Last night before I hit the sack, I turned the power off on my Mogul. I had 90 percent battery remaining. This morning when I woke up it would not power on. I happened to have a spare battery from a test unit I have been playing with & popped it in. It powered right up so that means the battery was dead. I know I powered it off because it asked me to confirm, which I did. So WTF? does this thing still suck power even when its powered down? That doesn't make any sense at all.

All pda phones use power when "off". That's why you can receive reminders and alarms. Keep in mind that the device isn't really off, it's just sleeping. To really turn it off you need to pull the battery.

The fact that the battery died overnight could be because of a weak signal or an open app that is using power.

True, when asleep your ppc still connects to your vision service and checks mail etc. give it a weal signal and viola, dead battery.

I'm not talking about sleep mode, I'm talking about when you press the power button for 5 seconds & it then warns you that the device will be shut down & you will lose all unsaved data. If you say yes; the green network light stops flashing, incoming calls go directly to voicemail & no messaging are received.

Holding in the power button again causes it to boot up from the Sprint screen, like a soft reset.

Also I see both of you have 6700's. This is not a feature of the 6700, it is new on the 6800. Pushing the power button in for 5 seconds on the 6700 simply turns the backlight completely off. That's not the same behavior as I'm referring to.

I was going to ask this on a brand new topic but since this topic is related ill ask here. What's the best way to conserve the battery? Cause my phone goes down probably within 10 hours even when not on the phone at all.

Also is it possible to get the green and blue light on the phone to stop beeping all day?

My Blackberry has 4 email accounts that are constantly monitored, and my battery lasts at least 2 days between charges. I realize they are different devices, but Microsoft/HTC just HAS to be able to tweak the settings so these devices don't guzzle battery power. It really is unacceptable for a phone aimed at business users. RIM's software and devices are so optimized, their phones just sip battery power. It's amazing.

What wasn't amazing is the high RIM fee. I have a 6800 now and love it. My battery is at 50% since my initial charge (6pm yesterday). At this rate it seems the charge will last about 24 hrs with moderate use. Good, but needs to be better. Also, the first ever charge isn't accurate. I'll know accurate battery life in a few weeks.

Comparing a Blackberry to a Pocket PC is apples and oranges. The last Blackberry I had would go over a week on a charge... there is simply not as much crap running in them. The Pocket PC has a larger display, more memory, a faster Processor, wifi, evdo, bluetooth, etc., all running, along with all the applications and such that cause the Processor to consume more power. They are better than they've ever been, but not going to ever match a Blackberry unless those gain a lot of the stuff that sucks power down.

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Mike - Been Converged?

That said, Convergent, there are significant problems with the implementation of Push Email on this platform. At the time we applied the patch for "true push email" on this platform, by battery life turned to crap. I have read articles about tweaking performance, and I've asked my IT group to look into it. We don't have a solution yet, but I do believe that there is a way to make performance better. The protocol may be too chatty????

One thing though, there's not an excuse for having a phone with the display turned off and just receiving push email, and have the battery not able to make it through a business day. In that case, you're not asking anything fancy of the device. Just receive the email like your competition does.

Again, you're comparing apples to oranges. BlackBerry uses a proprietary (i.e. patented) technology that does not require their devices to maintain a constant connection to the server for push e-mail. Their devices also use very slow CPUs and corresponding ultra-light-weight operating systems and applications. The point here, though, is that "the competition" to Microsoft owns a patent on how they do things (which FWIW they stole from someone else, which is why they nearly got shut down) that they are not about to license to MS at any price.

While BlackBerry's battery life is great because of their technology, the total cost of maintaining service on the devices is several times that of Windows Mobile/DirectPush. First, you have to pay the carrier a monthly BlackBerry service fee, in addition to data plan fees. Then, your corporate IT department has to pay for a BES server license for each device that'll be in use (and this is in addition to the MS Exchange CAL they're buying for each e-mail user).

Conversely, with Windows Mobile/DirectPush, you only pay for a data plan, and for the Exchange CAL. The savings adds up to $30-50/month per user, plus a savings of more than $50 per user on the initial acquisition cost. Not only, but with BB you're entrusting your e-mail to their data center somewhere in the Canadian boondocks, whereas with DP, it never leaves your control. This is why corporations are pushing hard to evict BlackBerry and replace it with DP.

Microsoft's pre-DirectPush technology (AUTD) was better on the battery, because like BlackBerry, it used out-of-band signaling to let the device know the mailbox changed and it had something to pick up. But this had problems too. If you got a lot of e-mail, your device was basically syncing all the time (AUTD did not support pushing deltas of the mailbox). It sent hundreds to thousands of SMS messages a month. And it wasn't as fast (and neither is BlackBerry). What exists now is the best balance of features and performance.

If you want to improve your DirectPush battery life, change from "As items arrive" to a scheduled sync at 60+ minute intervals. This will dramatically improve your battery performance, at the cost of not-quite-real-time e-mail delivery.

No, I'm not comparing apples to oranges. I'm comparing push technologies. Certainly, they went about implementing it differently, but that's what I'm comparing -- the implementation.

Your "solution" for improving DirectPush technology is not a solution. To stop using a technology is not a solution. It's a work-around.

Look, I'm not unrealistic. I do this stuff for a living. When I produce something thats performance is inferior, I start looking for ways to improve it. I would like to see Microsoft do this.

Also, I'm pretty sure that at some time over the past year or so, I read an article about how to change your configuration on the exchange server (or it's router) to improve battery life.

um can we get back on topic here? has anyone else experienced what I have with the battery draining even after its been powered down all the way?

No. Last night when I hit the sack, my battery was 90%. This morning when I turned it on and checked it out it was 80%.

Do you have push email turned on? What other apps do you have loaded?

Yes but it shouldn't have been using any battery power at all if it was completely powered down. I guess I'll try it again tonight. Maybe I didn't really shut it down like I thought I did.

i'm having battery issues too. i used it lightly at work yesterday and it drained to 60%, then i went to the baseball game and it was down to 40% eventhough i didn't use it and the display was off the whole time.

losing 20% of juice while doing nothing is scary

DiGiTY -

Do you use push email?

I'll let you beta testers.....I mean early adopters figure all this out and let the rest of us non 6800 people know what is going on.

My battery went completely dead overnight as well, not using push email (it pulls emails at specific intervals), but I did have Agile Messenger running at the time, connected to 3 services. That's the only thing I can think of that would cause it. I ended up disabling the Google and MSN accounts on Agile, and it hasn't been as much of a hog on battery power, but its still far from ideal. At this rate, even without a messenger app running, it'll need to be charged every 24 hours with absolute minimal usage. Much more often if you, God forbid, receive a phone call...

It's worth noting that I do have an average signal strength (3-4), however I do not have EVDO in my area. I don't think that should matter. I'm 90% certain that the cause of my first battery drain was that Agile was connected to 3 services (AIM, MSN, and Google). XMPP (the Jabber protocol that Google Talk uses) is all XML, and is very very chatty, compared to AIM and MSN, which use proprietary binary protocols. The fact that XMPP uses XML, means that the same action (say, receiving notification that a buddy signed on or off), will require 3-4 times the bandwidth compared to MSN and AOL, or possibly more for other notifications. I can't test this with the device turned off, as I need it to be on at all times (occupational hazard) -- I got in enough trouble when the battery died.

Does anyone else have this problem with Agile eating battery power like that, and have some kind of workaround (even if its a new program)? I'm in the 21-day trial for Agile, so if I can find something that works better (maybe by receiving notifications of IMs, rather than staying constantly-connected), I will change to something else. But right now, I can't afford to have Agile connected to a jabber service. The MSN connection was not as bad as a Google connection, but still less than ideal. Note that when Live Messenger is connected to the MSN account, it also did not seem like such a battery hog, so maybe Live handles the connection more efficiently than Agile does.

Can you really call it a mobile device if you have to be near a charging source multiple times throughout the day? It's ridiculous :/

If I run anything that depends on keeping a data connection, my battery life drops to less than a business day -- maybe as little as 4 hours.

also keep in mind to have your wireless switch turned off, because i woke up one morning and found my phone dead with the wireless switch in the on position. This phone is terrible at receiving wifi signal. I use my 6700 for wifi so im on aim with that while im on the 6800. No way im carrying that brick around anymore lol