So I’ve had the pleasure of owning an EVO 4G for about three weeks and overall its been a good experience. Being an iPhone user for three years I’ve only known one mobile operating system. The transition was pretty easy and I found some added features like voice to text and native google integration incredibly useful. However, there is one part of the phone that is extremely disappointing, and that’s the battery life. Eventually its what made me decide to return it in favor of the iPhone 4, which had always been my second choice. Before I actually return it though, I wanted to do some controlled tests to determine exactly how long the battery lasts.

I’m not claiming to publish official benchmark the battery life on these phones. These are real, unaltered results from testing the performance of each phone. You should try to find as much information as possible before making any judgement.

UPDATE: Some time has passed since I actually did some tests and I’ve had my iPhone 4 for around 2 weeks, so I’ve updated some of these tests to reflect my new phone.

So I fully charged my EVO and performed a set of specialized tasks so I could find out how long it could last under a variety of tests. So let’s see how long the super smart phone stacks up.

Video Playback
In this test I disabled all radios on the phones, and played back the same 2 hour 320×240 video file. At no point did the phones screens dim or turn off.

As you can see, the old iPhone 3G beats the EVO in consumption by over 30% at 57% vs 91%.

Camcorder Recording
Obviously I couldn’t test this with the iPhone 3G, but iPhone 4 results are included.

Here the rate is a bit closer at 75% vs 86% in favor of the new iPhone 4.

I was going to include youtube battery benchmarks, but sadly the EVO couldn’t last more than 12 minutes on a 60 minute youtube video without freezing up the video (on a 4G connection). So rather than compare Apples to Oranges, I’ll just say that the EVO watching a normal youtube video for 12 minutes drops the battery by 27% to 83%.

Now, thanks to a helpful blog post I was able to correct the problem. Seems like a rather large piece lint had made it’s way into the headphone jack and was blocking the plug. I would have never figured it out if it wasn’t for this helpful blog post. So I’ve linked it below and will leave the explanation to him:

http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/tips-tricks/how-to-fix-your-iphone-headphones-mic-if-its-not-working/

1. First, go to this page and follow the instructions: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358
2. Set up your calendars in iCal properly.
3. Connect your iPhone and sync.

Your iPhone should automatically sync and update google calendar whenever iCal is open to update the events. This is by far the best free alternative and ensures that all your events are in sync and properly formated.