A few months back I purchased a
PPC-6700. I like many others was coming from
Palm OS, specifically a
Treo 650. When I received the phone I was blown away by all it could do. I quickly noticed though with all these great features comes abysmal battery life. Sure the phone is claimed to get 4.7 (at least that is what my box says) hours of talk time, but when you start using all the power that this device has to offer, your battery meter begins to plummet. I soon realized I either had to cut back on my usage to make it a full day, or get more power. I wasn’t familiar with cutting back, so I began looking for more power! There were a few options available:
1.
Buy a Mugen Power aftermarket extended use battery from Lion Battery. 1500mAh for $58.45 plus shipping. Most bang you can get in the stock size.
2.
Buy an extended use OEM “big” battery. 1850mAh for $69.99 plus shipping. It is a higher capacity than the stock size battery and adds a considerable amount of depth to an already large device. I didn’t really like this option, especially since it only adds 500mAh.
3.
Buy another OEM battery. 1350mAh for $59.99 plus shipping. 2 1350mAh batteries is a lot of juice to go through in one day. This is more to carry with you, but leaves you with the stock thickness. On the days you know you will need the juice carry both. I like this option, but $59.99 for this battery seemed a bit high.
4.
Buy a Seidio aftermarket extended use “big” battery. 2400mAh for $69.95 plus shipping. Seems they have some kind of sale going on for $54.95 not sure how long that will last. I still don’t prefer a “big” battery. I would maybe use it for this kind of capacity gain.
5.
Buy a Mugen Power aftermarket extended use “big” battery 2300mAh for $72.95 plus shipping. Once again, I don’t want a big battery, although this is a considerable gain in power and might possibly consider it.
I took the first option. I received my battery from Lion batteries in a timely manor, especially considering it was coming from Quebec, Canada to Moore, Oklahoma. It was shipped to me via USPS priority mail and the invoice shows March 24, it was delivered on March 27. That is 3 days including a weekend. The item arrived well packaged and undamaged. I opened it up and read that they recommended charging it with the device for 12 hours prior to use. I was quite upset about this, since I had to go to work and wouldn’t get to test out my new toy until the next day.
When I got home I threw the battery in the phone while it was plugged in. This made my device soft reset repeatedly. I haven’t tried reproducing this effect, but I read someone else had a similar occurrence with their Seidio extended use battery, so I assume this is a phone problem and has nothing to do with the battery. One thing I noted was that you could not plug into a charger and swap batteries. When you put a new battery in, it soft resets the phone even if you have an external power source. I didn’t much care for this, but this is a limitation of the device and has nothing to do with the battery.
Let’s move on to the batteries performance. I would love to be writing in telling you this battery is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but honestly it only has 150mAh more than the stock battery. I can’t honestly say that my battery lasted longer, because now that I had two batteries at my disposal my usage skyrocketed. I was no longer worried about running out of power and not being able to use the device, so I began using it to its fullest potential. In fact, on more than one occasion I used both of the batteries completely in a single day. I honestly love the extra battery. I think having 2 available is the only way to go. On days where I will be near a charger all day, I don’t carry my UTStarcom battery. I just use the Mugen Power one. I did note what seems to be longer talk times. I talked to my girlfriend for 3 hours one night and the battery was still at 40% when I ended the call. I was between 80% and 90% when the call began. I had Bluetooth and incoming beams turned on (as I always do) and the backlight turned off during the call. Usually with the stock battery when I talk to her I will hear the 20% beep either during the call or as soon as it ends. To me this was a noticeable improvement, but I had to be sure.
Having said that, I knew I couldn’t post a review stating that “I think it is more powerful”. I knew I would have to test this baby out and see what it was made of. I then set out to completely destroy a battery in as short a period as possible. I knew the task at hand would be a difficult one, but I was willing to brave it for all the 6700 owners of the world. I charged both batteries to 100%. I went into my settings and turned everything that I could think of on. I turned the backlight up to 100% and set the phone to keep the display on. I left the incoming beams and Bluetooth on, as well as connected to my wifi network.(no activity just connected and set to maximum performance). I then called my
PPC-6700 from my other phone and started a timer; as soon as I set the stopwatch I unplugged the device. Now all I had to do was just sit back and watch the battery meter dwindle.
First up was the OEM UTStarcom battery. I have to say, it lasted longer than I expected it would. About a 10% drops every 15 minutes or so. I didn’t touch the device most of the time. A couple button presses here and there, but no actual usage other than the wifi and the phone call that I had left running.
A side note – I really hate the way
Pocket PC devices display your power. An increment of 10% is crummy in my opinion. I liked how my old Treo’s would display it in 1% increments. Also, the phone gets really warm too with all this activity going on. This was something I hadn’t noticed before.
Note how fast it dropped from 40% to 20%. It was too quick for me to even notice the 30% mark. At 10% you get another warning and wifi gets shut down, however Bluetooth and the phones radio continue to eat away at the battery. The screen also gets dimmed severely and a once amber/green LED blinks red. The device didn’t last too much longer with the phone running once I hit 10%. At 0% battery life you will hear the phone off sound just before the battery dies completely and turns the device off. The phone would not boot back up until I plugged it in. I am glad for non-volatile flash memory.
• 90% at 0h 15m 44s
• 60% at 1h 01m 55s.
• 50% at 1h 18m 51s
• 40% at 1h 34m 50s
• 20% at 1h 48m 48s
• 10% at 1h 59m 20s
• 00% at 2h 07m 33s
Now it was time to test the star of today’s show. The Mugen Power extended use battery brought to you by the good people at
Lion Battery. I followed the same procedure as I had for the OEM battery.
• 90% at 0h 27m 01s
• 80% at 0h 43m 15s
• 70% at 0h 58m 13s
• 60% at 1h 15m 37s
• 50% at 1h 36m 50s
• 40% at 1h 53m 49s
• 30% at 2h 01m 05s
• 20% at 2h 04m 59s
• 10% at 2h 16m 25s
• 00% at 2h 19m 00s
Test notes:
• Each battery was charged overnight before testing began.
• I tried to keep the phone in the same place throughout each test.
• Button presses and actual phone usage were kept to a minimum.
• Signal strength was 1 or 2 bars most of the time.
• When I was testing the Mugen Battery I had to reanswer the call a couple times because I needed to use my other phone and messed up on the 3-way dialing, I got a couple text and I also took an actual call on my
PPC-6700.I personally would think this would require more power than just staying on the line and continuing the call, but I have no data confirming this assumption.
The results speak for themselves. The UTStarcom was dead while the Mugen Power battery was still in the 20% range. I took an actual call and had text come in while testing the Mugen Power battery. After testing these batteries I defiantly think the WM5 battery meter is worthless. The Mugen battery is claimed to be 11% more battery than the OEM, but I found this to be inaccurate in my test. Since the OEM battery lasted 127 minutes a 11% increase would have been 141 minutes (2 hours and 21 minutes) of usage. The phone died at 139 minutes (2 hours and 19 minutes) just 2 minutes short of the 11% increase over stock capacity. In a perfect world that would take your 282 minutes of standard talk time and turn it into 313 minutes (5 hours and 13 minutes), so about half hour. This puts the phone into the
Treo 650s talk time of 5 hours. This to me says maybe the phone battery isn’t as bad as I once thought it was, especially since the
Treo 650 comes with a standard size battery of 1850mAh.
After testing and using the aftermarket battery I must say I really enjoy having two batteries. I am using my device much more and can get a lot more accomplished. The Mugen Power battery is cheaper than another OEM battery with a larger capacity and still maintains the stock appearance and size. If you almost make it through the day with the standard battery or hit 20% most days and are tired of hearing that annoying warning the Mugen battery is perfect for you. If you are a very heavy, user as I am, then this is an option in conjunction with the stock battery, but in no way is as powerful as the extended use “big” batteries. Just as a reference point as to what I consider a heavy user, I use 2000-4000 minutes a month, 1000-3000 text a month, surf the internet randomly and use agile messenger a few hours a week. Lion battery was great to deal with, fast shipping and very nice people. They responded to my emails in a timely manor and were always polite. The battery in my opinion is a good buy, albeit a bit expensive when compared to the “big” battery that Seidio offers. Definitely works to the advertised capacity. I cannot speak on longevity of the battery as I haven’t had it quite a month, but it comes with a standard 6 month warranty. I upgrade devices fairly frequently, but not faster than a year usually. I would prefer a 1 year warranty, but I didn’t see any companies offering this, not even UTStarcom. Sorry for the crummy picture quality, what do you expect from a PDA-Phone?
This is my first formal review, so I am open to critiques as I would like to improve upon my reviewing skills and maybe turn this into something of a hobby. Let me know if I missed anything.
Lonzo
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