MG and I came at our EVO 4G reviews from different backgrounds. Even though I’m married to a BlackBerry with a little Droid action on the side and he’s a self-proclaimed iPhone fanboy, we both came to the same conclusion: the battery life on the EVO 4G sucks. Sorry, it does. But that’s the state of high-powered Android phones at the moment. Both the EVO 4G and Incredible are in the same boat. The 1GHz Snapdragon CPU makes the phones a joy to use, but drains the battery in no time. It’s not entirely the snappy dragon’s fault either. Android users have been putting up with these type of shenanigans since the G1 debuted in late 2008. It’s really sad that the battery life issue still exists and users have to work around it just to use the latest and greatest hardware.
I read every single comment on my EVO 4G review with the hope that I was wrong about the phone’s battery issue and was simply doing something wrong. But none of the suggestions significantly improved my EVO 4G’s battery life. However, by doing a bunch of little things, I extended it’s idle life from about 12 hours to 14:30 — this is the phone’s battery life with everything turned off besides 3G and it just sits. All the tweaks are easy to do, but you’re going to have to forgo some of the more fun things about Android. It’s a shame, really, that a user has to give up fun widgets, advance wireless connections, and auto setting just to squeeze a few more hours from their phone.