Sprint HTC EVO - 17+ Hours on Standard Battery

Here's how I avoid the biggest gripe I hear about the EVO, short battery life.

You probably know by now that the new EVO is THE super phone.  Only the Motorola Droid X (unreleased) and the iPhone 4 (poor connectivity and orange splotches on screen) are in the same league.  You've probably also heard the stories about really bad battery life on the EVO.

Well, I was getting no more than about four hours out of mine the first few days.  Now though, I get at least twelve and as long as 27 hours out of a charge!  And I did with without hacking the phone or buying anything extra.  You can too.

The biggest change is that I turned ON the WiFi radio.  Yes, I turned it on.  This goes against all "common sense" about cell phones.

I have a WiFi network at home and one at work.  The one at work is a bit dodgy due to the many networks in use in the area meaning that only our Android and Windows based equipment can stay connected.  Anything with an Apple logo on it rolls over and dies.  (Note,  my iPod Touch upgraded to IOS 4 deals with it almost as well as Android.)

By using WiFi instead of 3G/4G I get tremendous battery life.  The EVO is smart enough to switch back and forth between radios as needed so the only time I'm on Sprint's network for network use is when commuting.

I leave GPS and everything else but 4G enabled.  Today I'm leaving 4G enabled as a test.  I don't use Live wallpaper, but I have a scene that does.  I use than scene when showing off the capabilities of the EVO.  And I use System Panel to make sure that apps I don't use aren't running.  All of this helps a little, but it was the WiFi that made the big difference.

The guys at my local Sprint store didn't believe me.  They don't have their EVOs yet as Sprint made employees wait til July 1st before getting theirs, and with demand exceeding supply, they'll have to wait even longer.

Show I showed them my battery history screens on System Panel.  You can see that the phone was down to just below 25% charge when I put it on chart about 12:30AM.  I charged it until about 7AM.  At 4:41PM, over 9 hours later, it still had about a 60% charge.  The other graphs show that I was indeed using the phone during this time.