HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Review: One Alternative
by Jason Inofuentes on July 13, 2012 9:24 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Droid
- Mobile
Like I mentioned in our discussion on cellular speeds, we’ve had trouble getting reliable signal at our two test locations. There’s a very real possibility that this reception issue affected our battery life tests, and so we leave that caveat in our results. Battery testing is easily the biggest part of our review process. In an ideal world the OEMs would send us seven samples, so we can have all our battery tests running at once, and still have samples on hand for performance and display testing. What this means is that battery testing is hard to repeat. So, bear with us as we prepare to do just that.
We’ll start with our call test, one that has been bringing good news for most of the phones we test over the last year or so. Here we see our first sign of trouble. The test is simple, play a little music through a phone calling another phone, through which a little music is being played. The Incredible 4G manages just under seven hours, nowhere near the One X and One S performance. There’s a penalty to be paid in data tests for CDMA devices because the 1xRTT radio has to get pinged periodically to check for calls. Here, though, with no background services syncing data, the screen off, and the phone doing nothing but making a call I find no way to explain the performance. If signal issues are the culprit then we will update, but it's not looking good so far.
The web browsing test cycles through a suite of websites with the screen on and set at 200 nits of brightness. Performance under 3G was well below the results from the similarly equipped One S, and even lower (by nearly an hour) than the HTC Rezound. Indeed, the AMOLED screen, higher clock speed and smaller battery of the One S should handicap it against the Incredible, but the Incredible 4G falls distinctly behind. There's a glimmer of improvement in the 4G LTE Web Browsing tests, but performance is still well below what we would have expected. Once we account for battery capacity and normalize the data we see that the Incredible 4G remains at nearly the bottom for 3G performance, and not nearly so impressive in LTE performance as the One X for AT&T. [Update: These 3G performance numbers are in a sure better signal area, with great signal, so we're marking these as infallible. We'll work on 4G LTE numbers more, but for now, in 3G, performance is definitely poor.]
In our tethered data test the Incredible 4G moves a little closer to its One, forebear; mustering nearly 5 hours to the One X's just over 5 hours. This number makes a lot more sense, the savings from having a 20% lower clockspeed would be mitigated by having a 20% smaller battery. So, if having the screen off leads us to a much better battery life result, perhaps the real culprit is related to inefficiencies in the display? Whichever the case, tethered data performance is the only feather in the cap of the Incredible 4G's battery life so far.
We’re not going to bring the house crashing down on the Incredible 4G for battery life just yet. If the reception issues are the root cause of the battery life deficits then we should hopefully find out before long. If, though, it turns out that there’s something more to it, then one of this phone’s most damning deficits will be battery life.
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aNYthing24 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The One S has a Super AMOLED display, not a Super LCD.Omega215D - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Kind of strange how battery life differs from other reviews. So far only a couple have said subpar life while more have gotten good to very good usage time. Could it be a problem with the phone itself? Well, it's nice to know my Rezound isn't too bad but I do like the designs of both the Incredible and Rezound.pikahatonjon - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
what is with the differences with the EVO 4G LTE & the Htc One X (att) in the contrast test.also, is the Tmobile Galaxy S 3 actually brighter than the At&t galaxy s 3. arent the 4 phones listed above pretty much identical to each other( one series & galaxy s series) what is with the huge diference in the brightness/contrast test
Rockmandash12 - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The One X has a Super LCD 2 display, not a TFT display.JimmiG - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
How many more years until Android phones can match the iPhone 4S in terms of 3G web browsing battery life?The Nexus One got 3.77 hours back in 2010 vs 4.5 hours for the iPhone 3G. Fast forward to 2012, and the iPhone 4S has more than doubled the battery life to 9.85 hours, while most Android devices have just barely caught up with the iPhone 3G.
Clearly Apple uses the same batteries as everyone else, so it must come down to incredibly lazy programming and poor power use optimization on the Android side. Some OEMs have apparently taken it in their own hands to optimize battery usage (Samsung, HTC), but this should really be something provided by the core Android OS. Battery life should be the main focus on for the next version of Android!
zorxd - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The iPhone has a small display. It consume a lot less. AMOLED displays are also not very efficient for displaying white backgrounds found on many web sites.Android's battery life isn't bad. Just look at the cellular talk time.
lunarx3dfx - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
What zorx said. You can't compare the iPhone and most Android phones Apples to Apples because of design differences. I'd be willing to bet money that if you had identical devices, the only difference being that one has an A5 and one has an S4, the S4 would wipe the floor with the A5 in every category except for maybe GPU performance.Not only is the S4 almost certainly more energy efficient due to be being a newer architecture, but it will also smoke it in terms of performance per watt.
A5= Dual Cortex A9's @ 800 MHz
S4= Dual Krait Snapdragons @ 1.5 GHz
On top of clock speed Krait is the ONLY ARM based CPU on the market with out of order execution which is why it is faster than Quad Core CPU's (Exynos 4 and Tegra 3).
Jimmi, I would recommend that you learn a bit about how all of this works before you comment again. The iPhone is a good device (although you couldn't pay me to use one), but in terms of theoretical performance it was out-dated before it was ever even announced.
Phasenoise - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
He indicated, as the article states, that the iphone has superior 3g web browsing battery life.So, for him, perhaps picking display or CPU technologies which consume more power is a poor trade off. He doesn't appear to be interested in theoretical performance, just actual real world browsing usage which as we know is generally not Incredibly taxing (pun intended).
lunarx3dfx - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The reason I brought up performance, was to illustrate my point that Apple doesn't necessarily make a more efficient product as much as they use low power components. I'll admit that I did get a little lost in my own argument. Oops.JimmiG - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
We will see when the next iPhone comes out with a much bigger display and higher clock speeds but still better battery life. The same thing can be seen with Windows vs OSX on laptops with similar specs - Apple simply spends more time optimizing the software side of their mobile devices.It's not limited to just AMOLED displays, and secondly, the CPU should not spend a lot of time at the highest clockspeed and voltage when you're browsing, especially with 3G which should be bandwidth limited. Unless of course the system is poorly optimized.
I'm an Android user myself, and battery life is the Achilles heel of the system. At the end of the day, my Optimus 2X is down to ~15% of battery while coworkers' iPhones last for two days without charging. It was the same with the Nexus One before that.
Just like the unresponsive and choppy user interface, it's important to realize when there's a problem that needs to be fixed.