The Glade 4.0

My wife and I are looking at upgrading our cell phones. We are staying with Verizon; this is known. Also, I'm not a OS-tinkerer/phone-rooter.

What I'm wrestling with is which phone to go with:

1: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Pro: Screen, Ice Cream Sandwich
Con: Battery life, ?

2: Droid Razr MAXXXXXX
Pro: Crazy battery life (this really appeals to me, but is it paramount?), sturdy construction, second best camera of these candidates (?)
Con: No ICS yet; still would be a Motorolerized version of ICS when it gets it.

3: Apple iphone 4.whatever
Pro: Global capable (c'mon Verizon. put global cards in all your damn phones), siblings have iphones so could use the facetalk thing, camera likely the best of the bunch.
Con: 3G tech, Apple ('You will be assimilated')
Question: How dick-ish are they about things like using Amazon Cloud instead of itunes?

Thoughts? Observations?

I notice you're not considering a Windows Phone

_________________
Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I'd like to just chime in and say that I've got a first gen windows phone and I can't wait for the next gen. They're great, IMO. As simple as a phone should be.

The nokia lumia 900 is gorgeous.

I have two push email accounts, and leave GTalk running on my Galaxy Nexus (and G+, but I don't get a lot of push notification stuff from G+), and usually run an hour-ish of Google Music streaming a day. That generally leaves me at 60-75% battery life at the end of the day.

ICS is pretty damn sweet.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is odd. I have a Droid 3, run Trillian and whatnot, and I'm lucky to get 6 hours of battery out of it. Maybe 10 - 15 mins or so of draw something or whatever during the day... I go from fully charged when I leave the house to auto shut off 6-7 hours later.

Am I doing it wrong?

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

Battery life is very dependant on what you have running. Any service that polls for updates (or syncs).. news apps, email, chat, cloud services, etc... will drain your battery.. as does enabling hardware you aren't using.. GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc..

I leave GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth off unless I'm using them, and my Galaxy Nexus has gone all weekend without a charge...

Remember, it's also highly hardware dependent. Droids have a huge reputation for being battery hogs.

It probably helps that I don't spend a lot of time phone-gaming or idly surfing for hours a day on my phone; even as it is the majority of my power usage goes to the screen.

Furthermore, yeah, what Midgen said -- what you're running, and how active it is when your phone is idle (syncing, monitoring phone state -- to that end, some task manager type applications can be a net battery *user* -- passing data back and forth in the background over your wifi or wireless, keeping location services running when you're not using it...) makes a huge difference to battery life.

Finally, it wouldn't surprise me if ICS was a little better about managing task switching from a power consumption standpoint; my previous phone was lower power, slightly bulkier, and had a smaller, less bright screen than the Galaxy Nexus' Super AMOLED or whatever, and it would push 80% charge over the course of dawn to bed with pretty similar usage habits. I can't imagine the battery in the slimmer Galaxy Nexus has that much more capacity than my old one...

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I don't use it a lot. In an 8 hour day, I'll do a bit of texting, check some emails, and use it as a clock. There's no wifi at work and I don't have a bluetooth on.

I don't get why it only lasts 6 hours or so.

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

When you say you use it as a clock, do you have the display active all the time?

The screen is by far the biggest user of battery (when it's on).

In settings, touch 'battery'. It should show you what is using the most battery power.

I just checked my GNex, and the screen is responsible for 62% of the battery usage since I took it off the charger this morning.

I pull it out of my pocket, press the "turn screen on" button, look at the time, press "turn screen off" button and put it back in my pocket.

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

My Samsung GS2 lasts days idling but some apps which run in the background can eat the battery life quickly if I don't remember to shut them down. I used to go from 80 to empty in a matter of hours with the idling. The biggest culprit was "Android OS" app for some reason. A little research revealed it was actually an app widget which was draining the battery but the battery manager attributes this to Android OS.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Rafael, I believe that's because widgets run as services, which are basically run as subsets of the OS rather than their own processes.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Update.
We went with the RAZR MAXX.

The ICS update should hit sometime in the next month or so. Also, Verizon are going to upgrade this phone to global ready, perhaps at the same time as the ICS update.

I'm happy so far (though I haven't messed with it too much). I will say this: I have left it off the charger to test the battery and after 2 days, 23 hours, 29 minutes and 16 seconds I finally got the warning to plug my phone it, as it has dropped below 15% charge. That's with about 90-110 minutes of active screen time. Not bad.

Nice. I'm very happy with my Galaxy Nexus but the Razr was my second choice as well. Battery life on the GN is ok, I may spring for the marginally better battery. We'll see.

Anyway good luck with it.

_________________
“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe