Need some honest opinions.

[mortalmallard]

My wife is upgrading from her HTC Thunderjunk. We are looking at the S3 and the Razr Maxx HD and had some questions. How good is the S3 battery? I would say my wife is a light user of her phone. Will she have to charge everyday like she did from the get go with her Tbolt? Will it last an entire day on a single charge? And just in general what are your thoughts on the different phones listed? Please give honest opinions, I don't need the typical fanboy answers and thank you in advance.

 

[paintdrinkingpete]

Came from Thunderbolt myself. For me, the battery is noticeably better on the S3. Not a HUGE difference, but significantly better none the less.

On a normal day, yes, I can survive on a full charge from wake up to bedtime....although on some days with heavier use I have plug in for a mid-day charge.

If battery life is very important, there's no comparison to RAZR Maxx, but yes, the S3 is better than the Thunderbolt in terms of battery life.

 

[RickG.]

If I could trade my S3 today for the HD razor I would. I have very bad reception in a very good 4g area. Verizon has told me point blank it is a hardware issue. New phones, sim cards, everything. Because my reception my battery is horrible.
I will say though when this phone is working it's awesome. My problem is I cant get mine working long enough periods of time to make it worth it.
When I am getting good reception I can go a day easy on a battery, with moderate use. I doubt it will realistically go more than a day though, even if she is a light user.

 

[MrDoh]

Yes, I have a Verizon Network Extender in my house that makes the phone work fine there. I use WiFi mostly, anyways, but when I take a 1/2 hour walk near my house and switch to mobile data for that (3G only, turning off the WiFi, already turned off 4G which is hopeless here), the battery goes down about 4% in that half-hour with no usage. If I were using only 3G all the time, you can see that in my area the phone would only get 12 hours with no usage (essentially on stand-by) because of the low cell strength in my area. If I were using it a lot during that time, I'd estimate maybe 4-6 hours or less between charges. And 4G is even worse, since it is even more marginal here. So yes, weak/marginal signal strength has a radical effect on the amount of time that you can use your phone without having to charge it. According to Verizon, I'm in an excellent signal area for cell phone, 3G and 4G. When I go outside my house, I'm lucky to see 2 bars on my phone, and where I take walks near my house, 1 to 2 bars.

Before this phone, I had an iPhone, same thing. The battery would go down very rapidly when the Network Extender wasn't on for some reason, even in WiFi only mode due to the low cell signal strength. Sucks, but the Network Extender at least makes it reasonable inside my house. Outside I have to go to "airplane mode" until I get to a higher signal strength area or until I absolutely need to use it. And 4G isn't even in the realm of possibility around here (the Network Extender has 3G, no 4G boost).

 

[GSDer]

Former Thunderbolt user here as well. I ended up getting the extended battery for it and then I didn't have any battery-related issues. I rooted it and tried different ROMs and was pretty happy with it, but the SGSIII was my last opportunity to get a new subsidized phone and still keep unlimited data. I actually wanted another HTC phone but there was nothing like the One-series available on Verizon and the SGSIII seemed to have the best specs of everything that I reviewed. I also liked the fact that Samsung was releasing essentially the same phone worldwide, which made for a great selection of accessories and also helped to encourage developer support.

I've only taken a cursory look at the new Razor Maxx HD, but it's definitely the choice for anyone concerned with battery life. I also really like the Smart Actions app/infrastructure that Motorola provides - it's much simpler to use than Tasker or Llama. If I had to go with a phone with a non-removable battery it would be the RAZR Maxx HD.

Too bad HTC didn't learn from Motorola with non-removable batteries - the new One-series that's finally coming to Verizon still has a battery that's too small.

Sorry for the long ramble, but I wanted to give you some background on my viewpoint.

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