I've had my Thunderbolt for about a week. The battery started out useless, and became somewhat less useless over time. I made a very hasty decision to order an HTC extended battery.
While I was waiting for Amazon to ship my new battery, the battery life improved considerably after my first "full-discharge" cycle, and slowly climbed into acceptable (for me) over the following few days. I still found myself nervous when away from a charging station for more than 8 hours, but I could get through a day, usually.
I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact that I finally ditched the "automatic" screen brightness that keeps the screen WAY too bright and got an app to change brightnesses to specific levels, then started running the screen at 10% for regular light, 20% under flourescent light, 40 or 70% in the car, and 100% only in full sunlight). The screen is always the #1 drain, but I brought that from 85-90% down to 60% just with better "brightness management".
Once I did that and turned off the LTE battery, I could just barely make it through a solid day without a recharge, but I was putting the phone on the charger with the low battery warnings going off every night if I didn't do a mid-day recharge (note that this was not true when I was at home - I was putting it on charge with 30-40% left at night, but my cell signal at my desk at work is really poor, so that eats battery up).
Last night, my extended battery came in. I put it on the charger and let it charge up.
At 1AM, I got a support call. I unplugged it (the battery had thankfully charged to 100%, which was a long climb), and ended up running a 2-hour 3-way conference call on my Thunderbolt, while pulling data off Wifi at the same time. I also ran "OpenSignalMaps" on the drive in to work and that tends to pull a lot of battery. In addition, I noticed that my GPS was running continuously for some odd reason after I updated Facebook, so I restarted the phone 4 hours ago to clear that up. So I'd say my usage patterns were somewhat higher than normal today.
It is now 10 hours after I unplugged the phone on the very first charge of the extended battery, I'm at work where my phone struggles to get signal, and my charge is currently sitting at 58% according to "Battery Indicator" by Darshan LLC.
I'm going to see if I can manage the timing for a "full discharge" (to low battery alarm) this evening and get this battery calibrated properly, but so far I'd fully expect the stock battery to be at about 20% and starting low-battery alarms by now, given how much the phone was used this morning.
I actually like the HTC extended battery and what it does to the shape of the phone. The edges give my fingers something to grip and my hold on the phone feels more secure than the old flat back, and the phone (while monstrously heavy by most cell phone standards) is still lighter than most "cordless" phones I've owned, so holding it up to my ear for two hours was in no way uncomfortable.
So far, it looks like the extended battery is going to give me more battery life than the stock battery in my much-dumber Blackberry Curve 9300, which makes me
Update: I'm at nearly 12 hours since I unplugged it, battery charge is at 50%, even with all the "heavier" usage today. In other words, with the stock battery that has about half the capacity, I'd probably be looking at a low battery alarm about an hour ago. I'll be at a meeting until 9:00 tonight, so this will be a 20-hour day, let's see if the battery can keep going that long with higher-than-normal use on its very first charge. If it can, I'll be deeply impressed.
Second update: 5:10PM. 16 hours in, battery is at 26%. Will it manage another 4 hours? Time will tell.
Final update: Battery ran out and phone shut down at about 9:15PM. It made 20 hours, just barely. More importantly, the battery is now calibrated and I get to see how it performs for real.
It took from 9:30PM to about 5:30AM to charge back up (on an 800mAh charger, I'll try it again on the stock 1A charger tonight). That's a long charge cycle.
I unplugged it at 6:15 and it's now about 10:15 AM. In that 4 hours, I've dropped to 85%. Not too shabby at all. I'm going to try using the phone a bit with my marginal signal today, and see what I've got at the end of the day. But I'm pretty confident I can get a long day out of it pretty easily now (yesterday's 20-hour debacle was a little unusual).
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