May 10 2008
sony ericsson z750a, horrible battery life
The Sony Ericsson Z750a gets horrible battery life.
Carrie and I just recently picked up two new phones on a family plan. The materials in the store said “up to 16 days standby” for the phone we chose. Now, I understand that it says “up to”, but this is gross.
I charged my new phone overnight, and then left it sit. Every now and then, I’ve used the phone’s internal battery meter to find out what its current charge status is. I dropped the data into Excel, and plotted it.
I know battery discharge isn’t strictly linear, but I don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that the data has a linear trend so far, and that it is not anywhere near a 16-day standby life. Currently, if the battery continues to discharge at its current rate, I’m going to get between 3 and 4 days of standby time from my phone. Standby means I’m not actually using it. If I were to use the phone (to, say, talk to people) the battery life would drop rapidly.
The battery life on the Sony Ericsson Z750a is horrible, and is nowhere near the published values. Anyone choosing this phone because they believe it will get close to two weeks of standby time are sadly mistaken; this phone will eat through its battery in a huge hurry. It is a poor choice if you want your phone’s battery to last a long time. Consider that this is a brand new battery; after roughly 100 charge cycles, I can expect a degradation of around 5% (pdf). At 200-400 cycles, I might see my battery life degrade by as much as 50%. Now, if I have to re-charge my phone every two days under normal usage, that implies that I’ll hit 200 cycles in about 1 year.
And then I’ll have to buy a new battery.
This is not what I want from my phone. I want a phone with a long battery life that lets me make and receive telephone calls. I’m not interested in having to recharge it every few days, or even every night for that matter.
We just purchased this phone (2 of them). The At+t website quoted 398 standby hours and 9 hours of continuous talk time. We are only getting 2 days of usage total, then it’s dead! We see 98 percent charge when we disconnect it from the charger. By the second day, we see 52 - 58 percent charge left. I think these phones or the batteries are defective.