Battery life?

[Dishe]

Is it normal that I can barely last a day on a charge with this device?

My GSM devices could go at least 2 days without charging. I don't mind charging every night, but right now it would be dead before my day is over if I don't charge it at my desk too. That can't be right?

[SultanH]

I ran bunch of test on this before i decided to keep it. One day I set it up without anything running. from 8am to 8am the next day the battery power was still 100%. Another test I did was playing audio. it went about 6 hours and I still had 20-30% battery remaining. it was loosing a about than 10%-15% per hour.

The problem is once you go on data mode it stays there and doesn't come out when it doesn't need it anymore and that drains the battery super fast. These type of programs:
-weather check
-Windows Live (for maps and searches)
-traffic
-e-mail (if you have autocheck on)

When you see the data mode (the two arrows that replace the tower icon) appeaing go in the comm manager and disable the data mode. That's obviously not a permanent solution but until figure out how to have the programs that use the data connection to return the radio to audio mode when they are done using the data mode, you can save some power.

I hope that helps.

[dew.man]

The Mogul's battery life is definately very sensitive to the software you have running.

When I first got mine, it would barely last me 8 hours of light usage before getting the critical battery alert.

A week or two later, after a few charge/discharge cycles and a ton of configuration/software tweaks, my battery lasts all day, and is only down to 60-70 percent when I go to plug it in at night;)

[kmartburrito]

Just to extend on what was already said, if you have outlook set up to sync automatically, set it to 5 minutes instead of "as they arrive." This made a big difference for me.

I use BatteryStatus to monitor my battery drain, and it drains at about 30-40 mA when the screen is off and when it is on and dim, around 85-100 mA or so when nothing is really active and I am at the today screen.

[caxiem]

From my experience, the thing that affects battery life the most is the signal quality of the phone/data service. If I'm in a location where the signal is 0 or 1 bar, then the battery will drain to 20-30 percent in about 4 hours. With a strong signal, the battery only goes down to 50% for the full day.

[TC1]

From my experience, the thing that affects battery life the most is the signal quality of the phone/data service. If I'm in a location where the signal is 0 or 1 bar, then the battery will drain to 20-30 percent in about 4 hours. With a strong signal, the battery only goes down to 50% for the full day.

Bingo ;)

It's not the PDA part that is draining it, it's the RF part.

[Dishe]

Bingo ;)

It's not the PDA part that is draining it, it's the RF part.

Right, so I've established that my phones lasts more than a day just fine if I'm in good service.

But is this "normal" for a CDMA phone to do? My old GSM phones could go into "searching..." for hours at a time and still have more than 50% at the end of the day. I know CDMA phones use a little more power then their GSM counterparts, but I didn't know it was THIS bad! Or is this just a bug in the system that can be fixed in the future? Being my first CDMA device, I can't tell yet what's normal or not.

[TC1]

GSM and CDMA RF transceivers manage power output differently. What's ironic, is that in theory CDMA handsets are suppose to manage battery power better than their GSM counterparts, sincd CDMA tranceivers continually vary the power output to match the cell tower coverage, while GSM tranceivers power a steady-state output.

Now that's in theory.... I've read numerous ancedotal articles that have compared sibling phones (same model, but one is GSM and one is CDMA) and the GSM for whatever reason performs better in terms of battery life. I know.... doesn't make sense. Two theories have been proposed by folks, one being the actual coverage for a particular area and the other that Qualcomm just basically did a poor implementation of the CDMA design in their chipsets (which are widely used by everyone).

Wish I had a better answer, but I don't have any hard evidence at the moment to say it's definitely this or that explains the difference.

[borealcool]

There is also a configuration issue whereby data connections are not terminated after an application is done with it. Email automatic Send/Receive being one of them. Shuting down the data connection through HTC's Comm Manager doesn't solve it either. I installed this software (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=310087) that allows you to manually enable/disable data connections, mapped it to button 5 and have seen my battery life almost double. This of course defeats automatic email reception though.

[jaslo1]

I have changed my battery drain from 90% a day to just 10% a day by turning off bluetooth discovery! I can leave bluetooth on all day, but by turning off discovery, it seems to save a tremendous amount of power.