Tuesday, March 15, 2011

More About The Battery

We get more emails asking, "How do I get better battery life from my EVO?" than you can imagine. Unfortunately, there's also just as many answers to this question and most of them will not work for everyone.

Battery life on the EVO is pretty bad. Not terrible, but not feature phone, 3 days on a charge good. Most Sprint Android devices are pretty weak in the power department, so you almost have to wonder if it's a network strength issue. Those that mention days of use on a charge are usually running WiFi when possible and turning off background data features.

Next are the ones that claim conditioning the battery worked for them. 8 hours of charging, power off, charge while off for an hour, then turn it on again and run it for 2 minutes before powering down again for another 1 hour charge. Sure, this will work for a short term solution, but as soon as you are back at using your device regularly, it will revert to the same battery issues you had before.

Our extensive battery testing did reveal some power hungry tasks that your EVO performs and some others that don't do much to its power supply. Downloading data with the screen and Bluetooth on is one of the hardest functions on the device. Slacker, Pandora and SprintTV are all programs that allow this to happen. 30 minutes of Sprint TV is about a quarter of your daily battery.

Polling email isn't a killer unless you have the mail program set to unlimited file size. That can crush your battery and you may never know why it happened - until you realize your buddy emailed over 2 songs that auto downloaded.

Screen brightness has a large effect on battery life, as does camera and video use. Your camera defaults the screen to 100% when in use, so keeping it to a minimal time on screen is imperative.

Overall, there isn't a magic fix to the battery on the EVO. If you work indoors, keep a charger handy. If you are staying in for the evening, plug it in. If you have an hour commute, then get a car charger. Getting continuous power to the EVO is very important.

For those wanting to condition batteries, don't try that cycle stuff that other sites recommend. It is a very simple process of getting a second or maybe 3rd battery and cycle charging them outside the device.

Charge battery #2 while #1 is in the phone. When #2 shows a complete charge, unplug it for 10 minutes and then plug it back in. When your external chargers says it is full again, switch and repeat. For best results you need to perform this on both batteries every few days.

Getting a larger battery is also another choice, but it will severely limit your cases and carrying options.

Visit our online partner today to order an external battery charger and spare battery while they are available. Get one today at http://www.getsmartphones.info.

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