Count Infinity

Battery life after the tweek. Screenshot by pingpongboss.

I’ve been drooling over the Evo since a month before it was released. With a massive 4.3 inch display, 1GHz processor, seriously impressive dual cameras, a stack of other features, and the Android OS, what’s not to love? It’s like an iPhone with no antenna issues.

Unfortunately, for all the awesome coolness, there was one major flaw. This glutton eats batteries like a fat boy eats Twinkies. Yes, that is batteries, in the plural.

Within days of release users were reporting that their battery life was less than 8 hours, with no calls and no phone use. Of course, there were armies of geeks suggesting various ways to improve battery life, but the suggestions were highly unattractive. “Disable WiFi and Bluetooth” they said. “Don’t install rogue apps that aren’t careful about battery consumption” they said. “Don’t use your phone to surf the web”, “Don’t use video calling”, don’t, don’t, don’t.

I got through reading the list of don’ts, and suddenly the phone wasn’t very attractive. The only feature that didn’t vampirize the battery was the kickstand. Heck, if I used any of the good stuff, the phone wouldn’t last a day between charges, and if I didn’t, I would still only (barely) get the phone to last 16 hours.

But the dream lingered. 4.3 inches. Dual cameras. Android OS with a deluge of apps. I wanted that phone…and I wanted it’s battery to last more than a day without having to do anything unnatural.

So I started looking again, this time for resolutions to the problem. Some folks were recommending the use of aftermarket batteries, but at best that would only give a 20% improvement, and at worst, it might give none at all. Purchasing extra batteries and a charger could easily add another $70-$80 to the price of the phone, and it still seemed clunky to have to carry a spare around at all times. And if you forget to plug it in one night? You’re doomed.

OK, so aftermarket batteries, bad idea. Fortunately, Google rocks, because it is the only search engine that can read minds. “Oh, this guy searched for aftermarket batteries, but he really wants better battery life on an Evo.” Hello relevant search results.

Last week pingpongboss posted a topic on androidforums.com explaining how to extend the life from hours to days. Users were reporting over 8 times better battery life without changing anything about how they used the phone. How is this miracle accomplished? A small app is installed to work around an operating system limitation added by HTC, then configured to underclock the processor when the screen is off. It’s that simple. Apparently (judging by the graphs) the phone was sucking up nearly as much juice while “sleeping” as it was when it was on.

There are three things we can learn from this:

1. I may have to go buy an Evo now.
2. HTC could have solved the battery life problems if they’d been concerned enough about it, and if they have anyone watching their community, they should have this fixed by default in future versions of their phones.
3. Never underestimate the power of motivated people to solve “impossible” problems.

For more information and technical details about the fix, go to http://androidforums.com/all-things-root-evo-4g/117997-root-using-setcpu-perflock-disabler-save-battery-underclock.html#post1098213

EDIT: The “unrevoked” root method doesn’t have awesome instructions. You’ll probably also need the following to get through the process:

• The download is a self extracting zip. After you run it, go to the location where it was unzipped and open “hboot driver.htm”. This file contains instructions for installing a driver on your computer which is essential to get the root access.
• After the driver is installed, run “reflash.exe” to root your phone. It will tell you to enable USB debugging. Instructions for doing that are here: http://www.technipages.com/motorola-droid-enable-usb-debugging.html