I'm seeing reports of bad battery life pretty much everywhere regarding the Evo. From TechCrunch (way near the bottom of my list of sites I trust), Engadget and other blogs, to real journalists like Andy Ihnatko and Walt Mossberg.
Battery life: Would it help if I got out and pushed?
The biggest Gotcha with the EVO appears to be its poor battery life. I can kind of understand reports (from Brother Walt and elsewhere) that the 4G service is a big power drain. It’s harder to suss out why the EVO kept dying in my pocket. I suspected that the phone was burning itself dry by constantly scanning for a 4G signal that wasn’t there. But even when I turned off the 4G, I could pretty much count on the EVO running out of juice well before the end of the day, even with light, intermittent use.
Whereas the Verizon Incredible’s battery endured well past dinnertime. After nearly a week’s worth of use, I’m convinced that a spare battery or a desktop charger is a required part of the EVO lifestyle.
And, when using 4G, the EVO’s battery runs down alarmingly fast. In my tests, it didn’t last through a full day with 4G turned on. The carrier, in fact, is thinking of advising users to turn off the 4G network access when they don’t think they need it, to save battery life. This undercuts the whole idea of faster cellular speeds.
Ok, great, there may be a song and dance I can do with firmware upgrades from random sources to improve things, but at that point the product has already failed me. If I buy an Android phone, I want it to be usable out of the box. Ok, there may be some bugs and quirks, but I'd expect those to be fixed and sent down to me automatically as updates. The second I have to go manually do some process to flash it with an unsupported update is the second it's no longer a phone to me. I like the ability to hack and tinker with my devices from time to time, but such activities should not be required to make the device usable to me.
And back to price. Sprint.com has the Evo page live now, and sure enough, minimum monthly charge for me to use the Evo with tethering would cost me $109.98 before taxes and fees. So yeah, the Evo is definitely dead to me, before I've even seen one. Being that it was on the top of my list for Android phones, that may be it for my consideration for a while. If I'm going to leave AT&T, it's not going to be for Verizon. Sprint at least offers me something above AT&T with possible 4G usage. Verizon would take things away, like using data while on a phone call (and yes, I do make use of that). So the Incredible and other "Droid" phones are out.
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