droidStory

I was going to write a post about how short the battery life was on the Droid. Within the first few days, my battery drained entirely. I was losing 10% charge per hour and the re-charge took a long time. It would have been enough to cause me to return the Droid and to wait for the HTC devices.

But, I decided to try several different things. One person advised turning on and off 3G. That made only a small difference. But, I did find two things that really mattered:

- The Gmail application takes less battery than the built-in email application. I spent one day pointing the built-in IMAP email application to the same accounts set to fetch at 30 minute intervals. I spent one day using Gmail for two accounts. Guess what? Under the built-in email, nearly 30% of the battery was used on the email application. The Gmail application used 2%. That is not a typo. I believe that the Gmail application is some form of Push mail delivery system as there is no fetch information. But — wow.

- The screen is the other big user. Turning off the automatic brightness and setting the screen to be dimmer has a major impact. I cannot quantify it, but that seems to be a big user. The reason I cannot quantify it is because I did other things. It is important to manually turn off the screen when putting it away. It does not seem to always go blank unless you force it to. FEATURE REQUEST: Please use the proximity detector to turn off the screen when it is put in a holster or case. The BlackBerry does the same thing with magnets. The Droid uses the proximity detector to turn off the screen when it is next to your ear for a phone call.

However — the biggest difference. I decided I needed a second battery because I was not confident about the battery life. I charged up the second battery and it went from empty to a full charge in an hour! Then, the new battery lasted all day with the settings I mentioned above. It dropped 10% charge about every two hours to 2.5 hours. That means that it could run an entire day on this new standard battery. Yes!

So, I conclude that my Droid shipped with a defective battery. I will be swapping it soon. I suggest that all Droid owners look at their batteries and see if they should be replaced.

Another hint. The charger for the BlackBerry Storm appears to work perfectly with the Droid. (I make no promises — that is up to Motorola and Verizon.) So, I have purchased several of them with the BlackBerry logo on them from Amazon at about $5 each with shipping. It is a lot cheaper that way.