Battery Questions

[jdk2]

I got home last night around 1:00AM with a little over 40% after fiddling with the thing from 11:00AM. I charged it in the car on the way to work (45mins) and again at work until the green light came on. So far, it's what I would expect from a device. I was in and out of 4G the whole time.

I'm syncing news and friend stream every 4 hours. Weather set to every hour. No facebook. Gmail is set to push with 5 separate accounts.

It's been more than accepatable to me thus far. Can only get better with GingerBread.

 

[ChiTownJim]

I don't know I'm at over 15hrs on the first charge and I'm still at 27% life left. Seems pretty good for me . Moderate useage

 

[rushmore]

A 3G/4G toggle so folks can turn 4G on when they need it should help out a lot. If people have gps, wifi, live wp and widgets running- ANY phone would choke with all of that stuff running.

All of those are evil for battery, but live wall papers and widgets may surprise people how much battery gets used.

There is a fix for the 3G/4G (to turn off 4G) but requires a phone code adjustment and a reboot to work correctly. Far more user friendly to have a simple toggle widget, just like for gps or wifi.

 

[mrjinglesusa]

Myself and others seem to think this phone will level out at about 10-12 hours a charge with moderate/heavy usage in a 4G area.

I highly doubt that.

Full charge overnight. Off charger at 7:30 am. It's 1:20 pm and I've got messages of 15%, 10%, and 5% all within the last 10 minutes with my phone just sitting here on my desk.

My phone will shut off in about 10-15 minutes. That's 6 hours. And that's with NO phone calls, NO music, NO messaging, and NO videos.

All I've done over the past 6 hours is read Twitter feeds, check Facebook, read XDA, light internet use, etc. VERY light use.

Moderate to heavy use? I think people will be LUCKY to get 4-5 hours on the stock battery after it's calibrated.

Trust me, complaints of battery life are going to EXPLODE on this forum in the next 2-3 days. This phone is a huge battery hog.

And no, I don't turn off Wi-Fi, GPS, data, etc. These are features of the phone and I shouldn't have to manually turn them on and off when I'm not using them just to get good battery life.

 

[rushmore]

I highly doubt that.

Full charge overnight. Off charger at 7:30 am. It's 1:20 pm and I've got messages of 15%, 10%, and 5% all within the last 10 minutes with my phone just sitting here on my desk.

My phone will shut off in about 10-15 minutes. That's 6 hours. And that's with NO phone calls, NO music, NO messaging, and NO videos.

All I've done over the past 6 hours is read Twitter feeds, check Facebook, read XDA, light internet use, etc. VERY light use.

Moderate to heavy use? I think people will be LUCKY to get 4-5 hours on the stock battery after it's calibrated.

Trust me, complaints of battery life are going to EXPLODE on this forum in the next 2-3 days. This phone is a huge battery hog.

And no, I don't turn off Wi-Fi, GPS, data, etc. These are features of the phone and I shouldn't have to manually turn them on and off when I'm not using them just to get good battery life.

Agreed, plus moderate / heavy is highly subjective. My Inc with a Seidio 3500mah extended battery will not last that long with my "heavy" use. (stock battery chokes in three/four hours).

Moderate should last that long, but lumping the two terms together would be a far wider spread spread of at least five hours.

A good test would be a continuous stream of videos using 3G vs 4G- THAT would be heavy use Overkill, but HEAVY use

Not agreeing about the forum exploding, since even with the infamous Incredible's battery life, plenty of people were claiming the same time with "heavy use". Point is moderate and heavy use can be the same thing to different people.

That said, due to the 4G issue and 4.3" display, my guess is the battery issue will be more of an issue than the Inc. The cpu being 45nm vs the Inc's 65nm is a small weight compared to a larger LCD display and a 4G radio.

 

[sean76]

I don't know I'm at over 15hrs on the first charge and I'm still at 27% life left. Seems pretty good for me . Moderate useage

Jim you are the exception brother! If anyone is gonna have luck with this battery, its you! I remember you saying you were gettin crazy usage out of the incredible stock battery...so if anyone is gonna have luck with this TB battery ,its you man. But seriously, how fast is this beast Jim....Bananas!!!

 

[garnto]

I highly doubt that.

Full charge overnight. Off charger at 7:30 am. It's 1:20 pm and I've got messages of 15%, 10%, and 5% all within the last 10 minutes with my phone just sitting here on my desk.

My phone will shut off in about 10-15 minutes. That's 6 hours. And that's with NO phone calls, NO music, NO messaging, and NO videos.

All I've done over the past 6 hours is read Twitter feeds, check Facebook, read XDA, light internet use, etc. VERY light use.

Moderate to heavy use? I think people will be LUCKY to get 4-5 hours on the stock battery after it's calibrated.

Trust me, complaints of battery life are going to EXPLODE on this forum in the next 2-3 days. This phone is a huge battery hog.

And no, I don't turn off Wi-Fi, GPS, data, etc. These are features of the phone and I shouldn't have to manually turn them on and off when I'm not using them just to get good battery life.

it takes a grand total of 2 seconds to turn on and off wifi/gps/data. why would you not do it?

 

[rushmore]

Jim you are the exception brother! If anyone is gonna have luck with this battery, its you! I remember you saying you were gettin crazy usage out of the incredible stock battery...so if anyone is gonna have luck with this TB battery ,its you man. But seriously, how fast is this beast Jim....Bananas!!!

Point here seems one person's moderate use is another's light, heavy or whatever else. Too subjective unless a standard for reference is established.

 

[sean76]

it takes a grand total of 2 seconds to turn on and off wifi/gps/data. why would you not do it?

Because alot of people use those features! In they're eyes its like, hey why buy a smart phone if I have to cripple it to use it? And I agree to some degree, I just feel the answer to this mess is just HTC putting bigger batteries in they're phones. I don't want to hear about they're keeping it thin and what not...How did Moto fit an 1850mAh battery in the Atrix if that's the case?

 

[rushmore]

it takes a grand total of 2 seconds to turn on and off wifi/gps/data. why would you not do it?

Even the "walk on water" (bleh) iPhone takes a big hit with gps and wifi left on. What helps it though is the very power efficient and smaller display.

No phone known to maannnnn is can last a day with everything on. Well, iPhoner's will say otherwise, but they WOULD

 

[ChiTownJim]

Jim you are the exception brother! If anyone is gonna have luck with this battery, its you! I remember you saying you were gettin crazy usage out of the incredible stock battery...so if anyone is gonna have luck with this TB battery ,its you man. But seriously, how fast is this beast Jim....Bananas!!!

This thing is a beast I downloaded a 5mb mp3 and it took like 3 seconds , insanely fast ...I think part of my luck is being in super solid coverage area. I rarely don't have full bars 3g or 4g anywhere I go. Plus I have wifi verywhere... I will say my phone dropped from 20% down to 3% in like 30minutes so I don't think the phones battery meter is dialed in yet


I can tell you thou my Eris and Fascinate never got good battery life . They were AWFUL it's weird

 

[destardi]

To each his own, but I think the smaller batter has to do with being thin, not cheap.

My Droid 1 did the same thing when I first got it. I think I was getting about 4-5 hours a charge. I settled into about 10-12 after everything settled down.

Last night I was using my phone moderately (web, streaming music, Youtube video or two, lots of background syncs) and I was at about 50% after 5 hours from a full charge.

I'm sorry, but after having the Droid 1, Incredible, Droid X, Fascinate, Evo, one of the manufacturers of these phones sticks out like a sore thumb when it comes to battery life (hint: it's not Moto and not Samsung).

HTC needs to fix this because as more and more people shift to Android, HTC WILL TAKE A BIG HIT on repeat buyers.

 

[ChiTownJim]

Because alot of people use those features! In they're eyes its like, hey why buy a smart phone if I have to cripple it to use it? And I agree to some degree, I just feel the answer to this mess is just HTC putting bigger batteries in they're phones. I don't want to hear about they're keeping it thin and what not...How did Moto fit an 1850mAh battery in the Atrix if that's the case?

Agreeded they should have put a 1600mah battery in this phone it's just like the Incredible and Eris using a 1300 when other phones with the same size battery came with 1500 (hero , EVO , TouchPro2) why even make a 1300 ??? makes nosense

I should have also noted that my battery expierence with this phone was with the battery being charged on an external charger . Which IMO makes a HUGE diffrence

 

[destardi]

I highly doubt that.

Full charge overnight. Off charger at 7:30 am. It's 1:20 pm and I've got messages of 15%, 10%, and 5% all within the last 10 minutes with my phone just sitting here on my desk.

My phone will shut off in about 10-15 minutes. That's 6 hours. And that's with NO phone calls, NO music, NO messaging, and NO videos.

All I've done over the past 6 hours is read Twitter feeds, check Facebook, read XDA, light internet use, etc. VERY light use.

Moderate to heavy use? I think people will be LUCKY to get 4-5 hours on the stock battery after it's calibrated.

Trust me, complaints of battery life are going to EXPLODE on this forum in the next 2-3 days. This phone is a huge battery hog.

And no, I don't turn off Wi-Fi, GPS, data, etc. These are features of the phone and I shouldn't have to manually turn them on and off when I'm not using them just to get good battery life.

This mirrors my experience this morning/afternoon PERFECTLY.

And I also second the notion that I paid $219.00 for a S M A R T P H O N E; not a "gee it's nice having a brick in my pocket because I have to stop and remember if I turned on data, GPS (for Google searches related to location" Phone. That is to say, I shouldn't HAVE to be concerned about turning off/on GPS, Data etc.

I didn't have to with either Motorola Droids, or Samsung Fascinate, I shouldn't have to with with T-Bolt.

 

[UBRocked]

Battery issues on most phones(including the Thunderbolt) are a combination of stock settings being very draining and the user not fully understanding everything that is going on with their current configuration. Users need to do extensive research(or perhaps I should make a really big in-depth thread so I don't have to repeat myself 50 times with long battery advice) to see what they need to do for long battery life.

The Thunderbolt has pretty good battery life from my own tests. Probably at least 50% better than the Incredible. I'll be blunt and say anyone having horrible battery life at this point just doesn't quite know what they are doing with the phone. These are computers, not feature phones. You can make a laptop last hours or 30 minutes depending on what you do with it. The exact same ideas apply to ultra high end smartphones. They in all likelihood left the phone mostly at stock configuration(which is very very bad for battery life), installed a bunch of apps that they left running in full on mode instead of sleep mode(Significant majority of people on this forum don't know the difference), and probably had stuff like Facebook set to sync at really silly intervals.

Some people might take offense to that, the more clever ones will see it for what it is and attempt to learn and improve their battery life significantly. I work a 9.5 hour shift. Used the phone pretty moderately throughout the day. More than an hour of web browsing over 3G, I listened to music for about 5 hours. Periodic checking of email and such. Didn't come down to anywhere near 50% battery level.

I'm going to have to disagree a little here

I got the T-Bolt in the AM yesterday, brought it back to my office and put it on the charger. I pulled it off the charger at 12:30 when the green light was on. Immediately it dropped to 94% battery life so I put it back on the charger until the green light came back on @ 1:35

Configuration for me yesterday was 4G turned on (wifi off), Gmail synced (no other mail clients at that time), No social networking apps other than Friend Stream configured with FB and Twitter, and very few market apps installed. Here's my log I kept from yesterday because some people wanted to know how battery life was LOL

- Took T-Bolt off the charger @ 1:35pm with 100% charge showing per the battery widget. (second time pulling it off of charger)

*Brightness setting at medium level, 4G on (no wi-fi).

- 13:20 min phone call to 611 for 1 year contract fix
- Approximately 10 speed test performed (10-12MB down - 28-32MB up)
- From 2:20-2:23 streamed Pandora (over 4G)
- 5:00pm - 55% Batt Left after 3.5 hours off charger.
- Watched 10 minute YouTube video on way home from work.
- @ 6:15pm - 30% battery left
- moderate use from 8:30 - 9:00 (web, phandroid, email, texting, gtalk), phone @ 5% (put on charger).

So...what do you see in my configuration/usage that caused the battery to "bleed" out within 7 hours? If I picked up the phone and turned the screen on (and it's not listed on my log), I was checking for messages, looking at the battery widget I placed on the homescreen, or something else very quickly. I would have expected approximately 50% based on that usage with my D1 or Fascinate

Blanket statements like the one you've made really don't bother me...but you have a bunch of people that just bought a 4G LTE phone with a 1400mAh battery...and you are telling them that any sub-par battery life is their fault?

I know what you're getting at...you can watch 2 movies many smartphones and go from 100% to dead before the second movie ends. Usage matters...but there are other factors to consider (...the phone is brand new...battery is brand new...4G is brand new).

Today is looking much better but I'm using wi-fi. I do have everything set up and syncing...sitting at 79% (been off the charger since 7am)

 

[garnto]

Because alot of people use those features! In they're eyes its like, hey why buy a smart phone if I have to cripple it to use it? And I agree to some degree, I just feel the answer to this mess is just HTC putting bigger batteries in they're phones. I don't want to hear about they're keeping it thin and what not...How did Moto fit an 1850mAh battery in the Atrix if that's the case?

unless you use the features 80% of the time(if you do this no phone will EVER have good life) it would not be any trouble to just pop the switch on when using, and then pop off when not.

unless they just want to whine on the internet about how bad the life is. I got 2 days easy off my incredible I have had for the last week(thats with alot of texting, internet every now and again+ angry birds a little here and there)

my opinion could very well change on this if the tb battery life sucks even taking those precautions(I'll know after I go through a few charges)

 

[ChiTownJim]

This mirrors my experience this morning/afternoon PERFECTLY.

And I also second the notion that I paid $219.00 for a S M A R T P H O N E; not a "gee it's nice having a brick in my pocket because I have to stop and remember if I turned on data, GPS (for Google searches related to location" Phone. That is to say, I shouldn't HAVE to be concerned about turning off/on GPS, Data etc.

I didn't have to with either Motorola Droids, or Samsung Fascinate, I shouldn't have to with with T-Bolt.

I dont' use it anymore but I used a program called juice defender on my Incredible for awhile and it worked really good. You basically set it up tto where it will turn off data when you dont' have the screen on but it will still turn it on from time to time for like 10 seconds to recieve updates . It actually made a big diffrence I stoped using it when I moved to 2.3 as it was compataible

 

[mrjinglesusa]

it takes a grand total of 2 seconds to turn on and off wifi/gps/data. why would you not do it?

Because I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO.

I want them on so when I need them, they are there and ready to go. I shouldn't have to remember to turn on WiFi/GPS/Data everytime I want to use them and then turn them back off when I'm done.

It's about convenience.

If phone manufacturers are going to include these features, they need to include batteries that can handle the load for AT LEAST 8 hours (full work day).

 

[mrjinglesusa]

I dont' use it anymore but I used a program called juice defender on my Incredible for awhile and it worked really good. You basically set it up tto where it will turn off data when you dont' have the screen on but it will still turn it on from time to time for like 10 seconds to recieve updates . It actually made a big diffrence I stoped using it when I moved to 2.3 as it was compataible

There is also a program called Y5 that turns off your WiFi based on cell towers. For example, when I set up my home WiFi, it remembers the towers I connect to when at home. When I leave and switch to other towers, it knows I am away from home and turns off Wifi.

Basically, WiFi constantly scans for signals and this can be a big drain. Y5 stops it from always scanning (since it's off) and only turns in on when it knows you are near a known wifi signal based on cell towers.

Used it with my Incredible for awhile and just remembered it after seeing your post. Maybe I'll give it a go...

 

[Mallissa]

I took mine off the charger at 7am this morning. I am a moderate (heavy at times) user, and at 2:46 est I still have 40% battery left at 7:45 up time. Not real sure why others are having such poor battery life. It's about the same as my Incredible, so I'm not worried. Hope yours improves though!

 

[mrjinglesusa]

well if you are that picky it would only make sense to wait for full reviews of the phone to come out before purchasing. we all knew that the tb's battery was going to be a little less than most

I got the Thunderbolt because of the screen, 4G LTE, processor, etc. Big upgrade from my Incredible. Never thought it was going to be perfect and knew the battery life was going to be bad.

That's neither here nor there though. We are discussing battery life and how the stock battery isn't going to be good enough for most users everyday use.

Maybe I should just leave my phone off completely and then turn it on everytime I want to use it for something? Surely that would give me good battery life. I bet I could go 3 days on a single charge if I did that. Not very convenient though is it?

 

[UBRocked]

Okay...enough.

No more personal attacks and bickering.

 

[AustinTech]

A cell phone has the ability to do all kinds of things, it doesn't mean you leave all those abilities on all the time. Like other people have mentioned, there are apps that can automatically turn of certain features at certain times of day. You can override those apps with the simple control switch if you have an abnormal day (traveling or something). Just because your phone can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea to turn that feature on ALL the time. That is all we are getting at.

You can be upset with the battery life if you want, but a stuborn refusal to manage your phone's capabilities is going to reduce your enjoyment of the device. It's your choice.

 

[destardi]

A cell phone has the ability to do all kinds of things, it doesn't mean you leave all those abilities on all the time. Like other people have mentioned, there are apps that can automatically turn of certain features at certain times of day. You can override those apps with the simple control switch if you have an abnormal day (traveling or something). Just because your phone can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea to turn that feature on ALL the time. That is all we are getting at.

You can be upset with the battery life if you want, but a stuborn refusal to manage your phone's capabilities is going to reduce your enjoyment of the device. It's your choice.

you're missing the point.

The question is not about managing the phone, it's why do other manufacturers supply their phones with adequate batteries, but Htc does not?

I love the phone, and I'm def not returning it, but it's more than obvious and more than fair question to ask in this forum.

When an entire O/S gets branded as being bad on battery life, thats not a good thing. I have heard "android phones get bad battery life" in more statements of fact than I can count.

It's not android, it's HTC!!!

 

[theacoustician]

When an entire O/S gets branded as being bad on battery life, thats not a good thing. I have heard "android phones get bad battery life" in more statements of fact than I can count.

It's not android, it's HTC!!!

I'm confused now. In the first paragraph, you say Android is the problem. In the very next segment, you say it's not Android, HTC is to blame.

If longer battery and greater convenience are as critical to you as you're making it sound ... if you just want the phone to work the way you think it should, you should look at getting an iPhone. That's what they're good at. Android allows for more options and choices, but those choices come with consequences.

Either way, why do you keep posting? We've told you how to extend the battery. You say you shouldn't have to do it and you won't. What exactly are you hoping to gain here?