been at a high setting for quite a bit of the time at least, generally around 50% for the rest)
This is also the first charge on this new ROM so it could improve a bit more. At points it dropped more rapidly than others so that may even out. I did wipe the battery stats, not that it's ever made a difference before.
This is the ROM, I just installed it as normal, nothing fancy added and no extra tweaks of any kind. It's completely standard for the most part, all of HTC Sense is there, nothing has been stripped, everything has just been optimised and updated.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1601543
I know ArHD is very popular, but a lot of the ArHD code work appears to be from this 'football' guy, who seems to know what he's on about, so I thought I'd give it a try.
After a couple more charge cycles I'm going to add in the more aggressive auto brightness mod because the default setting is far too bright. In a dull room the brightness is at 30-40% or more and that's far too high. I'd rather have it at 10% or under in those situations. This should improve the battery life even more.
So, if you're looking for a ROM, give this a try.