Sprint Epic Battery Life test

[beejmeister]

Originally Posted by yankees45us

So the battery in the epic is bad too. I was thinking of switching over to get better battery life. I guess it won't help me. Maybe all 4g phones will have bad battery life. I hope not. I haven't even even used 4g yet.

Sent from my Evo using Tapatalk

Actually there are those that are saying their battery is awesome... I don't know.

I will say that it sucks to walk into my local SPRINT store, where I know them as I've been doing business with them for 10 years or so, and, when I mentioned that I had a battery that was dying fast, have them ask me if I had my BT shut off.... Really? I have to disable a critical function of the phone in order to be able to use it? That makes NO SENSE!

Also. And I find this most laughable... everyone is saying to make sure that the 4G is off... So... Is it rude for me to notice the elephant in the room called SPRINT's advertising of 4G as the Second Coming, but also point out that we're being told not to use 4G?

WTF?

[smu]

Originally Posted by beejmeister

Actually there are those that are saying their battery is awesome... I don't know.

I will say that it sucks to walk into my local SPRINT store, where I know them as I've been doing business with them for 10 years or so, and, when I mentioned that I had a battery that was dying fast, have them ask me if I had my BT shut off.... Really? I have to disable a critical function of the phone in order to be able to use it? That makes NO SENSE!

Also. And I find this most laughable... everyone is saying to make sure that the 4G is off... So... Is it rude for me to notice the elephant in the room called SPRINT's advertising of 4G as the Second Coming, but also point out that we're being told not to use 4G?

WTF?

That's pretty funny...and sad. It mirrors my feelings exactly. At any rate, 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.

[real shift]

Well, I have had my Epic for a week now and think the battery life is very comparable to the Evo's pre 2.2. Honestely, I noticed a large jump in battery life with the Evo after the OTA. I can't complain about the length of time I am getting with my Epic's battery: 4 hrs heavy use, 6 hrs medium, 8-10 no use. My screen brightness is set to Auto. I went ahead and added the sprint's wifi package this morning, turned on the 4g and surfed on my laptop until I got the first battery warning, which was three and a half hours. Not to shabby running 4g and kicking wifi. I do use Samsung's built in app manager to close programs, mainly for the World War game. Otherwise I'm running pretty stock and am pretty happy with my current battery life. I am hoping that Froyo will give me another hour or two. My biggest problem with this phone is the lack of sensitivity of the 4 bottom bezel buttons. I constantly am hitting home or menu three or four times. I may take this phone back just for that. I have friends who say their buttons are extremely sensitive. Any thoughts?

[austin420]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-us; SPH-D700 Build/ECLAIR) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17)

smu, where are you adjusting the brightness? When I go to display settings, I have a slider bar that lets me stop at any point on it. There are no definite setting levels on it.

[smu]

Originally Posted by austin420

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-us; SPH-D700 Build/ECLAIR) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17)

smu, where are you adjusting the brightness? When I go to display settings, I have a slider bar that lets me stop at any point on it. There are no definite setting levels on it.

Then you have the same one that my wife currently has. The previous one had the same slider, but it would snap to one of four positions.

[Wunder]

Originally Posted by smu

...
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.

....

Hey would you mind posting her build info?

[smu]

Originally Posted by Wunder

Hey would you mind posting her build info?

Here is the new model information (from Settings-AboutPhone, down at the bottom of the screen):
SPH-D700
Firmware 2.1-update1
Baseband S700.0.55.DG27
Kernel 2.6.29
Build number Samsung ECLAIR.DG27
Hardware version D700.0.5

[D/\SH]

Originally Posted by smu

Here is the new model information (from Settings-AboutPhone, down at the bottom of the screen):
SPH-D700
Firmware 2.1-update1
Baseband S700.0.55.DG27
Kernel 2.6.29
Build number Samsung ECLAIR.DG27
Hardware version D700.0.5

same as my version from release morning at 8 am.

[daddymikey1975]

Going to try the factory reset, re-install my apps, and report back later tonight or tomorrow.. I seriously was gonna trade this for the Evo to see if it gets better life, but meh.. it looks as if that device is comparable (in batt. usage that is)..

[vansmack]

So I did this on Saturday after getting really poor battery life all week (dead by 5pm) and it definitely worked. It stayed active all day yesterday finishing at 29% around 11pm and is at about 34% at 7pm tonight.

Each day I'm (re)adding a widget to see which one might have been bleeding me dry. Thus far I can rule out Beauftiful Widgets and the Facebook widget....

Thanks for the idea!