Hi everyone. So,
battery life is always an area that causes quite a few arguments between people
and it's a very subjective thing and it's probably one of the harder things to really
test on a device.
Now we've had this device for about three or four days now
and there's some interesting things we've already started to notice.
Certainly the additional battery that we have in here, this much larger
battery
is making a bit of a difference. Now there's always a trade-off because we
have a bigger screen
which is obviously going to impact on, you know, how much battery life we are
going to get
even though we've increased the battery size. Now,
overall I found the battery life to be pretty good, especially when using kind of all of the power
saving features that HTC provide here.
Certainly the power save mode, just the generic power save mode, not extreme mode,
does do a very good job at generally governing down
all of the kind of power draining features and giving you longer battery life.
However, ultimately when you're playing games or if you've got the screen brightness
turned up
full and so on and if you're running the device full tilt, it's not giving a massive boost to the
overall battery life compared to the HTC
M7. The One M7. It's still too early to really tell
what this battery is going to be like over weeks, months and years
but ultimately it does feel like it's giving more power for our buck as it were
than we were getting from the previous device.
The addition of the extreme power saving mode though
has proved to be extremely useful, especially when we consider
overnight power loss. One of the things that we tend to notice
is we put our device next to us when we go to bed,
we wake up in the morning and we've lost quite a lot of battery and lot of that comes
from
background tasks and so on running there draining the battery down.
By dropping the device into extreme power mode what we're able to do
is effectively cut probably 95% of the
power usage while it's just sat in standby. Now essentially
it cuts the device down to only some bare essentials,
making a phone call and receiving a phone call, your messages, your calendar, your mail and your
calculator. Basic features that you might consider to be
the lowest level functionality you would require from a smartphone. Now,
it has to be said that the mail, the message and the calendar app
these are using the native ones built into the device, they're not using Google
services.
Effectively these are off line at this kind of point,
You know, data signal operating. But what it does mean is that you've got
a device which can happily sit next to you while you're asleep, it's not draining your power but
if a phone call comes in
the phone will still ring and you can still answer that call
if necessary. Ultimately this saves you power
and I'm sure it's happened to many of you, you've woken up in the morning you don't
have time to put your phone on charge before you need to go out
but your battery is particularly flat. Here you've got the extra option
to well, conserve some of that power, especially
well, why do you need it background syncing while you're asleep? Not necessarily for the
majority of people
a feature they kind of need. This helps to work round the problem of people
not wanting to turn their phone off or disabling all of their radio
options but dropping the radio options that you don't need away
and just keeping with that phone or with the very basic syncs for your mail and
calendar etcetera. Really, really useful and I've found it's certainly
is worth around 20% of the battery drain overnight. That's
quite a considerable saving when you think about it. Overall we still need to
do a lot more testing with the battery on this device but we found that when playing
games
and when, you know, using the camera the battery drain is
no worse than any other leading smartphone on the market.
In some areas it may very well be an improvement because we have that slightly
larger
battery there as a ratio to the screen size where we're then obviously draining slightly more power.
Very impressed so far but it's going to take a few weeks,
potentially months before we really bed these batteries in and can really see
how they drain down over time
as well as obviously the mix of various features that we can use
and how long they will last for. So far I'm impressed enough to say
there is no issue here with this particular battery and in many
respects the additional software features that we've been provided with
create a very good opportunity for longer battery life with this device.
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