If I root.....

[scott craft]

Will I be able to get better battery life and signal strength? Battery life is my only real complaint with this phone. My Rezound isn't my only phone now so I am willing to root if it will help the phone out.

 

[acejavelin]

Will I be able to get better battery life and signal strength? Battery life is my only real complaint with this phone. My Rezound isn't my only phone now so I am willing to root if it will help the phone out.

No... not by rooting in itself. Understand what "rooting" actually does, it just gives you the ability to access the entire device's filesystems in read/write. Essentially you can think of it as unrooted is the same as a regular Windows user, and rooted the user now has full administration rights. That and install a small binary called su (SwitchUser) and a managing application to prompt you to allow or disallow apps access to the su binary (ie. access to the root of the file system).

Now, rooting does allow more customization and changes that are not possible on a unrooted device, but for significant improvements to the battery on the Rezound (in excess of 2 hours screen on time/12-16 hours idle time) you need an extended battery. The Rezound, and others in it's early LTE genre, are just battery hogs, and the Rez is one of the worse because of the screen which is superior to just about every phone out there even today, problem is that it is also a battery hog.

Sorry to disappoint you...

 

[scott craft]

Let me rephrase my question a bit. If I rooted would I be able to get better radios and under/over clock the processor? When I used my Motorola DROID I did all that stuff to it. Currently with an extended battery if I have two hours of screen time it might last eight hours. I have signal problems with the phone and I think that is the biggest contributor to my poor battery life. When I get to a computer I'll post a link to the leaked software I'm using.

I'm using the leak in post #3 in this thread: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=246111

 

[dezymond]

You would be able to get better battery life with the help of battery saving apps such as Greenify, but as for radios depends on the official radios released. Even rooting you may not see much improvement in battery life because Rezound is notorious for fairly poor battery life. I rooted a friend's Rezound and he had the extended battery, I did all the tricks when it came to battery saving, but maybe managed to squeeze an extra hour or so.

 

[scott craft]

You would be able to get better battery life with the help of battery saving apps such as Greenify, but as for radios depends on the official radios released. Even rooting you may not see much improvement in battery life because Rezound is notorious for fairly poor battery life. I rooted a friend's Rezound and he had the extended battery, I did all the tricks when it came to battery saving, but maybe managed to squeeze an extra hour or so.

Thanks for the input. If I'm not going to see much improvement in battery life I'm not going to mess with it. I am going to get a newer phone in a month or so, I was just wanting to make my Rezound a bit more tolerable in the meantime.

 

[dezymond]

Thanks for the input. If I'm not going to see much improvement in battery life I'm not going to mess with it. I am going to get a newer phone in a month or so, I was just wanting to make my Rezound a bit more tolerable in the meantime.

Yeah I don't think at this point it'd be worth it. Plus your battery's life isn't quite as good as it used to be anyway if you stuck with the original one. If you are on the original one you are more than likely not to see much of an improvement.

I can tell you that these newer 4g devices have significantly better battery life and better radios than your Rezound though. I upgraded to the s4 from the Nexus and the difference in night and day when it comes to battery life. The first few 4g devices were battery hogs while these newer ones during idle are battery sippers.

 

[scott craft]

My wife has the Note 2 and that thing is amazing on battery life. Well it was prior to her candy crush addiction....

 

[gerrya]

I had the Rezound for 2 years and battery life was my biggest gripe. Had the Incredible before that and battery life was not good on that either. I just upgraded to the HTC One and I get triple the battery I did on the Rezound, very pleased. In a typical day with the Rezound at least 10 hours on 4G at work and the rest WiFi at home I was lucky to get 1hr 20min of screen time and normally had to give it a bump charge during the day. With the one I easily get over 3 hrs of screen time and not close to dead battery. the Rezound on 4g would eat battery just sitting with the screen off. The One seems to idle very well, hardly losing anything when not being used.

 

[acejavelin]

Well, again, back to the OP's original question. You will not get significantly better life without giving something up in return, assuming that there isn't some unusual situation causing abnormal battery drain. JuiceDefender can help, but it shuts off most radio functions except to sync at intervals, improvements can be slight to moderate (5%-20%) depending on how aggressive you go. If you root and go to a high performance, optimized operating system that is stripped down, like Infection, Tachyon, Tron, Talonm or something similar and you will get some improvement in battery life by underclocking/undervolting, but not significant.

There is no way around the fact that the major battery drainer here is the screen, it easily uses 50-70 percent of your battery in normal use and on 3/4 brightness will drain a battery a 2 hours with moderate use. No software tweaking or radio change is going to do anything to help that.

One more thing to keep in mind, rooting, unlocking, and S-OFF on the Rezound is different than most others. With HTCDev unlock you can root and flash ROMs, that is about it, you only get access to the recovery and ROM filesystem but even to flash kernels (ie. boot.img files) you have to do a little trickery from the command line. Just being unlocked will NOT allow you to flash radios or Hboot (the bootloader) or anything except recovery and ROM software. This is all most people need and it keeps the phone relatively safe from most possibilities of bricking the device well allowing sufficient access to customization for most users. The next step is not to be taken lightly, it is S-OFF and means Security Off, all mechanisms to stop you from doing anything are disabled, you can flash any radio/hboot/recovery/ROM you want at will, and the phone will do nothing to stop you, even if you do it wrong or load the wrong file, the phone will happily agree and brick itself when S-OFF without any warning to you. S-OFF requires a working Ubuntu distribution of Linux, a piece of copper wire, good timing, a little technical knowledge, and an ability to follow instructions to the letter.

Anyways, done spouting off, hope it helps put things into perspective... My recommendation, if you are not up for a new phone in the next few months, grab an HTC branded extended battery and back cover, unlock the phone, install one of the new JellyBean 4.2 or 4.3 ROMs and enjoy your Rezound for a while, it's real potential isn't even close to being unlocked on the stock ROM.