Nice phone but battery life abysmal

Deleted User · Mar 18, 2011

This is a great phone functionally, but my experience has been that the weak battery life overshadows the phones good points. I know its been out only a coupla days and it takes time to break a battery in, but this has become a major obstacle to really enjoying this phone. I have killed gps, many email syncs, haptic feedback, weather syncs, stock quotes checks, lowered the display brightness, killed vibrate for alerts, other things also, but running it from 9 am to about 1 pm with just minimal to moderate use, no videos, just email, a few texts, 5-6 phone calls, about 20 webpages, and this thing is down to 40%. No way would it make it till 5 pm or longer. I feel this is just totally unacceptable and don't want to spend the money, nor want the extra bulk and extra weight that an extended battery would add. Hate to do it, but I think its going back. Reminds me of the Incredible last summer with the battery problems it had. I'll give it another day or two, but don't really think it will improve. Just my 2 cents.

Yellow Snowman · Mar 18, 2011

be lucky you're getting that much battery out of this phone. i barely use it but for a few calls and texts and thing is dead in half a day. its pathetic and you're right, kills all the positives.

HTCThunderbolt · Mar 18, 2011

anticipator said:
This is a great phone functionally, but my experience has been that the weak battery life overshadows the phones good points. I know its been out only a coupla days and it takes time to break a battery in, but this has become a major obstacle to really enjoying this phone. I have killed gps, many email syncs, haptic feedback, weather syncs, stock quotes checks, lowered the display brightness, killed vibrate for alerts, other things also, but running it from 9 am to about 1 pm with just minimal to moderate use, no videos, just email, a few texts, 5-6 phone calls, about 20 webpages, and this thing is down to 40%. No way would it make it till 5 pm or longer. I feel this is just totally unacceptable and don't want to spend the money, nor want the extra bulk and extra weight that an extended battery would add. Hate to do it, but I think its going back. Reminds me of the Incredible last summer with the battery problems it had. I'll give it another day or two, but don't really think it will improve. Just my 2 cents.

How do you stop email syncs? and stocks

Anthony1970 · Mar 18, 2011

All android phones have this problem. Its just something you have to get used to.

howarmat · Mar 18, 2011

give it time! you are draining the battery a ton more now than you will in a week. the phone/battery are still calibrating too

RyanM · Mar 19, 2011

Droids are power hungry. Add 4G to something already power hungry on 3G and this is what you get.

I agree its not good, but that is just how it is.

They should have used a 1900+mAh battery like Motorola Bionic.

dm33 · Mar 19, 2011

Anthony1970 said:
All android phones have this problem. Its just something you have to get used to.

Not true. You can put a decent battery in a phone. No excuse for this.
I have an Incredible with the OEM big battery. I get decent life out of it. Its significantly heavier than the stock battery. I wouldn't want to add that much weight and bulk to a Thunderbolt.

Two_cents · Mar 19, 2011

its not that bad... the incredible was worse when it was first released with 2.1... its not as good as my incredible was with custom kernels but your going to have to deal with it for a little bit... I got 11 hours out of mine today... my email/fb/exchange syncs are at 2 hours, gps/bt/wifi off, brightness at the middle setting... and when I say dead i ran it til it would backlight the screen when I hit the power button but the screen wouldn't show any image(dead) took 5 minute charge to get enough power to reboot...

TxGoat · Mar 19, 2011

I got 12 hours out of mine before the amber battery icon came on. I'm not sure why some people expect their battery to last so long. Might I suggest slapping an alternate on your phone and an accessory belt to power the alternator?

sean76 · Mar 19, 2011

Anthony1970 said:
All android phones have this problem. Its just something you have to get used to.

I have to disagree! My Fascinate gets great Battery life, and I got 16 hrs today with my Motorola Atrix. I'm not asking for 16 hrs out of he TB, but 8/10 hrs would work for me. HTC once again let's the Android faithful down.

garnto · Mar 19, 2011

sean76 said:
I have to disagree! My Fascinate gets great Battery life, and I got 16 hrs today with my Motorola Atrix. I'm not asking for 16 hrs out of he TB, but 8/10 hrs would work for me. HTC once again let's the Android faithful down.

I had my phone on for 11 hours total today.

8 hours wifi/texting/angry birds
2 hours just sitting
1 hour pandora

good enough for me

JustinHEMI · Mar 19, 2011

I agree that the battery life isn't ideal, but it certainly does NOT kill the positives, IMO, as one user alluded to.

Battery life is the only negative for me, and it is manageable.

Justin

stratusmonkey · Mar 19, 2011

I've had the phone two days now. Thor's day, it came out of the box with 25% battery life. Yesterday, it lasted 11.5 hours of moderate-to-heavy use. Drained completely because I didn't think to turn it off, as opposed to standby, until it was too late.

Moderately heavy use was about 3 hours of screen time for web, e-mail, text and music player, including ten minutes or so of screwing around with voice search. And 2.5 more hours listening to music with the screen off. The screen definitely ate up most of the juice. (Drank it up?)

P.S. No 4g was involved. All action took place in 3g territory or WiFi.

rbanks1451 · Mar 19, 2011

Let me first say I do not have 4G in my area yet, so this is all based on 3G. I took my phone off the charger yesterday at approximately 8 AM. It finally gave me the low battery indication at 9:37 PM that 15% remained.

During that time I have GPS location turned on, WiFi on, used golf GPS app while playing (not the full round, between 7-9 holes), have email set to sync every five min, Facebook to sync every hour, 25-35 text messages and 10-15 phone calls, web searched for about 45 min total and a few games of Angry Birds and Homerun Battle 3D.

With my Incredible, I kept GPS and WiFi off unless needed. Everything else was the same and got no where near this type of battery life.

Overall so far this has exceeded what I expected to get with the OEM battery. If I can get this all the time I will be happy and this will make the phone as close to perfect for me as possible. I am sure once 4G is here later this year this will all change, but until then I'm happy. Hopefully they will have better slim battery options by then.

Anthony1970 · Mar 19, 2011

dm33 said:
Not true. You can put a decent battery in a phone. No excuse for this.
I have an Incredible with the OEM big battery. I get decent life out of it. Its significantly heavier than the stock battery. I wouldn't want to add that much weight and bulk to a Thunderbolt.

Its what HTC packages the phone with, ergo, it has bad battery life. I dont count that the phone can get good battery life with an after market. Im talking about out of the box. Many people do not want to purchase an aftermarket or feel they should.

elchip · Mar 19, 2011

Battery life was atrocious out of the box... I was sick of making so many compromises just to get the phone to last 12 hours with light use... So i got the 2750 mAh extended battery. Never looked back, been playing heavily all day and am still at 75%.

You get used to the ugly bump. I really recommend it.

odnerd · Mar 19, 2011

Guess I've gotten really lucky. Off the charger at 7:30am. A 5 minute phone call, 25ish texts, 20 minutes web, installed a few apps, a tango test call, 7 emails, 4g on the whole time and its 8:17pm and i still have 55% battery.

TheXFactor · Mar 19, 2011

Too bad there isn't some benchmark test to use for battery performance in the phone. All of these threads are pointless.

Nice phone but battery life abysmal

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