Keanen's Blog My personal blog.

A review of the Seidio Innocell 3500mAh for the EVO 4G

I decided to order Seidio's 3500 mAh battery a couple of weeks ago because of some traveling that I had coming up. I was tired of swapping the OEM 1500 mAh battery and after-market batteries that were not holding up as well on long days when I did not have a charger around. I had used an inexpensive 3500 mAh battery from eBay for $11 that did not hold up to my expectations. I read reviews that argued whether or not the $11 battery up to par with the Seidio battery that I ordered from Amazon for just over $50.

I can say that the $11 battery does not hold a candle to the Seidio battery. The Seidio battery can take a beating!!

Below are some examples of use...

What I have running all the time:

• Three Gmail and one Exchange account - all push enabled
• Weatherbug Elite updates every 30 minutes
• Facebook updates every four hours
• Google Latitude running
• Google Voice - Push enabled
• Google Talk - Signed in
• PingChat running

Heavy Usage Day:

• Disconnected from the charger at 6AM ET
• Streamed SiriusXM for 90 minutes
• Checking Twitter with Touiteur every 90 minutes or so
• A couple of dozens of SMS sent and received
• Responded to Gmail and Exchange based email throughout the day - received about 100 emails in total and sent 20-25
• Received and responded to a few PingChat messages
• Used 4G for 25 minutes
• Streamed YouTube videos for 10 minutes
• Browsed the web for 30 minutes
• Played cached Slacker content for 30 minutes
• Phone calls totaling 60 minutes

I went to bed at 10:30PM CT which is 16.5 hours with 9% of the battery remaining. The 4G, YouTube, and most of the Internet browsing occurred when my return flight to MSP was delayed. I was floored when I still had power when I went to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light Usage Day:

• Disconnected from the charger at 8:30AM CT
• Checked Touiteur every couple of hours
• Sent and received 12 text messages
• Received 20 emails, responded to 5
• 10 minutes of phone calls
• Browsed the Internet for 20 minutes

After 13.5 hours, my battery life at 10PM had 66% remaining!

With my OEM 1500 mAh battery I could make it to about 13 hours on a lighter use day. It is very nice to not be concerned about the battery. This brings me back to my Blackberry Curve days I never had great battery life with my Tour 9630 so this far exceeds the stock battery on that device.

As far as the look of the device with the hump back, I do not really care how my device looks. I wanted/needed a highly functional, reliable smartphone and now I have it!

Unrevoked Forever

I admit, I was so excited about Froyo on my EVO that I loaded it and gave up my rooted device. I have now used the 2.2 root method provided here and am setup once again with a rooted EVO. Being able to perform screen captures for little app reviews is nice among other benefits.

I have also loaded a new kernel that allows my EVO to achieve higher frames per second (FPS) which has offered a substantial graphics performance increase.

I look forward to trying out some other ROM options like CyanogenMod but with 4G around the corner in our market I will wait until that ROM has 4G capabilities.

Sprint Airave 3G – Airvana Access Point

I received the new 3G Airave from Sprint today. I must say, there is not much of a need for me to turn on Wi-Fi on my phone with this thing running. The below speed tests are from the Airave over my Comcast connection. This is certainly a nice change over the original model that only offered 1x data where my devices would still reach out to local towers and eat up battery. I look forward to seeing what kind of battery savings that I realize with a strong data signal in our home. The real kicker would be having broadband at the cabin and putting this thing to use when needed.

I am very curious to see what Sprint does with the VOIP capabilities that this device offers. It would be nice to consolidate my phones to a single bill but it might be difficult for them to beat our the feature set and pricing that I currently have with another VOIP carrier. This functionality will offer Sprint another revenue stream and likely be a great way to lure people from traditional phone lines.

So far, the new Airave is showing our location correctly on Google Latitude unlike the previous model that showed me a couple of cities away.

I still have 4G in my neighborhood in case Comcast goes down...

The new Airvana model all ready to go.

4G in my neighborhood!!

OK, so I am a geek who drives around town with my EVO 4G radio turned on and noticed today when I pulled into our neighborhood that I had a 4G signal. It's not very strong at my house but just down the street with 1-2 bars I was able to get some pretty incredible speeds...

Rooted!

Thanks to the fine folks on the Unrevoked team my phone is now rooted! It's like jail break for you Apple people