Monday, July 12, 2010

HTC: Carry a Spare Battery

Sprint Nextel Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse has a solution for his carrier’s Evo 4G’s infamous battery drain: Carry a spare, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Before you dismiss the idea, consider that a spare, original manufacture HTC Evo battery runs between $25 and $40 online. Those of you who have purchased spare batteries for other smartphones, that might seem a bit steep, but bigger screens and heavy Web use will drain any battery fairly quickly.

In fairness, users who want longer battery life should buy devices with much-smaller screens, and then not use mobile Web features unnecessarily. Battery advances do not occur at the same rate as changes in processor and memory, so the advent of larger screens and mobile Web usage is simply going to be a bigger issue.

Lots of us use, or have used, devices with much-smaller screens, as well as devices more typically used primarily for voice and texting. Battery life is longer on such devices, period. In phone technology, as with other devices, there are trade offs.

The HTC Evo's battery life is noticeably shorter than many would like. That's the price of the bigger screen, for the most part. Would I be willing to trade down to a smaller screen? No. But I routinely carry two mobiles, one primarily for voice, the HTC for Web apps. So in a sense I alrady carry a spare battery.

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