• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

24 hours (give or take) with my EVO

S

Skatter

Newbie
Well, its been about 32 hours with my EVO...and im loving it.

I admit, the battery worries me a bit. However, some commonsense things (and not so common sense, like the GSM/CDMA battery life change) have really helped. Task Manager seems to be the best overall task killer app, and keeping background data on but auto sync off seems to be a nice happy medium for syncing.

The major, MAJOR battery drainer? Google Maps/Navigation. The perfect argument for a car charger that can EVER be made. Ye gods.

So I unplugged it from my charger at 11 this morning. As of right now at 6:43 pm i have 41% battery left, have been fiddling with it for about half of that time, and turned disabled the data connection while i was in low signal areas during a short road trip.

Moderate use of Yahoo Messenger, texting, a few 5 minute phone calls, the occasional manual update of the Seesmic twitter client and a few other things have drained it a little bit...but a 5 minute stretch of Google Navigation? Did the most damage to the battery, knocked it down by 7 percent. Again...car charger. Need this soon. Anyone know of any reliable ones? :)

Other than that, great phone. Versatile, and I'm looking forward to the day that Android 2.2 comes to us for even more battery efficiency. Please feel free to ask me anything about how I have things set up, constantly trying new things out on this!
 
I got a ginaric car charger at RadioShack for 11dollars. It works well, and its even got an additional USB port on it to plug in another device to charge... So I could power two USB devices at once. not bad for $11.
 
Very cool. I'm going to swing by Best Buy (because I absolutely detest Radio Shack. >.< ) and see how their pricing is for car chargers. I wish my old Blackberry Curve 8330 used the same kind of USB port as the EVO, but sadly it uses the slightly chunkier version that PS3 controllers and my CyberShot had. Kinda wish I'd "forgotten" to return the data cable from my Blackberry 8830 now when I took it back to Walmart. ^_^

Ah, well. Cables are cheap. Not going with a screen protector, tho. I'm going to treat this phone as nicely as I did my iPod touch when I had it, and that sucker's screen was just fine. I did order an $8 case through Amazon, the black Amzer Jelly Case. Had good luck with silicone and silicone-esque cases with my pre-Touch iPods, and the reviews are generally positive. Especially considering the price!

Side note: Was hanging out with friends last night, and charged my phone up there. From about 10:30 to 1:30 am, through constant fiddling except for a 10 minute drive, I knocked the battery down to 79%. Also: This was with Wi-Fi on the moment I got home, to save battery life. 3G radio = powerhungry.

Messing with Live Wallpapers (Have a 3D starfield running right now just for amusement's sake) and many other bits and pieces drove it down. On a lark, I decided to leave it unplugged the rest of the night, with regular syncing for 2 gmail accounts and 3 hour syncing on weather, with Yahoo Messenger and AIM running as well. And hourly twitter refreshes via Seesmic. (with Comic-Con going on right now, LOTS of tweets.) Oh, and Task Manager running and slaughtering any errant processes I didn't approve of. I'm looking at YOU, Footprints and Sprint Navigation.

Woke up at 8 am, checked the battery: 43%. Now, Yahoo Messenger, from what I understand, is a push based messaging app which I thoroughly approve of; its how it worked on the iPod touch and iPhone, and I like that for less battery shenanigans. However, AIM DOES seem to run constantly unless someone can contradict me on this. It doesn't keep a constant connection running, but I don't know how often it "polls" for updates or anything. Hells, it might be push-based for all I know as well. Either way, just want to get that fact out there.

So, in the space of.. *glances at the counter* almost exactly eight hours, with three hours of that being near-constant use of network and non-network stuff, app installation, app tweaking, etc...I lost 57% battery. WITH full syncing and other background IM apps running, and half of that time had a live wallpaper running.

...considering I'll have syncing and Seesmic auto-refreshes off while I'm actually at work during the week (except for breaks and lunches), I daresay this lil fella will make it through with flying colors once the Shiny New Toy phase of my love affair with the EVO starts to fade.

...I'm still considering a higher capacity battery, tho. >.<
 
Additional: I'm giving the EVO a week to see just how well the battery will work. At the end of that, if I think more can be done, I'm going to root it and rip out the Sprint apps that keep trying to load into memory and a few other things. *glares at Footprint and some other HTC apps like Peep*

I'm just glad that this phone isn't as pathetically battery-eating as my short-lived Moment was. I turned EVERYTHING off on that device and it dropped to 70% in three hours. Granted, it was in my drawer at work, but come on...ONLY the cell standby radio was on, and it dropped 30% in three....bloody...hours. Pathetic.

*hugs my EVO, not caring who sees*
 
Battery loss has nothing to do with the Sprint apps being cached. They're not running.

Peep doesn't use battery unless you have it checking tweets, and even then it doesn't seem to use much of any battery.

Footprints is like the Sprint apps, it doesn't do anything unless you're using them. It's just cached.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom