By Oftentimes when making the decision over which phone to purchase, battery life may have to take a backseat in order to take advantage of certain features. Such is the case with devices featuring AMOLED displays, as they recently found themselves at the bottom of the heap compared to phones featuring LCD displays in terms of battery life. The HTC Droid Incredible and its AMOLED touchscreen ranked lowest, which perhaps creates another enticing argument for newer versions of the handset outfitted with SLCD displays due to component shortages. Devices already featuring LCD screens such as the Motorola Droid 2 and Droid X ranked at the top of the pack by a wide margin, while Super AMOLED Galaxy S phones make up the middle of the pack.
While the testing undertaken by LaptopMag followed a strict set of parameters, it only accounted for battery life in terms of web browsing. Talk time and standby battery performance were not tested as far as we can tell from the details in the original article. Head over to the source link below for the full story.
[via LaptopMag]
Function before form. The fancy new displays that everyone must have provide less time for use.
I thought one of the big benefits of oled was less power consumption. wtf? they look worse most of the time and certainly look worse in daylight.
Yet another reason why I am so happy with my Froyo rooted Droid X, I average 10-12 hours of heavy use. Days on light use!!
I’ll take the 13 hours of battery life on my Super AMOLED with all around use still. :-)
I can testify to DroidX’s excellent battery life as well. And my fiance’s HTC Incredible surely pales in comparison. Maybe a little Froyo will help out the Incredible and other devices a tad in that dept. We’ll see.
The droid X has a 1540mAH battery BTW.
Also, it looks like Sense and touchWiz may be a bit heavier than new “Blur” (not surprisingly). That’s probably part of this.
This is an incredibly flawed experiment considering Advanced Task Killer was used. Task Killers on ANY Android device are not recommended. This comes directly from Google’s own developers.
http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
And for the record, I used to have an HTC Incredible. I now have a Droid X. Battery life is way better than the Incredible.
If you read the comment of one of their staff, I don’t think they know about Android much.
“Actually we killed the tasks before running the test, but not during so for better or worse anything that likes to launch itself (Amazon MP3 for example) would still launch itself.”
Why not just restart the phone? Really, just restart the phone and start the test. No need to use a task manager for that kind of task.
Anyways, LaptopMag should just stick with laptops/netbooks/tablets. Let the mobile phone sites do phone testing.
the droid x and droid 2 don’t have blur.
I like how they listed the battery sizes. The Inc was handicapped out the gate cuz of that small battery…but a few observations…
The Droid 2 has a wee bit better battery and has way more battery life than the Inc. 45nm cpu in the Droid 2 vs 65nm in the Inc..
Yea the X has the biggest battery by 40 mAh …but look at the Samsung phones and the EVO. The EVO uses a 65nm chip too, so thats expected.
The Samsung phones is suprising since they use 45 nm chips…
And look at the Droid 2 compared to the X. On a 1390 battery it almost lasts as long as the X. In reality the Droid has the best battey of all the phones.
The the Streak uses a 65nm chip too (the GSM version of the ones on the Inc and EVO)if the specs are correct. Seems like other factors most of us dont know about play a part in the battery life.
Flash lite and full Flash…The Droid 2 is still up there running full Flash. Froyo has been reported to be better on battery life.
The Inc on a 1500 battery should be close to the EVO’s score.
Again, the Samsung phones are surprising…
Oops, just checked the link…Flash was disabled…
we need a GSM version of the Droid X
I had the Incredible and, while it was nice, it had POS battery life. I have the Droid X now and I’m much happier with the battery. It easily lasts a full day even with heavy usage.
” which perhaps creates another enticing argument for newer versions of the handset outfitted with SLCD”
Or perhaps because it has the smallest battery.
Here is the reason the AMOLED screens did poorly
“OLED technology uses the most power when displaying white, which is why Samsung chose a black background for the app menus on its Galaxy S phones.Since our battery test surfs web pages, most of which have a white background, both the Galaxy devices and the Incredible were at a disadvantage. It really comes down to what you view most often on your phone”
Platinum sells a 1750 mAh batter for all HTC phones. Best Buy sku 1170034. It kicks ass and keeps up well against my SO’s droid2
I wonder how the est would go with the New 1820 mAh battery for the Droid and Droid 2.
http://www.droidhype.com/2010/08/21/motorola-1820mah-bp7x-extended-battery-for-the-droid/
GSM Droid X & 2 please moto! Canadians are really getting left out in the cold when it comes to Android.. but I guess we should be used to that by now huh? ;P
“we need a GSM version of the Droid X” Screw that! We need a GSM version of the Evo!
droid 2 rated 3rd!
when i first got it i thought that battery life would suck because of the screen and physical keyboard but once you change a few settings it last at least a day if not a day and a half with medium-heavy usage
I can get through about 12 hours of moderate to heavy use on my Vibrant with Live Wallpapers, wifi, auto-brightness, social and regular sync, music use, web browsing, and app downloading and by the end of the day (around 11), I’d still have about 20%-15% left.
This test sucks. Furthermore, these results are going to be severely skewed by Samsung’s GPS problems on the Galaxy S series… Take it with a grain of salt.
whoops…they turn off GPS…nevermind.
@iamsteventucker go look at one, they have motoblur, motorola just does not call it that.
I’m gonna call bs. This isn’t a test by any measure. This is “let me leave one website up all day”. A real test would be making the same amount of calls and texts, etc, and doing normal things.
I read books using Kindle on my DI with a black background and light gray text (for easier reading at night), and it lasts hours. Granted the DI battery life isn’t stellar, I think it’s better than they’re showing here. Can’t someone do an apples-to-apples comparison with one of the new Incredibles with an SLCD?
interesting to see the Streak, with the biggest screen by almost an inch still in second place.
Not surprised on where the Incedible finished, worst battery EVER phone dies by 4:30 a car charger, work charger, and home charger is a MUST HAVE. maybe if i complain enough Verizon will push me to an X hell we get no love anyway, No docking station, No car dock, No Otter box case.
Funny how I myself came from an EVO 4G to a Samsung Vibrant (Galaxy S) and have much longer battery life on the Samsung. No comparison. My old Moto Milestone overclocked had better battery life than the EVO.
Lol if yous guys on here don’t believe it get you a X and you will…or just ask a X owner and he/she will tell you it is so…don’t know why it’s hard to believe….sheesh
I have yet to see the battery drop below 25% life on my galaxy s after a days use, including watching videos etc so I’m more then happy with it.
I got an Incredible a week ago because I didn’t like size of the Droid X and didn’t care for the slide out keyboard of the Droid 2, and my battery lasts for over a day during regular use, ie. text, using the internet, making calls, playing games, and just dicking around on it
but I’m not on it all the time either, it’s pretty regular use
Yeah lol, I love all the ‘I call bs’ comments. No bs, the X will easily do 12 hours with heavy usage.
looks like Dell did some work with the battery, if only they had put 2.2 ha ha
The Incredibles display is not to blame for the bad battery life, on average when I look at battery usage my display says 9% and right now after 10 hours of use it says 3%. my buddies Droid says around 70%.. I think what gets the incredible is 2 things.. 1 is the obvious bug that I hope is fixed with Froyo where the software is not charging the battery to 100%.. well it thinks it is.. but it’s not. I have to turn my phone off in the morning and plug it back in, it charges another 15 minutes (the HTC support site says to do this twice!!!! major fail). so people aren’t even starting the day with a full charge. second is just the fact that it should have been released with at LEAST a 1500mah battery.. people who buy the 1500mah OEM HTC battery are getting easily those extra few hours. I think HTC owes each of us a bigger battery :P
How is Android phones’ battery life compared to iPhone? My friend, who was an iPhone-owner, told me that Android phones tend to have shorter battery life.
excelent!
HTC hero =D??
This “test” doesn’t mean shit. I know for a fact the battery life in the Vibrant is MUCH better than the battery life in the Evo. My brother and step-father both have an Evo. My fiance and I both have a Vibrant. My brother and step-father are always complaining about having to charge their phone 2 or 3 times a day just from normal casual use. No gaming or watching videos or anything. Just normal phone use. My Vibrant, on the other hand, requires one charge to hold it through the entire day. Sure it gets close to dying on me at the end of the night sometimes. But that’s only because I play games on it and watch videos.
Halvorsen, you shouldn’t use a task killer if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. That’s what they should say. I use a taskiller, and an app for rooted phones called autostarts. Autostarts allows you to disable that shit that autostarts for no apparent reason. Taskiller is great too but you need to ignore and hide critical system apps, that’s where the problem comes in when someone with no experience starts killing everything.
PS: This demo looks pretty spot on to me. I tried an EVO and that sucker didn’t last 4-5 hours. My Droid original and Droid X easily gets through the day 5:30AM – midnight +
I’ve had an Evo since launch and I’ve only ran out of battery a couple of times. The first time was 15 hours after charging and I use using the video camera. The second time was late at night and I was using GPS navigation during the day. The only time I charge my phone is overnight. It’s off the charger at 7:30am and sometimes doesn’t get back on the charger until 2-3am with sufficient battery life left. Essentially what I’m saying is, if you have battery issues with an Evo, your doing something wrong…
I got a samsung captivate after switching from my droid incredible. I used a 1500mah battery in my droid incredible. I would say the droid inc with the 1500mah battery lasted as long as my captivate with the stock 1500mah battery. One good thing tho is that the galaxy s phones have a separate brightness setting for the browser. Also they have a powersaving screen mode which adjusts the brightness depending on what’s showing on the screen. It’s kinda like dynamic contrast on a hdtv
In my opinion the Droid Incredible is still the best phone that Verizon offers until the Fascinate is released. Then again I am a little biased as I like to flash ROMs and that is really not possible on the Moto phones.
you can get a lot more life out of your AMOLED screen based phone if you use black colors anywhere possible as black uses a lot less energy than white. for example, instead of searching at http://google.com with its white background you should use http://bgoog.com which is all black!
@angermeans
u crazy?
where is the DX and D2 and of course D1
The results are a surprise to me, didn’t expect the droid x to win.
A Black Google on an AMOLED screen can help reduce energy consumption nad give AMOED’s better results. With a Dark Google http://www.blackl.com I can extend my battery life by about 20% (I use mine mostly for web surfing). Blackl will not work that well on LCD’s as they don’t save that much energy with a Black background.