HTC EVO 4G LTE battery best and worst case runtimes
When it was announced that the HTC EVO 4G LTE would come without an easily removable battery, there was a kerfuffle. Arguments were made that 2000mAh simply wasn’t enough, there was no way a phone could last a day, and that the new EVOs were now no better than Apple.
My experience has been varied. The first full charge day I had was my second day of owning the new EVO. When I got the phone it was in the 20% range, and I played with it pretty hard the first day. The second day started at 9am on a full charge. The battery would have lasted me 29 hours given my usage, but it was plugged back in at midnight with about a 30% remaining charge.
The fourth day my battery life took a hit because of roughly 2.5 hours of Radiant Defense, and it was in danger of dying at about 11 hours. This is actually still an impressive showing since my HTC EVO 3D could eat up a Seidio 4000mAh extended battery in under 6 hours of similar gameplay.
Last night I traveled to Madison, TN, and while not using the net, not playing games, etc., and with Sprint coverage like it is there (between zero to two bars of signal), I was in danger of the phone dying from a full charge in just slightly over 4 hours.
I attached the Battery Monitor Widget profile, starting right when I pulled into Madison TN. From 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. I lost 45% of the battery. This was sitting in a restaurant with no data signal, one bar if I put the phone in the window, no internet.
I told my wife to turn on WiMAX on her OG HTC EVO 4G, and she got a nearly perfect 4G signal. I sat and cursed my new LTE technology and Sprint’s lack of 3G in the area.
By 7 p.m., we went to meet some friends and were in an area where there was no signal, so I put the phone on a portable charger I have, made a call to verify I still had that ability, and ignored the thing.
Now, knowing the situation I was walking into, I could have turned off background data so that only the cell radio was using any juice; this would have probably netted me another six to ten hours, but what good is manual battery management if you accidentally drive into a situation like that and don’t pay attention to the battery drain? I mean, who does except when testing?
So the worst case real world run was yesterday, and looks to be a little over 4 hours. Best case real world run I’ve done so far would be close to 30 hours. The best test scenario I’ve managed to run on short-scale would be around 51 hours, and the worst drained the battery in 1.5 hours.
Your mileage may vary.
