HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE Review: One Alternative

Like I mentioned in our discussion on cellular speeds, we’ve had trouble getting reliable signal at our two test locations. There’s a very real possibility that this reception issue affected our battery life tests, and so we leave that caveat in our results. Battery testing is easily the biggest part of our review process. In an ideal world the OEMs would send us seven samples, so we can have all our battery tests running at once, and still have samples on hand for performance and display testing. What this means is that battery testing is hard to repeat. So, bear with us as we prepare to do just that. 

We’ll start with our call test, one that has been bringing good news for most of the phones we test over the last year or so. Here we see our first sign of trouble. The test is simple, play a little music through a phone calling another phone, through which a little music is being played. The Incredible 4G manages just under seven hours, nowhere near the One X and One S performance. There’s a penalty to be paid in data tests for CDMA devices because the 1xRTT radio has to get pinged periodically to check for calls. Here, though, with no background services syncing data, the screen off, and the phone doing nothing but making a call I find no way to explain the performance. If signal issues are the culprit then we will update, but it's not looking good so far. 

The web browsing test cycles through a suite of websites with the screen on and set at 200 nits of brightness. Performance under 3G was well below the results from the similarly equipped One S, and even lower (by nearly an hour) than the HTC Rezound. Indeed, the AMOLED screen, higher clock speed and smaller battery of the One S should handicap it against the Incredible, but the Incredible 4G falls distinctly behind. There's a glimmer of improvement in the 4G LTE Web Browsing tests, but performance is still well below what we would have expected. Once we account for battery capacity and normalize the data we see that the Incredible 4G remains at nearly the bottom for 3G performance, and not nearly so impressive in LTE performance as the One X for AT&T. [Update: These 3G performance numbers are in a sure better signal area, with great signal, so we're marking these as infallible. We'll work on 4G LTE numbers more, but for now, in 3G, performance is definitely poor.]

In our tethered data test the Incredible 4G moves a little closer to its One, forebear; mustering nearly 5 hours to the One X's just over 5 hours. This number makes a lot more sense, the savings from having a 20% lower clockspeed would be mitigated by having a 20% smaller battery. So, if having the screen off leads us to a much better battery life result, perhaps the real culprit is related to inefficiencies in the display? Whichever the case, tethered data performance is the only feather in the cap of the Incredible 4G's battery life so far. 

We’re not going to bring the house crashing down on the Incredible 4G for battery life just yet. If the reception issues are the root cause of the battery life deficits then we should hopefully find out before long. If, though, it turns out that there’s something more to it, then one of this phone’s most damning deficits will be battery life.