Why does it seem like all HTC android phones have terrible battery life?

[Shempster]

Battery life isnt so bad on the Inspire and it only has a 1250 battery , Not great but it can go an entire day.

Yea, I had an Inspire for 2 weeks & with a little app managment the battery life was not bad at all. As someone said - HTC may have alot of stuff going on behind the scenes.

 

[anon(40252)]

I went from the evo to dx. I have used the dinc for work and know several other evo and dinc users. I find that moto does have better battery in every case .. Under similar conditions.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

 

[li2327]

My HTC mytouch dies very quickly with normal use. But it charges very fast and I love that.

Sent from my Mytouch 4G

 

[Ryobi]

I used the DInc for several months. Regular battery, seidio's extended battery, verizon's extended battery. All schiznit! Terrible battery life. It's not the battery, it's the device.

Judging HTC's history, expect the TB to on par with the rest of their devices. If you need a smartphone to get you thru the day without being tethered to a charger, forget this.

Love Sense UI. Everything else, not so much.

 

[Bushido Brown]

HTC Hero / Droid Eris... crap battery life. Motorola Droid was much better in that regard, despite having a comparably-sized battery.

HTC Incredible... crap battery life. Droid X was much better in that regard, despite having a battery that wasn't that much bigger.

HTC Evo... crap battery life.

And now, it sounds like HTC Thunderbolt... crap battery life.

I really prefer Sense over Motoblur, and I like the Thunderbolt's additional RAM and storage space over the Droid Bionic, but it seems like the Bionic, with its monstrous 1930 mAh battery, might end up being the phone for me.

What does HTC do to their phones that gives them such poor battery life? Is there something in the Sense UI? Is there something about the hardware they use?

The Bionic has much faster RAM than the Thunderbolt. Don't let the numbers mislead you.

but I agree with your post, though. My Moto devices have all outperformed their HTC counterparts by a pretty significant margin.

 

[Bushido Brown]

not going to believe that until i see it. they might use less juice under ideal conditions, but in case of android where things are not very optimized, I am almost 100% sure it will use more juice.

There is a reason Moto decided to use 1930 mah batteries, and it is probably not to make us all happy with uber battery life. They are likely just aiming to match the battery life of single core phones, otherwise they would go for making the phone thinner with smaller battery (to be competitive with the obvious suspects)

And why in the world does Android need dual core? They need to get the OS sorted to the level of smoothness of iOS and Windows phone7 which both run great on a single core. Remember, the iphone has an 800mhz single core cpu with crappy graphics unit, yet it runs super quick and smooth.

The whole affair reminds me of lunatic approach that alot of laptop manufacturers used in last couple of years - stuff as much power as possible by using power hungry quad cores and massive video cards just to have the whole mess be bottlenecked by a slow hard drive and 1 hour of battery life.

These laptops did great in benchmarks, but a dual core with a low power video chip felt exactly as fast, but ran alot cooler and laster 5-6 hours on battery.

Its not a conspiracy theory. Its a general rule of computing that dual processors do twice the work with half the effort, which leads to more efficient computing. Obviously the Android SDK doesn't support dual threading yet, so any application that wasn't preinstalled onto the phone will likely not recognize the second core. If the second core isn't recognized, why would it drain MORE battery? That doesn't make sense.

The 1930 mah battery is the same as battery offered to the DX (extended) Maybe Moto figured they'd throw us a bone and make it the stock battery rather than forcing users to pay 50 bucks for it. Bravo to them, for that.

 

[juck]

Verizon dude said TB is getting 2-3 hours per charge

That is what the holdup is. Take it for what its worth. This lil geek seems to know his stuff however lol.

 

[brownhornet]

Evo and Bolt both have ginormous screens which is why their battery life is worse.

I had a MyTouch 4G, and its battery life was pretty damn good.

I think part of the issue is that HTC has a LOT of synching going on in the background, which eats battery life like crazy. Sense itself is just a battery hog, and HTC hasn't done a great job of tuning what processes are running.

Not really true. I have the Evo and if you look at the battery usage the display is usually near the bottom around 5% even when I have the phone on a lot. Having used sense and aosp roms, its most definitely htc sense. I ALWAYS get better battery life with aosp roms than sense roms.

 

[Chris Kerrigan]

Not really true. I have the Evo and if you look at the battery usage the display is usually near the bottom around 5% even when I have the phone on a lot. Having used sense and aosp roms, its most definitely htc sense. I ALWAYS get better battery life with aosp roms than sense roms.

Sense definitely seems to suck more juice than most others, at least from personal experience. While no Android phone I've ever owned has AMAZING battery life, my experience with Moto/Samsung has always been better than HTC devices in terms of how long they'll last on a single charge.

 

[Droid800]

Not really true. I have the Evo and if you look at the battery usage the display is usually near the bottom around 5% even when I have the phone on a lot. Having used sense and aosp roms, its most definitely htc sense. I ALWAYS get better battery life with aosp roms than sense roms.

The screen doesn't help. When you do ANYTHING that involves the screen (e.g. just using the device) you're using more power with that 4.3 inches than with a 3.7 or even a 4.0.

 

[brobertsleo]

Not really true. I have the Evo and if you look at the battery usage the display is usually near the bottom around 5% even when I have the phone on a lot. Having used sense and aosp roms, its most definitely htc sense. I ALWAYS get better battery life with aosp roms than sense roms.

That may be true on the Evo but on my Incredible my display is almost 60 percent of the battery usage percentage. I usually keep my brightness at 50 percent or so. Those SLCD screens do suck down some battery.

 

[Joelist]

Sense likely does have extra stuff running under the hood. However, the payback for that is a vastly superior user experience to Moto or Samsung. Really all that needs to happen is HTC making larger stock batteries for their phones - I had a DINC and once I put the 1750 in it (which does not even increase the size of the phone) battery life was just fine.

 

[brobertsleo]

Sense likely does have extra stuff running under the hood. However, the payback for that is a vastly superior user experience to Moto or Samsung. Really all that needs to happen is HTC making larger stock batteries for their phones - I had a DINC and once I put the 1750 in it (which does not even increase the size of the phone) battery life was just fine.

This is true. Also let's not forget that the Incredible doesn't have LTE. No really knows how big of a strain it will be on the battery in the Thunderbolt. If the "rumors" are true and the phone is really only getting 3 hours of battery life with LTE then HTC has some serious tweaking to do.

 

[Droid800]

This is true. Also let's not forget that the Incredible doesn't have LTE. No really knows how big of a strain it will be on the battery in the Thunderbolt. If the "rumors" are true and the phone is really only getting 3 hours of battery life with LTE then HTC has some serious tweaking to do.

There's nothing they can do. 4G tech eats batteries whole. Its outpaced battery technology, and the only thing we can do is live with it for now.

 

[am4966]

Since LTE is a huge drain on the battery they are gonna need to do some adjustments to the settings(or it would be nice) to where you have the option of just using LTE for Data and then it turns off.

If not it will be a pain in the A$$ to turn LTE off and on all the time. Battery R&D is coming along for cars, maybe they can use some of what they learn from that to help with the development for phones. Just a thought.

 

[bkorver]

This may sound crazy... but I am willing to plug my phone in every four hours to have the HTC user experience. Call me an HTC fanboy if you want, I don't mind. As long as I have Sense running on my phone I could care less....

 

[li2327]

This may sound crazy... but I am willing to plug my phone in every four hours to have the HTC user experience. Call me an HTC fanboy if you want, I don't mind. As long as I have Sense running on my phone I could care less....

I always have my phone on the charger when I'm not using it or when it gets to the halfway mark. The battery life doesn't bother me at all.


Sent from my Mytouch 4G

 

[stray]

If not it will be a pain in the A$$ to turn LTE off and on all the time. Battery R&D is coming along for cars, maybe they can use some of what they learn from that to help with the development for phones. Just a thought.

Eh... if there is any new battery technology on the horizon it'll end up in an Apple product first, not htc. I seriously think htc uses a dartboard to pick their battery capacities. I mean... 1500 mAh was clearly more than enough battery for the Evo, so their next round of 4.3" flagship phones obviously needed far less... right?

Then again when you can ride marketing, hype, and fanboys... who needs engineering?

 

[am4966]

Eh... if there is any new battery technology on the horizon it'll end up in an Apple product first, not htc. I seriously think htc uses a dartboard to pick their battery capacities. I mean... 1500 mAh was clearly more than enough battery for the Evo, so their next round of 4.3" flagship phones obviously needed far less... right?

Then again when you can ride marketing, hype, and fanboys... who needs engineering?

I didnt mean HTC would be the one that came up with said technology....I just think that there has been alot of money dumped into Battery Technology lately for Automobiles. So I dont see how some of whats been learned there cant be transformed or reversed engineered to work in upgrading a phones battery.

I could just very well be talking out my A$$ but, its a thought.

 

[Droid800]

Since LTE is a huge drain on the battery they are gonna need to do some adjustments to the settings(or it would be nice) to where you have the option of just using LTE for Data and then it turns off.

If not it will be a pain in the A$$ to turn LTE off and on all the time. Battery R&D is coming along for cars, maybe they can use some of what they learn from that to help with the development for phones. Just a thought.

Pain in the ass? Here are your steps to turn off LTE:

1) Add HTC 4G network power widget to your homescreen
2) Tap said widget
3) 4G network is off

If that's a pain in the ass, I'd hate to hear what you think of texting or listening to music...