Dude, this battery life is attrocious

[elohel]

I thought the battery life was going to be at least somewhat decent seeing the size of the battery. Now that I have it, I seriously cannot get more than half a day (12 hrs) of a small amount of texting, surfing the web and maybe 3-4 mins worth of phone calls.

I love this phone, but what good is a phone that's always dead? I have to charge it every night, then I have to re-charge it at like 7 pm if I wanna go out anywhere that night. WTF?!

I have bluetooth off, wifi off.. Is there anywhere I can change the settings on screen brightness, and turning off all the vibrations it does whenever I click anywhere? I'm desperate at this point to get a battery that can last me from waking up till going to sleep.

 

[kxs783kms#WP]

If you go to settings>all settings>system>power...you can tweak a few things there that may help you save a little battery power. Settings>all settings>system>touchflo....allows you to turn off the vibrations.(*Don't know how much this will help with your battery.*) Settings>all settings>personal>buttons>backlight....allows you to turn off the backlight auto sensor for your keypad.

 

[jawse]

Go into phone settings/personal/phone/network, change it from global to CDMA only, this will help greatly.

 

[ejonny]

Hmm... hadn't actually thought of that... but I think Jawse is right... I shut off the GSM radio (and took the SIM out) a while ago and I saw better battery performance but that it was because the battery was getting "burned in".....

 

[Aero]

generally speaking lithium batteries dont get much of a burn in. perhaps a 5% improvement.

What goes on more often than not is that when you first get a particular smartphone you are spending alot of time exploring the features the first few days and using a lot of battery.

I find the battery on the touch pro 2 considerably and clearly better than iPhone or Pre, and better than the prior trouch pro. So it is improved. On par with my HTC made Treo Pro? no but fallry close.

The OP is coming from a blackberry. There are a huge number of things this phone can do which a blackberry cannot, not to mention you are driving a screen that makes the blackberries look like led screens from a decade ago.

Anyone going from a blackberry to a WebOS, iPhone OS or Windows mobile, especially one with a huge 400x800 screen, and many features a blackberry simple doesn't have, is in for a shock.

 

[waazzupppp]

Wow, this is almost sad... I mean, when I got my first WinMo phone (the Moto Q) to replace my Dell Axim, the battery life was terrible. When I say terrible, I mean like 2 hours - maximum.

I then moved on to BlackBerry - the Pearl lasted days on end with little charge. Then off to the Storm, where the battery out of the box when about 3 hours - on a good day.

My new TP2 on Verizon ran about 6 hours out of the box with constant email pull (5 accounts every 5 minutes), Vcast Music (playing about 4 hour of the 6), and some browsing and RSS pulls (every hour)... Currently it is out to a solid 8 with a few power setting adjustments.

I think people are starting to expect phones to do way too much with the current battery technology. Do some homework, turn off the features you don't use, and get yourself an extra charger for your office desk and car and let your phone charge when you can.

 

[skfny]

Is there a poll on any of the various TP2 forums on other sites?

I think most users find the battery life to be awful, but you'll always get someone to jump in with stories about amazing battery life. I had the TP, every single tweak known to man to improve battery life, and multiple batteries. Battery life was still awful.

 

[monomer]

My last WinMo device before the TP2 was a Treo 750. With HSDPA active, the battery on that device was ill-equipped for the task.

As such, I'm more than happy with the battery life on my unlocked European-version TP2. I'm not sure if there are major differences between the different versions out there, but a lot also depends on individual usage and signal quality from the mobile network.

Personally, I've found locking the signal to a particular band (GSM/WCDMA rather than Auto) and disabling Push Internet (by using a .cab at xda-developers to stop the background service from actually starting) to be helpful for battery.

 

[kxs783kms#WP]

Monomer....when you lock the signal to one particular band, do you lower you chance of having a good signal? Or by doing this, what effect does it have on the rest of the phone besides saving battery life?

 

[monomer]

Oops sorry, I should have clarified!

Locking the band to either 2G or 3G is useful in areas where you have a low 3G signal. In low 3G areas, the device will switch to 2G when it thinks that the 3G signal is too weak, and then keep checking for a sufficient 3G signal. When it detects a strong enough signal, it will hop back onto 3G. Unfortunately if you're in an area with a weak 3G signal a lot of the time, this constant hopping between bands and checking the signal strength will drain the battery, so making the device stick to one band saves it a lot of work.

Also 2G uses a lot less battery power than 3G, so locking to 2G until 3G is needed had been my strategy with the Treo 750. I've found that I don't need to do that on the TP2, I just lock to 3G.

If you do a lot of travelling then I would guess that you would potentially have a lower chance of a good signal (e.g. locking to 3G and then moving through an area with no 3G signal at all).

I don't know of any effects on the rest of the phone.

My disclaimer is that I'm no expert on this area, but this is the way I've understood it from reading around the forums! (I'm sure someone will correct me if I've slipped up somewhere. )

 

[ejonny]

mono -
you are right on the mark. the same issue happens on sprint/verizon phones when there is spotty EVDO coverage and the phone has to fall back to 1xRTT (the cdma equivalent of 3g and 2g). but i don't know of a way to lock in just the 1xRTT.

 

[kxs783kms#WP]

Okay, I'm understanding now. I was wondering why my Verizon phone had the actual 3G symbol in the task bar. Because I was told I would only see EVDO on Verizon phones. But I guess because it was picking up the GSM band, it allowed 3G to be shown. Nice to see how I can save on my battery life.

 

[jfa1]

IMHO its a good idea to have a charger at home and a car charger and a charger for your office should you work where you have one. I have been doing that since my days with the treo 600 through the treo pro and if or when ATT comes out with their touch pro 2 the tilt 2 if in fact they do thats what I will still be doing.

 

[waazzupppp]

Verizon is rolling out their 3G symbols on phones moving forward as they begin to transition to LTE. EVDO will slowly become a thing of the past once the LTE network is up and running...

 

[tester24]

I so can't wait for the LTE network. Verizon has spent billions on theirs and it looks to be the first to get complete coverage. No more compatability issues, and at least the other major companies (save for sprint) will be going to the same technology. But I saw the GSM phones have better battery life than the CDMA ones do.

So far my battery life has been acceptable. I get through the day with txting calling and playing the occasional game. I am in the process of using the tweaks that are on a sticky thread on this site (getting rid of push internet, the better driver etc).

 

[rrife]

I'm getting 1-2 days with light usage in a really poor reception area.

 

[motty69]

Better than TP1

I moved from the HTC Titan (great battery life) to the VZW Touch Pro (horrible battery life) to my current VZW TP2. For me the battery life has been much better than the TP1 but falls short of the Titan. With light usage during the day and medium to heavy usage at night (pulling it off the charger at 6:00 AM) I still have around 40-50% battery left when I go to bed. I have poor data coverage during the day and ok coverage in the evenings at home. Don't get out much with 2 kids and a pregnant wife.

 

[jughead]

I personally think the battery life is better than my Titan.

 

[Lil_Sunshine#WN]

I moved from the HTC Titan (great battery life) to the VZW Touch Pro (horrible battery life) to my current VZW TP2. For me the battery life has been much better than the TP1 but falls short of the Titan. With light usage during the day and medium to heavy usage at night (pulling it off the charger at 6:00 AM) I still have around 40-50% battery left when I go to bed. I have poor data coverage during the day and ok coverage in the evenings at home. Don't get out much with 2 kids and a pregnant wife.

GSM phones get better battery life than CDMA. Hince the difference between the battery life of your Titan and Touch Pro.

 

[arthurbrownleeiv]

I've had my Touch Pro 2 from T-Mobile for 3 weeks now, and having come from the Touch Pro, and the origional Tilt, and a host of other WinMo smartphones in the past. So I believe I've a good grasp on what battery life could and should be, especially working with people with every othe type of smartphone you can imagine.

The Touch Pro's battery life was horrible out of the box, but with an upgraded ROM and radio, I found I never had issues making it through a day. On average it would be 2-3 hours of phone calls, a few hunrded SMS, exchange running the entire time, 15-30 minutes of web browsing, and a few games of solitare.

The Touch Pro 2 though, I've found running again a different ROM and radio than what shipped with it, I will wear out my bluetooth headset (6hr battery life on average) and still have 40-60% battery life yet with the same SMS, exchange, and etc running. I've been absolutely AMAZED at the battery life they've been able to get while pushing such a massive screen.

So to all of those thinking the TP2 has poor battery life, I'll say you certainly could be right of you are on the backwards CDMA network, but if you are on the GSM switch the ROM and radio and you'll be very happy with the results.