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Help Is anyone returning this phone?

I got my Thunderbolt Friday morning via Fed Ex. I work in the cellular industry and have had almost every top notch smart-phone in the last 5 years. I have been an Android user since the first appearance of the G1.

That being said I know all about HTC's tendency to put batteries in their devices that are point blank underpowered. Initial charge I charged it fully then bump charged. I know the first day it will use more battery syncing and downloading apps and what not.

At the end of the day I was bone dry, I put it on the charger and when it was done I bump charged again turned fast boot off as well as the device and charged over night.
Woke up the next morning and powered on the device. I immediately set all widgets facebook email and etc. to update manually only I also disabled 4G and lowered my screen brightness.

After being of the charger for 23 minutes with no phone calls or data usage my battery was at 82%!!! After a three ten minuet calls and a quick check of facebook I was down to 77%!! The phone lasted about 3 and a half to almost 4 hours off the charger with EXTREMELY light usage in a full signal area.

I know that after a week it would improve but I would also definitely be using it more also. In my opinion I would probably only get about 4 to 6 hours if I was lucky with normal to moderate usage.

All of this being said I sadly boxed my Thunderbolt up for return on Monday. I called Verizon told them my woes and told them I would be keeping the iPhone instead.
I was transfered a couple of times and spoke to a technical support rep who actually sounded educated.

She told me they were getting a ton of calls about returning the Thunderbolt for the same reason as well as others. I LOVE Android and I was an Apple hater for years after I switched to Android but it is what it is.

I know Android likes to eat battery life but I got over a full day on my Droid X, Nexus S, Nexus one, MT4G, Vibrant, and original Motorola Droid to name a few. In my OPINION the battery life on the Thunderbolt is unacceptable and I should not have to spend another $40 for an extended battery on a new phone just to use it the way it was intended to be used.

There is no reason HTC could not have strapped at least a 1850MAH battery in this beast like Motorola did with the Atrix (which I also had) Those of you with great or good battery life seem to be the exception, but I am happy for you.

Please no need to flame me or say bye or all that garbage I am just letting you know about an experienced Android users experience. I am sad to give it up but I should not have to compromise in my usage or spend more money to make a phone I just bought last more than 5 hours.

Shame on HTC for making a great device with such a glaring deficiency, especially after the hold up for bad battery life.
 
Snerch said:
Quick question about bump charging-are you supposed to power the phone up in between bump charges, or do you leave it powered off? Mine was powered off and the green light was on. I unplugged it and plugged it right back in. The orange light came on and didn't change back to green for about a good 10 minutes, even though it was green 5 seconds before...
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When you bump charge you power the phone up...let at least a percentage of battery come off of the phone...then power the phone back off and plug back in. The Orange light will come back on.

If the only truly lost 1 percentage, you would only see it charge for a minute or so...but that's not what will happen...instead, the Orange light may stay on for approximately 30 minutes.
 
nguyen18 said:
So I have turned everything off: GPS, WiFi, Autosync, Brightness all the way down, manual sync on everything. After letting the phone sit for 30 minutes, my battery was already down 10 percent. This is really frustrating. Last night I went to bed at 2am with 90% battery, woke up randomly at 7am and saw that there was less than 15% battery.. I turned my network off and wifi. What's the deal?
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Just get the mandatory extended battery.
 
nguyen18 said:
So I have turned everything off: GPS, WiFi, Autosync, Brightness all the way down, manual sync on everything. After letting the phone sit for 30 minutes, my battery was already down 10 percent. This is really frustrating. Last night I went to bed at 2am with 90% battery, woke up randomly at 7am and saw that there was less than 15% battery.. I turned my network off and wifi. What's the deal?
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I have the studio 1600mAh battery, and am just getting in the yellow 7:30am til now 5:43. Your not going to fine much better battery life on any other Android. I've had the inc, the X , and the fascinated. I have not changed a thing except for putting the display on auto.
 
oBIGTo said:
I have the studio 1600mAh battery, and am just getting in the yellow 7:30am til now 5:43. Your not going to fine much better battery life on any other Android. I've had the inc, the X , and the fascinated. I have not changed a thing except for putting the display on auto.
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I had the Droid X and I would take it off charge about 7 am and I was fine sometimes until 2 pm the next day but usually until 11 pm the same day ending with 30% left. this was with a lot of calling facebook and in a bad reception area.
 
HTCThunderbolt said:
People that say that it has battery life just give it some time. I just bumped charged and its working great now.. Cant wait till I dont have to bump anymore and it just knows when its 100%
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Ain't gonna happen. You'll always need to bump it.

Edit: Just got started and responded, see others saying the same thing. Ignore.. ugh.
 
i'm gonna return mine because it's not holding it's charge at all, GPS and clock thinks i'm in Lithuania at times, and some apps aren't installing that my friend has no issue with on his thunderbolt.
 
Skittlez said:
i'm gonna return mine because it's not holding it's charge at all, GPS and clock thinks i'm in Lithuania at times, and some apps aren't installing that my friend has no issue with on his thunderbolt.
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Sounds like you have a problem, I've been playing with mine non stop, and its the best Android I've had so far.
 
I bumped it over the weekend.

Today I'm at 87% charge, off the battery for 4hr 9min. Only about 30 minutes (commute) of that has been on 4G, though, as I'm lucky enough to have WiFi at work nearly all of the time. My usage has been probably light-moderate - music playing in the car, several texts, a few minutes of facebook, a few minutes of browsing, checking emails a few times, and checking news feeds a few times.

I'm pretty happy with that.
 
kcs7272 said:
I had the Droid X and I would take it off charge about 7 am and I was fine sometimes until 2 pm the next day but usually until 11 pm the same day ending with 30% left. this was with a lot of calling facebook and in a bad reception area.
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The OMAP chipsets have better power management. At chip level, funtions not needed or used are turned off and activated when needed. A lot of neat dynamic stuff going on :) Qualcomm never has seemed to get the power efficiency thing down very well.

Case in point is the new dual core. The Tegra 2 is also a good power manager, but the OMAP dual spanks the Tegra 2 for efficiency and a little better with actual performance.
 
Just throwing this out there, but has anyone considered that you are messing with the phone a lot more in the first week or so than you will be after the new has worn off? That affects battery life in a big way.

I don't expect my laptop to last more than a few hours off of the charger. I expect a little more than that from a high-powered smartphone, but not a lot more.

I have a car charger, a home charger, and a desk charger at work. Since I got my first cellphone when I was 16, a Qualcomm little boxy phone with a flip down microphone, can't remember the model, I have always plugged my phones in at night, every night. I can't see why anyone would ever want to get more than about 12 or 16 hours out of a charge.

And I've seen the battery life compared to an iPhone 3GS in this very thread. Isn't the Thunderbolt way more powerful of a phone than the 3GS? Wouldn't you expect it to use more battery?

And for that guy who said he loves Android and hates iOS, and blah blah blah, but isn't willing to spend $40 to make his Thunderbolt usable? Whatever.
For that matter just keep your Droid-X if you really love Android so much.
But to switch to iPhone 4 just to save $40, I am sorry, but you are not as into Android as you say you are. He'll spend more than $40 for a car charger for his iPhone4. lol
 
Right now I am in a 3G network and overall the battery seems to be pretty good, lasting about all day. I am anxious to see when I go home to the 4G network what it is going to be like. I am hoping it is not as bad as people say it is, or I might be returning the phone and wait for the Bionic to release. I bought the extended battery, and realized its just way to big and bulky so I returned that really fast. The phone is big enough without that.
 
18 hours later I'm still rocking a 18% charge. Yeah, only 4 hours or so were on LTE, but I didn't hold back my usage at all...that was a legit moderate to heavy usage day.

Couldn't be happier.
 
rcpratt said:
18 hours later I'm still rocking a 18% charge. Yeah, only 4 hours or so were on LTE, but I didn't hold back my usage at all...that was a legit moderate to heavy usage day.

Couldn't be happier.
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Did your phone die when you first got it? Give me hope dude. haha
 
I won't be getting rid of mine, but I am regretting the purchase. I've bump charged it and it isn't noticeably better. I need this device at work (in the medical field) and got 6 hours out of it today off a full charge with sending 3 text messages (literally that is all I did with it and the screen was off the rest of the time), not having the mobile network on, turning the wi-fi off once I hit the 60% left mark and have had the screen at about 25% the whole time.

Anybody know of a good portable external charger that I could carry in my pocket that would be powerful enough for this device?
 
I hope tons of you return the TB, so then I have a shot at getting a discounted refurb :) ;)

Then again, I may gamble and wait for a more power efficient dual core. Root and modded kernel progress for better power management could still make a TB the phone to choose :)
 
rushmore said:
I hope tons of you return the TB, so then I have a shot at getting a discounted refurb :) ;)

Then again, I may gamble and wait for a more power efficient dual core. Root and modded kernel progress for better power management could still make a TB the phone to choose :)
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Isn't that sad? The fact that the dual cores will be more power efficient is just backwards...HTC needs to step it up and hire some better engineers so their single core phone sitting in someones pocket all day isn't dying faster than a dual core phone getting hard use (I'm exaggerating, but it probably won't be far from the truth).
 
i will be returning my phone. The reception is horrible for me. It is consistently 3-5db's worse than other phones i have/had. In my living room i only have one bar where my other phones have two, In the bathroom im in 1X, in the gym im in 1X. I dont believe i ever saw 1X on the Incredible! WTF! Yesterday heading to a friends house i tried to check the forecast on weather.com and i couldnt get even a signal (not even 1X) for a full 5 minutes while the incredible was still in 3g the whole time!
 
If you're getting poor reception call Verizon and speak to tech support. They can send out a tech to your area and check satellite.

I'd do that before returning phone since you obviously dont have enything better ont he market or in your possession. Its worth a shot before your return date expires to give it a shot.
 
sooooo i called and he did some thangs on his end, and now the reception is significantly better, anywhere from -5--10 better than the incredible, so i'll give it some more time and see...




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