SPECIFICATION OF BATTERY LIFE IN HTC THUNDERBOLT

The ThunderBolt’s battery is obviously a major point of discussion. How does the Verizon Wireless’ first 4G LTE smartphone do in the real world? Well, not that great to be honest — especially with a 1400 mAh battery. Over 3G, the ThunderBolt can easily power through a normal workday. On 4G, however, I couldn’t get more than around 4.5 hours of usage at best… a figure that is not at all acceptable to me.

What makes matters worse is the fact that 4G can’t be switched on and off by the user. There is no widget to disable LTE and there’s not even a menu setting you can check on and off to enable or disable 4G. While there is a method floating around to do this by entering into the phone’s field test mode, this doesn’t even come close to cutting it. While enthusiasts might be comfortable with a “hack” like this, the average consumer will never even know the option exists. Other 4G smartphones like the HTC EVO 4G and the Google Nexus S 4G have a simple widget that disables 4G, and it really helps with battery life. When users don’t have a need for speed, they should definitely have an easy way to turn LTE off and stretch out that puny battery.
                     
Verizon has an extended 2750mAh battery that will effectively double the battery life of the ThunderBolt. To be honest, the extended battery adds so much extra thickness and weight to a phone that’s already way too thick and too heavy, there’s no way I would even consider using it regularly. Most people will likely feel the same way and a widget to disable 4G would have been a much cheaper and more user-friendly way to fix the battery life problem. I get that Verizon wants to deliver a consistant user experience that showcases its beastly new 4G network, but I don’t think a 4G widget would have detracted from that experience or confused anyone.

The HTC ThunderBolt is a phone from the future in many ways. It delivers the fastest internet speeds of any device I have ever tested (at least 2-3 times faster than anything else, in fact), and it runs on a very fast (and customized) version of Android to deliver great performance. In many ways, however, the ThunderBolt resembles phones from a year or two ago — in styling and in thickness and heft.

I’m not a fan of any smartphone that features a display beyond 4-inches, and the sheer thickness and weight of the ThunderBolt makes it a non-starter for a role as my daily driver. In addition, the poor battery performance makes it a tough sell. It’s awesome that I can use the ThunderBolt to email presentations, download files and and stream video at ridiculous cellular data speeds, but all that means nothing if my battery dies after just a few hours of usage. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the HTC ThunderBolt isn’t the right device for you, however.
                              
My advice is to definitely play with one in person at a Verizon Wireless store to see if the device is your perfect Android match. If you can look past the poor battery life — or if you don’t mind reinforcing your pants pockets so that the added weight and size of the extended battery doesn’t rip right through them — then you’ll find yourself with an amazingly fast smartphone packed with all the bells and whistles you need.

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SPECIFICATIONS OF BATTERY LIFE OF HTC THUNDERBOLT

The HTC Thunderbolt has been available to purchase for less than 24 hours and we’re already seeing report from bloggers who are claiming that the device suffers from poor battery life.  One report has taken things to a whole new level, by reporting that the Thunderbolt consumed 92% of its battery reserve in 3 hours and 34 minutes.   The report claims “average to heavy” usage, but the screenshot they provided clearly indicates that the phone was awake for nearly 78% of 3:45 time period.  One man’s definition of “average to heavy” usage can really mean anything, but I would tend to classify 78% awake time as “extremely heavy.”
                 
Like many other bloggers, I’ve been playing around with the HTC Thunderbolt for a little more than a day.  I have not done any stress testing on the battery yet, but I have used the Thunderbolt today as my main device for news, Twitter, phone calls, Gmail, and some light gaming (20 minutes of Dungeon Defenders).  After being off the charger for 8 hours, the HTC Thunderbolt still has 30% battery life remaining.

I’m not here to claim that the HTC Thunderbolt has amazing battery life.  It does feel like it will fall short compared to the HTC Inspire 4G or even the EVO, but I don’t think it’s half as bad as some other bloggers are reporting.  I simply hope people don’t jump to any conclusions about the HTC Thunderbolt’s battery life before some thorough testing is completed. After a full week of testing, I’ll be giving you guys my final opinion of the HTC Thunderbolt’s battery.

We’ve been passed some rather interesting information on the battery life of the HTC ThunderBolt from our pal Vince over on SlashGear – specifically, that the first day using it didn’t add up to a very good long life of usage. We’ll be getting our review model in later today, but for now, let’s take a peek at one test that revealed much less than a full day’s work on a single charge. And note – this is indeed only one test, and there’s much more testing to be done, but it is a real-world situation nonetheless.

After having just charged the unit up from zero to full, Vince took the HTC ThunderBolt from Verizon out for a spin. Once one hour had passed and having done “regular tasks” like email, internet browsing, Twitter, and a little bit of Facebook, the batter displayed 70%. The battery then hit 50% after having been used in the same way approximately another full hour. And the battery is right around 30% after 2:15:21 the ThunderBolt was used an “average to heavy” amount of time.

Finally, with an uptime of 3:34:03 and actual usage time of 2:45:59, the battery was at 8%. During this time there were no phonicalls made, no YouTube or Videos watched, no Wifi used. This amount of time was dedicated to LTE for data working with email, Twitter, Disqus, downloading the app Dungeon Defenders, and etcetera.

So is the battery draining pretty quick? Seems that way. We’ll be bringing an extra battery pack along to CTIA 2011 since this will still be the phone we’re using there primarily. Speaking of which – do you think there’ll be a phone in there worthy of eclipsing the HTC ThunderBolt?

ALSO: Vince (and I) will be going through more natural day-to-day tests today for the battery and everything else, so we’ll have more results up here in a few hours. Take note that the “usage time” might be strange in the first test because every time we plug the device into the computer to take screenshots using the developer program, the time resets (if anyone has a screenshot app that works outside of root, we’re all ears!) For further tests, we’ll be taking photos of the screen to avoid this problem.
                                          
Our next test here is being conducted as a mix between LTE and Wifi whereas the test yesterday was done purely on 4G LTE. I think you’ll be interested to see that the results appear to be quite different.

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OVERVIEWS OF HTC THUNDERBOLT

                                    


With the ThunderBolt, HTC has delivered yet another “first 4G smartphone” following its EVO 4G for Sprint (and the often forgotten MAX 4G introduced in 2008). It’s the first handset to run on Verizon’s brand new 4G LTE network, and it’s an Android smartphone powerhouse that is easily the fastest smartphone on the planet in terms of data speeds. That’s not to say the device is perfect, however. The release of Verizon’s first 4G handset was pushed back several times, spanning almost two months, and I’m not so sure all of the wrinkles were ironed out even after all of the delays. But the ThunderBolt is finally here and I’ve spent some quality time with it over the past week or so. Read on to see if this is not only the fastest smartphone on the planet, but one of the best as well.

The HTC ThunderBolt packs a punch in the specifications department. In addition to being the first Verizon handset to be released with 4G LTE compatibility, the ThunderBolt stays at the top of the smartphone pack with competitive specs like a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 4.3-inch Super LCD display, an 8-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, and more.

As far as the build quality of the HTC ThunderBolt is concerned, it’s a tank — but I’ll get to that part in a moment. The ThunderBolt seems to be very well manufactured in typical HTC style; it feels very sturdy, durable, and solid. There are no creaks, no parts wiggling, and nothing I could conceivably see being an issue down the road with normal use and wear and tear.

The device is, however, extremely large and heavy. It’s one of the widest, thickest, and heaviest smartphones on the market. It absolutely dwarfs an iPhone 4, for instance, and it could pretty easily could swallow a T-Mobile myTouch 4G in a couple bites. It doesn’t necessarily feel as thick as it looks thanks to the heavily tapered edges, but some slick tapering can’t do anything to mask the phone’s heft. Another thing that just might be a personal niggle is the kickstand… I mean, I just can’t honestly ever see myself using it in any scenario. As heavy as the ThunderBolt is, I would like to have seen HTC strip out as much as possible, and the kickstand definitely could have been stripped.

The design identity of the ThunderBolt is typical HTC — literally, aside from little changes here and there, one HTC device could pass for another most of the time these days. The ThunderBolt specifically doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of differentiation beyond its bulk, at least, and its design seems dated. Compared to, say, the aluminum unibody HTC Inspire 4G, the ThunderBolt just feels kind of last year. That, coupled with the viciously thick and heavy body makes it hard to swallow from a hardware perspective alone. Thankfully that’s not all a smartphone is nowadays.
                                 
The 4.3-inch display on the HTC ThunderBolt is beautiful. The viewing angles are here are straight up incredible — noticeably better than the HTC EVO’s screen. Colors are very rich, whites are bright, and text is pretty crisp. With such a big display, however, the 800 x 480-pixel WVGA resolution shows its shortcomings. This is a common issue among devices with larger displays: since they spread the same number of pixels over a larger surface compared to modern sub-4-inch displays, the result is a less impressive picture. The ThunderBolt’s display is still great, but I would have loved to see one of HTC’s qHD displays on here.

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