I’ve been experimenting with maximizing my battery savings on my new Droid Eris without compromising its usefulness. The standby time rating is over 2 weeks, but I will tell you that if you actually use the device, it will spend a lot of time on the charger, and will need to be charged daily. Standby is the lowest power usage possible without turning the device off completely. Talk time is rated at approximately 5 hours max, meaning continuous use can kill the battery in under 5 hours. I suspect average use will see anywhere from 8 hours to 24 hours between charges. What I intend to do is find the best way to maximize the time between charges without making it totally useless.
I just upgraded my phone. I had been waiting for Verizon to release an Android device as I did not want to change to T-Mobile just to have one. It finally came time and Verizon released two devices at the same time, the Motorola Droid, and the HTC Droid Eris. I was at the 1.5 year mark in my contract so I couldn’t use my New Every Two plan feature to upgrade, which gives a $100 credit towards a new device. With the rebates and New Every Two, the Motorola Droid would have cost $99 and the HTC Droid Eris would have been free. However, I believe the rebates are not staying around so by the time my “free” upgrade would have come, the price may still have been the same as I paid now. So, I went ahead and upgraded and went for the Droid Eris.
I’ve been idly learning development for Android, having studied up to the 1.6 SDK and written small useless apps that run in the emulator. Now that I have my own Android device (HTC Droid Eris on Verizon Wireless), I plan to go into full swing with writing apps for it. I have a lot of interest in the platform so not only will I write apps, I will write some articles here, prompting the creation of the new catagory: Android. I will write more as time comes.
