When it was announced that the HTC EVO 4G LTE would come without an easily removable battery, there was a kerfuffle. Arguments were made that 2000mAh simply wasn’t enough, there was no way a phone could last a day, and that the new EVOs were now no better than Apple.
My experience has been varied. The first full charge day I had was my second day of owning the new EVO. When I got the phone it was in the 20% range, and I played with it pretty hard the first day. The second day started at 9am on a full charge. The battery would have lasted me 29 hours given my usage, but it was plugged back in at midnight with about a 30% remaining charge.
The fourth day my battery life took a hit because of roughly 2.5 hours of Radiant Defense, and it was in danger of dying at about 11 hours. This is actually still an impressive showing since my HTC EVO 3D could eat up a Seidio 4000mAh extended battery in under 6 hours of similar gameplay.
Last night I traveled to Madison, TN, and while not using the net, not playing games, etc., and with Sprint coverage like it is there (between zero to two bars of signal), I was in danger of the phone dying from a full charge in just slightly over 4 hours.
I attached the Battery Monitor Widget profile, starting right when I pulled into Madison TN. From 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. I lost 45% of the battery. This was sitting in a restaurant with no data signal, one bar if I put the phone in the window, no internet.
I told my wife to turn on WiMAX on her OG HTC EVO 4G, and she got a nearly perfect 4G signal. I sat and cursed my new LTE technology and Sprint’s lack of 3G in the area.
By 7 p.m., we went to meet some friends and were in an area where there was no signal, so I put the phone on a portable charger I have, made a call to verify I still had that ability, and ignored the thing.
Now, knowing the situation I was walking into, I could have turned off background data so that only the cell radio was using any juice; this would have probably netted me another six to ten hours, but what good is manual battery management if you accidentally drive into a situation like that and don’t pay attention to the battery drain? I mean, who does except when testing?
So the worst case real world run was yesterday, and looks to be a little over 4 hours. Best case real world run I’ve done so far would be close to 30 hours. The best test scenario I’ve managed to run on short-scale would be around 51 hours, and the worst drained the battery in 1.5 hours.
Your mileage may vary.
Anyone else show a HUGE power draw on the screen, like 50-60%, even with screen mostly in standby and auto brightness on? My phone’s pretty much stock aside from installing SuperSU as detailed a few articles back. I’m constantly crashing too, with reboots at random and terrible WiFi reception. Did I just get a bad phone?
Have you tried doing a reset with power, vol up and down? It emulates a battery pull. I’ve had a few issues with mine, but doing the reset usually fixes it.
Can you explain why the phones battery was so bad (4 hrs vs 30 hrs!!!) when you visited TN? Why would having no signal cause a battery to die faster? This doesn’t make any sense to me as it seems counter intuitive. One would think that not using a phone because you have a poor signal would extend the battery life vs using it with a good signal and doing some heavy lifting. Does searching for a signal drain battery or something? I’d love to understand.
When you have poor reception the phone is constantly searching for a signal thus more energy consumption. Same thing happens with wifi and bluetooth; leave those antennas on and you will see more of a power drain as opposed to when you turn them off. With my OG EVO I have to remember when I have no signal to turn of 3G and in some cases put it on air plane mode to conserve battery life.
Because the phone is working really hard trying to get a signal. It listens constantly with the ‘volume’ turned up to max, and it transmits constantly at max power trying to reach a cell tower.
The phone is constantly talking to the tower, whether to say “hey, I’m alive” or to request data.
Imagine you’re talking to someone 4 feet away.
Now imagine you’re trying to have the same conversation and they’re 20 feet away. You’re expending more energy to yell.
Where I was in the worst case scenario was basically my phone attempting to talk to someone on the other side of a football field.
The more and more things I learn about the evo lte the more I am staying away. First came the news of non removable battery, then the mixed reviews on battery life then the horrible multitasking that is non existent and now I have heard that htc sense keeps rebooting on a lot of phones. I’m sorry but I will not be wasting my 2 year discount on a phone with this many issues. I would rather keep my 3d and wait for ics and maybe by december htc will have fixed the issues or come out with a different phone for sprint.
The battery life is completely due to location and application. In a good area and with my application of the phone I would get 30+ hours. Out in a place with no cell service, blah!
Sense keeps rebooting? I have not heard that, please point me to people who have this problem, I’m interested in it.
Multitasking fix is a memory manager tweak, not really sure why they shipped like they did.
The sense rebooting issue was in a forum on androidcentral, with the title something like this “why i’m returning the evo lte after 10 days” or something like that. About 8-10 people were reporting the reboot issue.
I’m glad that when the phone has a good signal the battery life is good, especially since sprint is upgrading their network all across.
I will see what happens with the multi task problem.
Can you elaborate on what exactly the multitasking problem is and instructions on how to fix/change settings?
I feel the need to point one thing out. When the EVO 4G (original) came out, there were data issues, batteries were melting, screens were fried, we had the invisible touch problem, wimax was unavailable, RSA keys were invalid half the time.
Look back at the bug list after launch of that phone, it’s been a couple of years but it was a mass of people calling it a failure.
The 4G LTE is pretty sweet. I really liked most of what stock has to offer, although I had to root it after a week because I was missing my backups and needed to restore a couple of my apps.
Right now I’m working on a battery saver piece, which in the scenario above theoretically would pick it back out to about an 18 hour run time.
Unfortunately I have to get back to the same location to accurately compare.
It’s not a bad phone, it’s like what the next EVO 4G should have been, I’m satisfied after a week.
Thank you for clarifying. I agree that this phone is a worthy successor to the OG EVO, whereas the 3D was not. The build quality is exceptional and I am looking forward to AOSP ROMs being available for this device.
My battery life has been amazing. I am still stock, and don’t plan on rooting it for a while. I have not had it run out of power on me once since I received the phone. I usually unplug it at 8am m-f and 10am Sat and Sun. During the week I plug it in at around midnight, and on the weekends whenever I get home, usually around 2 or 3am. During the week I usually plug the phone in to charge with about 60 to 70% battery left. (I just like to start fresh every day at 100%) On the weekends I use it much more, so I may have about 40 to 50% left on the battery at that time. I have not experienced any problems at all.
As for reboots from Sense, I also have not experienced any of those either. I also have not heard a single person claim they have either on this site or any others as well as people I know who have them.
If you don’t want to get the phone, then more power to you, but don’t come here and make things up about a phone that so many people love and have not had any major issues with. Go find the right phone for you, and enjoy it the way we all enjoy our Evo LTE’s. Good luck in your search.
Sorry, this piece was not supposed to go live yet, was finishing up and going to add a couple of more things / thought I scheduled it for tomorrow…
Interesting that folks are saying there are so many problems with this phone. I am currently at stock 100% and I am having zero issues with the phone. My batter life has been so much better than my OG Evo, I easily get through the day with my normal usage and even on a very high usage day I will get to bed with about 10% or a little less left.
I have pretty poor reception in certain areas of the city, like on Sunday night down at the ball park, I had no data at all and only one or two bars, so I finally just turned data off entirely. If there is one complaint I do have it is that the data reception does seem pretty spotty compared to my OG Evo, but in general I am very pleased with the new device. I will be rooting shortly if only to be able to tether my phone and kindle Fire again like I used to be able to with my OG Evo.
I have had my EvoLTE for about 3 weeks now (since May 24th) and I have not had a single issue with it. It’s been rooted ever since XDA went live with the root process. Everything runs great… battery life… speed… the whole 9 yards! My phone has yet to do any of those notorious reboots that I keep hearing about. I must admit that this is hands-down, the best phone I have ever had…and I have all 3 EVOs. I’m taking my phone off the charger at about 6am every morning and not putting it back on until about 10pm and the battery still would have about 30% left on pretty regular usage.
I’m starting to get the feeling that those folk out there who are bashing EvoLTe either got a bad phone, have some settings jacked-up some where or are simply in search of the “PERFECT” phone, which doesn’t exist and probably never will.
Sorry for those of you who disagree and are not able to reap the benefit, but this go round…HTC and Sprint just may have gotten it right!
I’ve had nothing but amazing battery life and I’ve had the phone for a week. Seriously I use my phone a lot too. I went on vacation where I was roaming the whole time and never got into even the yellow. I watch you tube videos a lot surf the net. Txts a lot of calls. Pics video. This battery is amazing. It reminds me of the 3500 mah I had w my og EVO. So people don’t worry about the non removable battery bc it kicks ass. As I said I still haven’t seen even the yellow yet and my usage is heavy. Even with roaming voice and data all day amazing. You need to switch to cdma only until LTE arrives maybe that’s why. EVO is king absolutely amazing device. And I’m coming from the og EVO and then the 3d now to this. Good job HTC . I appauld you.
Yeah, I love this little phone.
My Batt life has been hit of miss honsetly. I have such terrible reception at my job (where I spend 9 hours a day) thats its hard to say. I actually turned on my OG EVO today and just watched the signal. I have to say it seems like the EVO LTE has some issue with holding a 3G signal. MY OG EVO never lost 3G like this phone does.
Got a question for you on the hit or miss. Did you remove the black plastic backing when you got the phone to poke around in the phone?
If so, when you put it back on is there a bulge in the center? Might be the antenna connector is not making contact.
Yeah my wife has the new EVO LTE and her battery life has been amazing. She isn’t a super heavy user and it lasted her something like 48 hrs without a charge. But even on days when she used it heavily it still easily lasted all day with juice to spare.
Everytime I pick it up I can’t get over how thin and light it is compared to my EVO 3D or any other phone Ive ever seen for that matter.
She hasn’t had any reboot issues at all either. All in all I’d say this has got to be one of the best phones EVER made.
This blog entry proves the point I was making: If you live in LA or Seattle you won’t have an issue. If you live in most of the rest of the country, it’s extremely nice to be able to run 2 batteries. Absolutely nothing compares to how easy it is to pop a fresh battery in after losing 45% in 2 hours.
I work in a basement. For some reason, I have good coverage days and bad coverage days even though I sit in the same place every day. Some days my battery lasts a really, really long time, others it drains a lot. Seems to have a lot to do with how cloudy/rainy it is (sort of by Seattle area). So I just can’t depend on a phone that doesn’t have a replaceable battery. I hope HTC is listening because the OG EVO 4G was my favorite phone ever.
Oh, and just wait till your battery is a year old.
At a year old you will replace the battery if it fails?
It’s not that hard of an engineering feat to remove the “non-replaceable” battery. About on par with replacing an iPhone battery
I’d say that whole non-replaceable argument is half invalid. Valid in that it’s incredibly useful to be able to swap out batteries on the fly, invalid in that the battery can be replaced fairly easily and you’re not going to have to chuck your phone.
I suppose. For most people, that’s not really an option. For you and I it is. I still do not understand the benefit to making them non-removable – my Galaxy SII epic 4G touch or whatever it’s called is a little too thin and light for me so I use a case – never used a case on my Evo 4G. Why do they do it?
I guess a theoretical benefit is the attempt to produce a “this is it” phone that carries the EVO name and quality, yet also appeals to people who like iPhones.
With the technology, software, and OSes out today it’s next to impossible to please everyone, but they’ve done something pretty amazing with this (at least at week 1 I still find it amazing).
I mean, I’m a modder, I love rooting things, I love root… I still didn’t root mine for about a week… in my time that’s like months worth of stock time
I think they made a mistake by not allowing the battery to be swapped out, same as I think the iPhones not allowing it is absurd. However they aimed at the everyday average EVO user, and the average EVO user is not going to be able to kill this thing in a day. I mean, I can – my setup is checking email constantly, several location aware apps, checkins, latitude, etc.
Me, I can. I take pride in that I can kill a 4000mAh battery in under 4 hours on my 3D. I’m the fringe. This phone, man, do not know how to describe how impressed I am at my average being over a day without a charge needed.
But yes, mistake was made by HTC, being remedied by several other companies in about a month
Paul, I have removed the black plastic a few times to get my SD card in and out but have noticed no bulges in the back though. I will see what it is like without the palstic on though..
The idea is to check and make sure the gold plastic pieces are making a correct connection since your exterior antenna is in the plastic piece. Probably not the problem, but can be an issue.
Is there any app or setting via root or another method that could change the behavior of the cell radio trying to get a signal constantly when it can’t find a good one?
I’m thinking along the lines of the 4G tweaks that people used to keep the connection longer or connect with a weaker signal, only the opposite to conserve power in those situations.
If you have your MSL I think the settings are in the EPST ##data# but not entirely sure… will check later
I use an app called Autopilot. It will turn on airplane mode automatically if the signal gets too weak. Having said that, I’ve noticed that it’s been crashing on my new LTE (worked fine on my rooted old Evo).
I have had the EVO LTE since the release and had no problems.Then today I saw exactly what you are talking about with the battery.I was in a bad to no signal zone ,in the past I would get 19 hr-a day +.Now my phone is 20% with 12hrs with not using the phone at all.It has never been that low.I see what a lot of people are talking about in forums bad zone = dead phone.
Most phones act the same way if you spend a large amount of time in an area with nearly no signal… There’s no sense keeping it on scanning for towers in those situations, just turn airplane mode on. I do this bi weekly with Tasker when I spend 4 hours in a lab that blocks all signals, pointless to waste battery scanning.
Juice Defender Ultimate! The app manages ALL of your antenas and can be customized to allow other apps to override JD as needed. I used this app on my OG EVO with great success so it was only natural to use it on my LTE. I have found that it works even better. You can try the free version and then upgrade to Ultimate if you find that it works for you. Overall, just as the original EVO was the best phone I had ever owned, and the only phone I have ever kept for two years, this EVO is the best phone I have owned to date.
BTW, removable batteries take up more space for several reasons.
Hey David, would you mind being a guinea pig for me for a day? I need someone to run an LTE with a paid copy of JD for a day and just let me know what their battery life was at the end of the day of regular use and also a day or non-juicedefender use.
For me, I installed it default settings with manage wifi and managed to blow through my battery in half the time. That didn’t seem right on the LTE on a non-heavy day.
Sure Paul, consider it done. I just started my day on a fresh charge with JD on. I will let you know the results.
Hey Paul, I used my LTE for a full 24 hours without JD and had about twenty percent left at the end of the day. That never would have happened with my OG EVO. I also used the phone for 24 hours with JD set to ‘agressive’ and ended the day with fifty percent. I decided not to charge at the end of that 24 hours and rushed out of the house the next morning. I was able to go another eighteen hours before having to charge. I consider myself a moderate user who uses most, if not all of the functions of my device on any given day. This includes several 15-30 minute phone calls and 2-4 hours of continuous 3G data usage while I am stuck in my chair for dialysis treatments.
Bottom line, I get great battery performance from this device with or without JD, but JD makes a positive impact for me. Considering that I used to carry a backup battery everywhere I went to keep my beloved OG EVO running, this phone rocks. Now if Sprint would get their act together and activate its LTE network here in Los Angeles…
Here, here, David! I used Juice Defender on my OG EVO (along with a custom kernel) and my battery life was EXCELLENT! Though I’ve yet find a need to run JD on my LTE, there’s no doubt in my mind that this would aid those in seek of more battery life.
Also, in regards to your comment on the removable batteries taking up more space….I know for a fact that one of the reasons they take up more space is that they have to put a protective casing around them for handling vs. simply allowing them to reside in thinner pouch as the non-removables do.
Hey Easymoney, I just read an article recently that outlined information regarding the need for the battery to be wrapped. Seems like such a small thing, but obviously makes a big difference in a small space.
Just to let you guys know yesterday after 15 hours of real heavy use. I’m talking YouTube videos hundreds of pics and txts and phone calls my battery was at 63%. The battery for me has been nothing short of outstanding. Really can’t get over how great this is!
And the people saying dead zone equals no phone like I said I was on vacation for a week roaming the whole time voice and data and still I had amazing battery life. I still haven’t seen the yellow. Maybe some people received bad phones. Bc mine is amazing. This battery kicks major ass. In the great words of flossycarter major win! This phone is a certified go!!
A dead zone and roaming are two different things.
Dead zone = no signal, roaming = no sprint signal. I can roam into a VZW CDMA tower and use the same mAh output.
I agree that the phone is a win.
I was getting pretty bad battery life for the first week and wondered why everyone else I saw talking about their new LTE was getting great battery life. Just got/installed an airwave a day ago and my battery life is amazing now. Although I knew I had pretty bad coverage in my house, where I spend a majority of my time, I didn’t realize it was sucking up that much juice to just give me the 1 or 2 bars I usually got. Obvious now that it had a hard time keeping even those.
The airwave obviously made a huge difference and now have a consistent full bars and longer battery life.
Anyone know if a battery case will be released for the EVO LTE? Seems more difficult to do with the connector on the side without the case being massive, but possible perhaps?
I’ll check it out – I was talking to two companies that were considering it for 3 months after the release (I think they wanted to make sure there would be a demand) – let you know if I find anything.
Thanks, Paul. Can’t imagine there wouldn’t be given all the chatter about it! Did you hear anything good or bad about the battery cases that were made for the Original EVO?
I have not found any cases thus far. I’ve found external portable chargers galore from $12-60, no case charge though.
Never saw a case charger for the OG/3D as you could just swap the batteries out. Seidio made a neat one for the iPhone (I actually reviewed it as I had one in my reach for a couple of weeks at that point) and it ruled.
The extended batteries for the originals all seemed to work about as advertised – strong, no issues, little bit pricey.
I’ll keep an eye out, drop a line if I find anything when I get back tonight.
Thanks. Have had my 4G LTE for a week now and concerned about the battery life if I can’t find a case+battery to use. External batteries are nice as well but not always practical.
Anyone had any finds here?
i talked to seidio today and the said they have a prototype battery case thats being tested. they said it should be here before christmas.
I was told they didn’t want that information disclosed until sometime in September. I’ll see if they’ll give me any specs on the thing if they’re telling people about it now.
so between the evo 3d and 4g which is better to have?
Any updates on this?
Thanks.