Well, it seems that the V3m’s battery life sucks. I am going to have to chalk this one up to Sprint’s stupidity. The same phone, with other carriers, is capable of lasting longer on the battery than Sprint’s. I even got their own employees to admit to this, but they insist that the fault does not lie with them (the company). They claim that the firmware for the phone is loaded by the manufacturer, Motorola, in a sort of sly way to pass the blame on to them. The problem is that I know the firmware is modified by the carrier and the manufacturer loads different firmware for different carriers. So that means they are really at fault. In the mean time, I have found a few ways to increase the battery life. The longest I have gotten it to last is 22 hours on a charge, but ATM, it has been 12 hours, and the battery indicator is showing 3 out of 3 bars, so maybe it will last longer this time. Anyway, the tips for a longer battery with Sprint:
- Disable EVDO and while you are at it, disable the other 2 options in the EVDO menu as well.
- Condition the battery: Drain the battery fully and change it fully. I used Quicktime Player to export one of the movies on my computer to 3G format, transfered it over to the phone via bluetooth, and played it till the phone turned off and refused to turn on.
- Turn off the animated background to the phone and tell it to turn off the screen as quickly as possible.
- Turn off bluetooth
This is what I have tried so far; we will see how it fairs. I am hoping I can turn bluetooth back on without much impact, but it is going to take some experimentation. Yes, mom, I know I need to take several samples of each to truly determine the impact :) Before doing all this, the phone would last at most about 14 hours before saying its battery was low. At least with the above, it can last the whole day. One side note: disabling the EVDO means that downloads will be much slower. I don’t care about this since I just want a small phone that I can use to talk, but others might. I will post more as I learn.
Edit: 55 hours, 1 of which was talk time, and some of that time was traveling with the phone in a pocket through areas without cell coverage. Not too bad.