HTC Incredible battery life?

[windstrings]

Talk time does not interpret into real life where we have lots of down time on standby and or texting, etc.

The Incredible has two things in its favor the moto does not have.
1. OLED screens use comparable power if both the OLED and LCD are white,.. .but show anything lower.. with colors, grey or even black the power usage on the OLED can drop as low as zero.
Think of OLED as being off all the time and then turning to when needed to show you something.
Think of the LCD as being full brightness all the time and blocking what it doesn 't want you to see so you only get the spectrum of light or intensity it wants you to have.

2. The Incredibles 1000Mhz snapdragon processor only runs at 245Mhz when Idle.... Idle is where most of the minutes of our lives live... anytime we are not on the phone.. thats idle.... thats a lot of time.

So while "in use" the incredible uses twice the Mhz, while idle it uses half.... thats a better payoff.

I do hear the camera uses lots of juice.... but until we get a few days of real life experiences we don't really know how battery life will fall.

 

[junpar]

to the person recommending juice defender: It doesn't even work on CDMA phones. It may look like it, but it does not work, the creator has also said so.

 

[infinitempg]

to the person recommending juice defender: It doesn't even work on CDMA phones. It may look like it, but it does not work, the creator has also said so.

Just uninstalled it, couldn't figure out how to configure it anyway, just seemed to be pushing a paid advanced edition.

As far as juice use with screens, a little unclear on the Incredible. Are you implying that having a picture for a wallpaper (or animation) eats the batteries, too?

 

[Frunkis]

I just ordered an HTC Incredible today, and these posts kinda get me concerned. I am normally a very heavy consumer of data and heavy user of apps. Since the battery is removable, would this mean I can purchase a larger/higher capacity battery should the problem be significant enough?

 

[windstrings]

I just ordered an HTC Incredible today, and these posts kinda get me concerned. I am normally a very heavy consumer of data and heavy user of apps. Since the battery is removable, would this mean I can purchase a larger/higher capacity battery should the problem be significant enough?

Certainly... I've already talked to Seidio and they intend to supply a full accompaniment of accessories which include an extended battery.
The present one for the motodroid is 2800mah.. I would expect it to be comparable and since the battery covers almost the whole back of the phone it could be even bigger if they have an interest in doing so.

 

[rweckhoff]

If you're experiencing battery drain with the Incredible - remove the Flickr account from your accounts. Flickr (based on observations using SpareParts) is keeping a wake clock on the Calendar app. In a nutshell, the Incredible will not sleep and the calendar app will suck battery and cpu.

 

[iPirate]

Charged mine all night. Took it off the charger at 5AM. Used it VERY infrequently all morning. Battery indicator at yellow (very low) by 11AM. NOT GOOD!!!!!!!

I knew it was going to be bad but that seems unusable...:icon_eek:

 

[windstrings]

Guys.. don't sweat the yellow indicator... it doesn't tell you much.
Download a little app called battery left, it can show you a constant readout of your mv readings and that alone will give you a reliable indication of how much longer the phone will last.
That app also watches as it calibrates and learns.

I keep wifi and bluetooth enabled all the time, but don't keep any of the other social networks going.
In fact, I don't know if it really helps yet, but I also run task manger by rhythm software to kill things I don't want "like cityID, Footprints, Friend stream, Peep" as they love to turn on all by themselves.

I just got 18hours of battery life from my very first cycle.
I was on the market a lot and played with camera and video a little.

Sorry, I didn't record my usage stats.

Seidio will be releasing an extended battery soon too.

 

[Flandry]

A coworker bought the Incredible. She had it fully charged when she came in, but had to plug it in to charge just 5 hours later. I checked and she had Bluetooth, Wifi and GPS all turned off. She had not gotten around to downloading any apps, so the phone was running pure stock. I did notice she had the default of automatic brightness on. So we turned that off and set the screen to about 1/3 brightness.

We also saw that her signal strength occasionally fluctuated between 2 bars with 3G and no bars with no 3G. My Droid set side-by-side maintained a constant 3 bars. I know folks have said the bars may not indicate true signal strength. But we tried watching the same movie trailer on Youtube on both phones. My Droid repeatedly loaded and ran the trailer just fine while her Incredible never was able to download more than about 10%-20% of the video before hanging. This makes me wonder if the battery and signal problems might be related. Perhaps the short battery life some are reporting is because their phone keeps having to hunt for a signal. It'd be interesting to see how many people reporting short battery life are also having signal problems.

She's going to fiddle with her Incredible over the weekend, looking at battery and signal, and we'll see on Monday how things play out.

 

[smithrep]

I love the Incredible except for the battery life issue. I unplugged mine this morning at 8:30 and now at 11:40 I am down to 58 percent and haven't made the first call. I just took the flickr account off as instructed above, I hope that helps.

Let me ask this, do the clocks (like the huge one that came on it on the front screen) continuously run and drain down the battery? How about the other widgets?

 

[windstrings]

Couple of issued to consider:
1. When a battery is brand new.. it really needs a deep charge "for several cycles" before you can insure its conditioned and all the cells are equalized... long periods of sitting on the shelf can allow weaker cells to drop... and when the charger quits putting in amperage and simply holds the voltage around 4230mv "battery protection prevents higher voltage" it takes time to get the weaker cells up to par with the stronger... once thats done, you can use it as normal.

2. Back to the first thought.... the meter will show full when its not really full.. some people pull it off the charger and go about expecting full battery capacity.
If you install "battery left" or monitor you mv readings with another app, expect its not fully charged "regardless of the indicator" until you reach about 4230ish "while on the charger" or about 4180 or so "immediately after taking off the charger.

A good rule of thumb is to just charge your battery when you sleep at night and normally it gets you through the day.. I you need a refresher because if heavy use.. fine, just do the longer charge once you go to sleep.

3. If she is in a marginal signal area the phone polls and eats up lots of battery trying to find a signal.

4. Also.. better not to mess locking onto a wifi signal, if the signal is marginal... all that does is cause the phone to hesitate and not switch to 3g because its trying to negotiate the wifi signal all the time.

5. The incredible has lots of social apps that run in the background ... not sure how much battery they eat.. but if your locked onto any, they can keep the phone from sleeping like it should.

I personally use "task manager" by rhythm software so I can pick and choose what I want to autokill verses ignore.
Things I personally autokill "works whenever the screen is off" are:
Mail "this is not gmail", Footprints, Peep, Friend stream, and photobucket".

I don't appreciate apps running without my permission.. if I want them, I'll pull their chain!

 

[Flandry]

1. When a battery is brand new.. it really needs a deep charge "for several cycles"...

This is true. As is the fact that anytime someone first gets something new that's cool, they're going to run down the battery way faster. Her experience with the Incredible after 24 hours is one that has provided considerably less battery life than I experienced after 24 hours with the Droid with heavy use. But this initial result can't be said to be a definitive conclusion about the battery. But it is something that bears investigating.

2. Back to the first thought.... the meter will show full when its not really full.. some people pull it off the charger and go about expecting full battery capacity... A good rule of thumb is to just charge your battery when you sleep at night and normally it gets you through the day..

She'd had the phone plugged in overnight. As you say, this should have been sufficient to achieve a full charge.

3. If she is in a marginal signal area the phone polls and eats up lots of battery trying to find a signal.

Exactly. This appeared to be a real problem with her Incredible vs. my Droid. I'd like to see more people chime in on this to see if there's a cause/effect relationship.

4. Also.. better not to mess locking onto a wifi signal, if the signal is marginal... all that does is cause the phone to hesitate and not switch to 3g because its trying to negotiate the wifi signal all the time.

She did have Wifi off.

5. The incredible has lots of social apps that run in the background ... not sure how much battery they eat.. but if your locked onto any, they can keep the phone from sleeping like it should.

This has definite possibilities. Usage screenshots posted online seem to indicate the System usage on the Incredible is 4-5 times higher than it is on the Droid.

I personally use "task manager" by rhythm software...

I recommended she download Taskiller from the marketplace so she can at least see what's loaded/running.

 

[manilaboy1vic]

i disabled flickr in accounts, will see if that helps.. i made it thru most of the day yesterday.. tho..

is the ext battery gonna be oem size or will you need a new cover?

 

[mjs31]

Battery left is giving me 15 + hours with my current use. I would say that is about average.

 

[shamus]

i disabled flickr in accounts, will see if that helps.. i made it thru most of the day yesterday.. tho..

is the ext battery gonna be oem size or will you need a new cover?

Last I heard they were coming out with both. One a little more capacity that fits OEM and one much more capacity that comes with a new door.