Originally posted here:
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showpost.p...9&postcount=12
I thought I would tell a short tale on this subject. While I am still TP2ing it, my wife's TP2 bit the dust a couple of weeks ago, so she was one of the first in line to get the Epic. Like so many of you, her battery life was horrible and it would go from charger to low battery warning in about 3 hours. We tried the usual suspects of lowering the screen brightness (which, even at its lowest setting was tremendously bright), not actively syncing with her GMail account, etc. and she still had very poor performance from the battery.
Over the last 5 days, she has twice had the issue where she would have "No data connection available" which would necessitate her pulling the battery to reset it. When it happened this morning, she was beyond pissed and called Sprint Customer Service. The guy suggested that she update her profile on the phone. When she tried to do this, she could not because it failed with an "unknown error". When the CS rep called her back five minutes later to check on her, she reported what happened and he asked her to take it to a Sprint store. We did, and - de rigueur - they wanted to hard reset her phone and that it would take a hour for the techs to get to it. Since I'm still a WinMo guy, I don't know how to do this on her phone, so I suggested that they just give us a new phone since hers was only 5 days old. After a slightly heated conversation between me and the Sprint store rep (it never elevated in volume, mind, but I just pointed out to him that if I came back in a couple days with the same problem, I was going to be one unhappy camper), he finally relented and gave her a new phone.
Now, this is where the story gets a bit interesting.
One of the first things that I noticed is that the new phone she has is either a new hardware rev and/or a new software build because on the previous phone, the brightness settings for the display only had four levels...the new phone has 10 levels and can get MUCH dimmer than the old one. The second thing we noticed is that this one charges about twice as fast as her old one...and the battery seems to be lasting much longer.
With all that being said, I'm wondering if the people who are having terrible luck with the battery had the same production run as my wife's first phone and - conversely - if the people having good luck have the other production run.