An article at PCWorld provides some tips on how to maximize battery life and perhaps alter your charging habits for the new Verizon Droid released last week. The article goes over a common sense approach to why battery life “is what it is” on the Droid, but I’d like to punctuate a few of the points. It’s important that you temper what you read on the internet from people complaining about the need to recharge every 5 minutes (not the PCWorld article, but others) with a few considerations that seem to be conspicuously absent in a number of opinions.
Things to consider:
- Usage. How fast the battery drains during daily use will depend entirely on how much you use the phone. You’d think this would be common sense, but if some articles about consumption are to be believed, you’d think the phone didn’t ship with a battery at all. The battery should be more than adequate to handle 2 or 3 hours of talk time every day while running multiple background services. Sure, Motorola’s battery claim (like all other phones) is based on an antiquated “talk vs standby” model, hardly accurate given what these devices are capable of today, I’d be surprised if you had to stop and charge mid-day. If you aren’t a big user of social networking circuits, the number of background processes the phone has running is reduced considerably.
- You can disable services and components that you never use. Since I don’t connect to an Exchange server or have a bluetooth ear piece, I shut these functions of the phone down completely. Using the Droid is a bit like using a computer. Sure it comes with eleventy million USB ports, forty firewire ports, 7-channel audio, and a built-in coffee maker, but most won’t use every single component. It’s designed to provide the broadest possible range of component use and only a handful of users will use *everything*. Those who find a way to use every feature are as much the exception to rules for computer capability as the same group are the exception to smart phone usage.
- When you look at the parts of the phone that are using the most power, in almost all cases, “Display” consumes most of it. And, depending on how much you talk on the phone, it could be consuming the power by a huge margin. None of the other background services eat even close to as much juice as “Display” and “Voice Calls”.
- If you consider the demographic predisposed to buy a smart phone, it’s likely you sit in a cubical all day. If you are in this unenviable group, remember, you can charge the phone via the supplied USB cable directly from your computer (No. You don’t need the multimedia dock). It’s slightly slower than using the wall jack transformer, but only a bit.
- Having used the phone for a few days, It’s obvious that a smart phone is not JUST a phone anymore. As the PCWorld article touches on, consider that you are browsing the web, communicating with friends, family, and co-workers in multiple rich, real-time mediums; pulling down GPS-style navigation maps with voice-prompted directions; taking 3MP+ pictures (Droid does 5MP), shooting close to HD video… all from a device that just 3 or 4 years ago could only perform a fraction of these activities.
Having said all of this, like the PCWorld article states, battery usage shouldn’t be considered all that unusual given what the device will do. The blogosphere discussion on battery life, however, will certainly be an advantage for future AT&T/Apple advertising campaigns. I can see it now.