Dave Burrows – Tech / iPhone Blog – Technical Evangelist

I have been testing out Battery life on the HTC Desire over the past 4 days and have found the device is pretty battery heavy, heavier than the iPhone unfortunately. I suspect that for the most part the Sense UI is eating up power, along with the OLED although it’s supposed to draw less power. Many have commented that they don’t see much power enhancement on OLED devices. Probably the biggest battery drain by far is the almost entirely connected to the cloud over wifi/3g. Although the iPhone is pretty much always connected, I have found that the Desire has been much quicker to notify you of facebook posts and tweets compared with the iPhone. I have had several Twitter conversations over the past 4 days which almost feel like I’m on an IM chat session. For the most part I’ve tried to have the same or similar apps with push notifications on both devices to try and get a good gauge along with having the brightness levels set at roughly the same levels.

I drove yesterday with Google Maps with the full free navigation with street view, the drive lasted 1h 45 mins and starting on a full battery, I reached my destination with 10% battery power remaining and had received a battery low message that I had to cancel just prior to reaching my destination. The HTC Desire was used for nothing other than navigation on the trip without a car charger. Comparing this to the iPhone, I had 30% battery power left, so the desire really does seem to use more battery. Likewise if I’m playing with the device in the day, the battery drains quicker than the iPhone. Comparing the HTC Desire’s 1400 mAh battery vs the iPhone’s 1219 mAh battery rating, you would think the Desire should be able to last longer?

Google maps managed to get me to my destination but I had frequent drop outs in GPS coverage and the TTS voice was way too low to actually hear with the car radio on. Google maps also provided a lot of late turn instructions which meant if I was actually listening to the instructions I would have missed the turn if I didn’t know where I was, and that would have meant I would have never reached my destination because my battery would have drained too much. I’ll write up a google maps navigation post a little later on my experiences.