Android battery life

[David Kramer]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> David Kramer made a point last night that the Motorola Backflip battery
> life is about 4 hours. In general, I've found that in comparison to the
> Blackberry, battery life is shorter, but in addition to the EDGE and GPS
> networks on the BB, I have 3G + 802.11g. If my usage patterns on the
> Backflip were the same as the BB, I would probably give the battery
> about 24 hours. Last night during the meeting, I had the Android fully
> charged until I unplugged it during Robert's talk, but I was using it
> during the talk to browse web pages related to SuSE station. I used it
> during the after-meeting meeting at the Brewery, and it was connected to
> the bluetooth in my car on the way home. At this time, the battery is
> registering 51%. Additionally, you can set the Battery Profile to
> "Performance Mode", "Smart Mode", and "Battery Saver Mode". The default
> out of the box is "Performance Mode" which is what it is currently set
> to. I'm going to play around with "Smart Mode" in a few days. basically,
> your have a number of options available to you to conserve the battery.
> you can turn off bluetooth and WiFi when you are not using them.  In my
> personal case, I generally can keep the battery at nearly full charge
> most of the time in Performance Mode. But, like the iPhone, it is a tool
> that is fun and easy to use.

You left out part of my claim.  The big "always-connected" selling
point, and built into the very desktop of the phone, is the continuous
updates from Facebook, GMail, and Twitter.  My claim was that when using
these kinds of features that talk to the server every few minutes, that
the battery life was jokingly short.

Right now I'm studying, but I hope to do a full post on my Backflip
findings later tonight.  In the meantime, I'll note that just yesterday,
an AT&T-compatible version of Nexus One became available (from Google;
AT&T isn't selling it yet).  Not that I'm likely to get one.  I don't
see Nexus One beating the iPhone with such poor marketing.  The Google
page on the phone doesn't even list what applications come on it, or
show what they look like, what the on-screen keyboard looks like,..  For
an interesting comparison, see
http://mashable.com/2010/01/05/nexus-one-vs-droid-vs-iphone/

As my cranky old AT&T 8525 (HTC TyTn (not TyTNII, but upgraded to
Windows Mobile 6, which is as far as it's going to go) starts showing
its age more and more (and it's just barely acceptable now), it seems I
am being forced to give up a physical keyboard, which is the only
barrier left to me getting an iPhone now that they've advanced to the 3Gs.