HTC Thunderbolt: Battery Life is Disappointing, Less than 4 Hours

Posted by | 03/18/2011 | 50 Comments

The HTC Thunderbolt’s 4G LTE connection is blazing fast, but all that speed comes at a price. After using the HTC Thunderbolt for a day, I’m disappointed in its real-world battery life and benchmark results.

How to Get Better HTC ThunderBolt Battery Life

For most of the day yesterday I battled against low battery warnings as broke my HTC Thunderbolt in. I’m an Android phone newbie, so I wasn’t sure if I was doing something wrong and just needed to adjust some obvious settings. Then, my friend Avram Piltch from Laptop Mag pointed me to his colleague’s review of the Thunderbolt and my fears were confirmed. While browsing over 4G, the Laptop Mag battery benchmark tool clocked in just 2.5 hours of Web browsing time. Avram asked me to benchmark mine and while the results were a little better, they’re still not pretty.

Before I went to bed last night I downloaded the My Settings app. I then set the HTC Thunderbolt’s screen brightness to 40%, turned off WiFi, killed background services and set the device so it would never go to sleep. I then started the Laptop Battery app and ran the test, which simply loads the world’s most popular sites (Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, etc.) over and over again until the battery is drained. The HTC Thunderbolt was left unplugged and worked away while I slept.

Thunderbolt Verizon HTC Battery Life

When I woke up, the HTC Thunderbolt was drained.  I plugged the phone back in and checked the results. The Thunderbolt lasted for 3 hours and 49 minutes before quitting.   That’s 52% longer than what Laptop Mag experienced, but still not long enough for many users. The reason for the wide gap may be sample variation. More likely, I’m guessing that I have a stronger 4G LTE signal than the Laptop Mag Reviewers in New York have. I ran the test in my bedroom, which is at the top of a hill in a residential neighborhood in San Francisco. Laptop Mag’s office is in a big building near Times Square in New York.

This battery test is pretty conservative. It doesn’t use any power-hungry apps, run background services or display video. It doesn’t take into account sharing the 4G connection with other devices via WIFi. It’s pretty difficult to test a ‘typical’ user’s day when switching between apps, locations and activities, but it’s pretty safe to say that it’ll be tough to muster more than four hours of active use.

By comparison, the HTC EVO 4G scored just under five hours of battery life on Sprint’s WiMax service. The EVO 4G can be switched to 3G-only mode, but you can’t turn off 4G on the Thunderbolt.

I’m loving the HTC Thunderbolt’s speed, but it’s going to be a challenge to keep this thing juiced up.

It’s nice to have a thin Android phone with a big gorgeous display, but I would trade a little thickness and weight for a battery that would last all day. Anyone want to sell me an extended battery for my HTC Thunderbolt?

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Category: Mobile, Reviews

About the Author (Author Profile)

Xavier Lanier is the publisher of Gotta Be Moible and Notebooks.com. He's a mobile technology geek that uses an iPhone 4S, iPad 2, Galaxy Nexus and Kindle Fire on a daily basis. He's an expert photographer that shoots primarily with Nikon DSLRs. You can follow Xavier on Twitter @xavierlanier and Google+
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  • RaRa

    I returned the thunderbolt today (i was waiting for many weeks to get it though) due to battery. according to me it is not a mobile phone ..it is a landline phone! It wont work for more than few hours without the power cable connected to it.

  • Anonymous

    My battery life was great using Advanced App Killer, but then my text messages suddenly and completely got erased. I brought my phone into the store and they told me it was likely Advanced App Killer overriding the text log program causing it to shut down, and they said with the Thunderbolt the AAK wasn’t necessary. Since uninstalling it, my phone’s battery now drains a lot more heavily when sitting idle at work or while I sleep. I used to be able to play games on my ride to/from work but now I just keep it in my purse the entire day in case I need to make or accept a call. Kinda lame, not sure how to resolve this…

  • Azara David

    The thunderbolt rocks you just have to have the right settings and an extended battery. I get twenty three hours of heavy use and 34 hours standby. If you have a regular battery you can get 7 hours of heavy use and ten hours standby. Disable background data. Only necessary when in the market. This alone will give you double battery life. Also install juice defender and advanced task killer. Set juice defender for basic and advanced task killer to crazy. Also set to autokill when screen is off. After a full charge each morning pull the battery and restart. You will lose 10 to fifteen percent doing so but this method will guarantee almost 8 hours of heavy use on standard battery with 4g on. Any questions you can email me @ dplaya6910@gmail.com

  • Don Draper

    I recently made of couple of odd setting changes that seemed to have upped my battery life to over 24 hours with the stock battery and now up to 36 hours on the extended battery. The sudden change was dramatic so I documented what I did. Hope it helps someone else out. Still too early for me to know what actually made the difference.

    http://www.dondraper.com/2011/05/possible-clue-to-getting-long-battery-life-with-htc-thunderbolt-android-phone/

  • yeahman

    I literally get around 80 hours on the stock battery with average use (Texting frequently, Gaming occasionally, even using navigation a few times). The extended battery.. well I’ve actually never gotten anywhere near half battery with it yet, but I would assume that it would last me around 120-200 hours of use with my HTC Thunderbolt. All you need to to is to do the obvious fixes: Limit brightness, disable the completely unnecessary features, FREEZE BLOATWARE (Important, and probably the biggest factor), download and run Juice Defender with Mobile Data disabled so you still get instant background data, and root your phone (to freeze the bloatware). You don’t need to disable background data to get long battery life. You don’t even need to switch from 4g to 3g. My phone always has these things on. Just limit the amount of crap that auto-syncs every minute in addition to the steps above. Also, do not use app killers. I used to get only 4-7 hours with my phone before I took all these steps. I was laughing when my battery life increased by more than 1500%. The thing is, doing all of this does not degrade the phone in any way in terms of usefulness. You’ll still get everything you need out of your phone. It’s all the useless crap that kills your battery life!

  • Jawa6988

    Last night I switched to “CDMA only” – not Auto 1X or 3G, but 3G only(we have no 4G here yet) and have had the phone on standby since last night and on about every 5 minutes since 6:00 am.  Thats 8 hours of medium-to heavy use and  I am currently at 40%!  I am a happy camper now… I was getting the same 2 to 4 hrs out of it as everyone else and was disgusted. As a side note, I’ve had no rebooting problems since either.  I almost returned this phone for the Charge, that would have been a mistake…  SAMSUNG YUCK! THIS PHONE IS AMAZING, YOU JUST HAVE TO SET IT UP CORRECTLY…  the iPhone only wishes it was as bad ass as the T-Bolt!

  • Jawa6988

    Update:  Its now been 10 hrs 45 min since I turned on the phone this morning, and I’m still at 30%.  This is much more reasonable.I have actually used my phone more “heavily” today than in the past simply because of the fact that it is still on and NOT plugged into a frickin charger.

    I hope the rest of you get it worked out. The t-bolt is an awesome phone as long as you can keep it turned on and charged up.  I believe we will have the kinks worked out soon…  I just hope that not everyone returns theirs before the upcoming software update

  • Janhunt1

    I bought a 4200mha battery for my Thunderbolt from Mugen and I get almost 48 hours of average use (I use my phone a lot but not consistently for one specific use – games, music, phone,internet, various applications, etc). The instructions say to charge, drain, and charge 4-5 times before you get full battery use and i’ve only done that twice so I hope the battery life gets even better. BTW, I was getting 4-6 hours of battery. Life with the original battery.

  • Anonymous

    I’m running the Thunderbolt, after using about a week I went and ordered an extended battery. However the next day I realized when I got home from work that I hadn’t charged my phone all day and it was STILL going. I’m running wifi and 3G, have background data enabled because I use instant messaging all day, the girlfriend and I exchange at least a few hundred messages a day.  I’m a heavy user, and I had my extended battery running for 24 hours last week without charging, and at about the 25 hour mark I still had 20 percent battery life.  That is on stock rom with no mods or tweaks, just the settings adjusted correctly.

    I’m no Android expert, I have an iphone and 2 ipads. This past month is my first time on Android, so its not that I knew anything different than any other novice user, besides doing a little research. I think nearly all of the battery life problems come from people not taking the time to learn to use and properly configure their phone. Also as a tip, the biggest battery drains I’ve found so far are the battery widget/battery performance apps, and the task killer apps. I’ve tested each configuration with and without battery increasing apps, and my runtime has been much better without those power saving apps and widgets.

    One of the biggest battery drains that I’ve seen is from people having their phone set to 4G who don’t have access to a 4G network, so the 4G radio is constantly searching for a signal that doesn’t exist. Takes about 20 seconds to fix the first time with the learning curve, 5 seconds after that, and dramatically increases battery life.

    I’m now running gingerbread with sense 3.0 overclocked at 1.4 ghz and pulling about 12 hours on the stock battery.

  • Lifeofbryan1980

    Let me correct this guy obviously he hasn’t played around enough with his thunderbolt oh can shut off 4g and use cdma only its in the settings menu under wireless and metworks and then mobile networks you can choose cdma only of 4g and cdma I get better batter life with cdma but that because with 4g your phones constantly searching for a signal to LTE and connecting and disconnectig

  • guacamole321

    haha i love this phone but its biggest strength, verizons powerful 4g network, is also its biggest weakness. thats a king size LOL

  • Hockyfan4life20

    I worked from 9am-10pm and barely lost any battery on my thunderbolt that includes me texting and transferring pics from my sd card to the computer back to my new sd card I love this phone!!!!!

  • Dave

    Get this monster and never have problems again: http://www.mugen-power-batteries.com/htc/htc-thunderbolt-4g-adr6400l/mugen-power-4500mah-extended-battery-for-verizon-htc-thunderbolt-4g-adr6400-with-battery-door.html
    Xavier, maybe you should test it.

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