Is the HTC Desires battery really that bad?

I regularly go over 24 hours between charges and if it's been a quiet day (few calls, not too much gaming, some browsing/email/texting) it lasts closer to 30 hours.
The only time I've run the battery out in a day (i.e between waking and sleeping rather than 24hrs) was when I had last.fm streaming music in the background and the battery only lasted about 9 hours.

sliq said:

that's disappointing indeed.

i don't mind if the battery life isn't so much better, it'll just mean i can get my money back via Fair Trading for false advertising

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That depends. Currently the Clove site has a pretty meaningless statement about the power efficiency of the display ("drawing up to 10 times less power than a VGA display", which is true if if they can find any VGA display that uses 10 times the power), but it doesn't compare with the AMOLED that I can see. Actually I suspect it's the same copy that they previously used for the AMOLED with just that word substituted, but that's only a suspicion.

But the effect on overall battery life will anyway depend on how much of the battery drain comes from the screen - even if the screen did use 5 times less power than the AMOLED that would not mean 5 times the battery life. Mine has just had a low-use weekend, and after 50 hours unplugged has 39% left. But the power usage breaks down as 45% cell standby, 42% phone idle, 10% android system, 3% display, so even if the screen used no power at all that would make only a trivial difference. It uses more when used more heavily, but I've never seen the display be one of the 3 biggest power drains, so it's not the dominant factor in my battery life. But these things depend on usage (with AMOLED it even depends on what is displayed) - it may make more of a difference to you.

But on the plus side, S-LCD probably has more natural colours and may be a bit sharper (as I would expect it to have a conventional subpixel structure rather than the pen-tile array of the AMOLED in the Desire & Nexus), and choosing "day" vs "night" modes in your ebook reader won't affect battery life, so there may be other up-sides.

Charged Fri night to 100%. Used it to watch the man utd game on sat over wifi, so 100 odd minutes, used it to surf a bit later on sat night, then used it to watch the Belgian GP on sunday again over wifi so another 2 hours or so, then watched the Liverpool game yesterday alvo and did a bit more surfing later.

Battery is currently sitting on 43%.....

I dont get how some people can completely slate the battery. Had I done the same on my old 3GS I would have been reaching for the charger after the man u game (had I actually been able to watch the game that is ). On my Nokia it would have have been about the same maybe the battery would be showing around 50%, but in my experience it is NOT too shabby at all!

I still think it is down to the user in most cases......As has been mentioned, a lot of Apps are battery vampires due to bad coding......

My tuppence worth anyhoo

I can sap 50% of my battery on a 4-hour train journey. That's partially due to the constant flicking between GPRS/EDGE/3G/HSDPA as mentioned earlier.

anoniemouse said:

with really heavy use & wifi, gps & mobile internet turned on i get 24 hours out of my phone, with normal useage i normally get between 2 & 4 days use.
On just pure standby i could get approx 10 days with wifi, gps & mobile internet turned on, but that makes having such an excellent phone pointless.

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Then the god's have truly chosen you. My battery performance is nowhere remotely near that. I have to switch off wifi, GPS and updates to get anything even approaching reasonable battery life. If I left everything on and used it simply above moderately then I would not get half a day.

I got the Desire through T-Mobile the day it arrived in the UK nearly six months ago and the battery sux. Great gadget but fairly useless as a phone. However I kept mine and still use it as my primary phone though I had to buy a spare charger so it can take juice during the day at work.

For those that didnt click through:



It is possible and with mobile internet on and facebook etc refreshing every hour.

sutton said:

Then the god's have truly chosen you. My battery performance is nowhere remotely near that. I have to switch off wifi, GPS and updates to get anything even approaching reasonable battery life. If I left everything on and used it simply above moderately then I would not get half a day.

I got the Desire through T-Mobile the day it arrived in the UK nearly six months ago and the battery sux. Great gadget but fairly useless as a phone. However I kept mine and still use it as my primary phone though I had to buy a spare charger so it can take juice during the day at work.

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Yep, This is about what's it like for me, too. I charge overnight and unplug at about 7 AM (usually..). In light use the battery lasts barely to the evening and in heavy use I have to recharge it at some point as the day goes by.. Usually between 4 PM and 6 PM

RaivoNaama said:

Yep, This is about what's it like for me, too. I charge overnight and unplug at about 7 AM (usually..). In light use the battery lasts barely to the evening and in heavy use I have to recharge it at some point as the day goes by.. Usually between 4 PM and 6 PM

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I don't have any battery issues, but I've been reading a lot of posts in various forums about it and there seems to be two main problems causing the low battery - one is using a task killer like ATK that is constantly sucking the battery while trying to shut down apps incorrectly due to poorly written apps. In some cases there are bad apps that do not stop using the cpu when they stop running, eating battery, so users are getting ATK to kill the app, which is a vicious circle as ATK is using battery to kill the app that's using battery. While ATK does help with bad apps, the real solution is to get rid of the bad app and you won't need ATK and you'll have normal battery life.

The other problem is improper calibration of the battery. Normally just doing a few charge/discharge cycles under regular use will allow the phone to calibrate to the battery. But sometimes there seems to be a glitch and HTC recommends doing a calibraton routine once to correct it:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=755903

Follow the instructions carefully as you need to plug and unplug several times in a specific sequence and power the phone on/off a few times during the process. Many users report it works for phones that are eating the battery. Of course this won't help if you have a rogue app that eats cpu cycles.

tommiev said:

My phone is just 2 weeks old, Battery dies within 24 hours even if everything is turned off other than mobile internet(GPS, Bluetooth, Least screen brightness, and using Advanced Task Killer)

HTC Desire-Sickest Phone

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Dont use the task killer thing, you'll probably find battery improves.

I'd consider myself an average user. I'd do the usual calls and texts, about an hour of internet, half-an-hour of music, the odd quick game (very little tbh), I tend to use the alarms, timer and notes a lot. Leave Wi-fi on all the time but only turn bluetooth and GPS on when needed (hardly ever for GPS) and sync set to manual for most things. I always have between 50% - 60% left at the end of the day. I don't worry about battery life anymore as I bought a cheap dock off eBay and leave it charging every night. Suits me grand.

In case anybody has the same issues as me, just a warning about Google gesture search. When it updated about a month ago I found my battery draining at an alarming rate. Just disable 'Double Flip' to sort it out. Never bothered looking it up to see if it's an issue in general or just my phone. I find a gesture swipe shortcut (appropriately) in LauncherPro is faster anyway.