BlackBerry 8820 Cell Phone Review - Battery Life
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Mark Brezinski Published on October 11, 2007 Comment on this |
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Call Time (7.10)
To test battery life, we set up a recursive task and some timers, and see how long the batteries can fight it out before the phones power down. As hinted at by the section title, this test pertains to call time. The recursive bit involves two looping audio tracks that simulate a conversation. The 8820 managed to live for 5 hours and 55 minutes before the never-ending conversation got the best of it. This isn't the greatest time, as shown in the table below, but the numbers also aren't indicative of what most phones are capable of — the T-Mobile Wing is our current astounding overachiever, beating all other times by a several hours. Compared to all phones, the 8820 is on the better side of average.
| Cell Phone | Talk Time | Score |
| BlackBerry 8820 | 5 hours, 55 minutes | 7.10 |
| Nokia E90 | 3 hours, 41 minutes | 4.42 |
| Nokia N95 | 5 hours, 43 minutes | 6.86 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 14 hours, 15 minutes | 17.10 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 3 hours, 58 minutes | 4.76 |
| Apple iPhone | 7 hours, 2 minutes | 8.48 |
Music Playback (8.65)
Here we simply create a playlist set to loop to see how long the phones can take it. As it turns out, the 8820 had a very impressive time, with 12 hours and 1 minute of continuous playback. This is a very good time, and should keep business users entertained during virtually any flight.
| Cell Phone | Music Playback Time | Score |
| BlackBerry 8820 | 12 hours, 1 minute | 8.65 |
| Nokia E90 | 8 hours, 46 minutes | 6.31 |
| Nokia N95 | 5 hours, 40 minutes | 4.08 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 10 hours, 26 minutes | 7.51 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 15 hours, 23 minutes | 11.08 |
| Apple iPhone | 5 hours, 13 minutes | 7.75 |
Web Browsing (12.86)
To test the effects of browsing on battery life, we point the phone to group of web sites that constantly cycle through each other every ten seconds. This is, by far, the most taxing battery test we perform, as the phone is constantly downloading data. The 8820 managed to tough it out for 10 hours and 43 minutes, however, a time so high we initially thought something had gone wrong. This isn't to say times near 11 hours are impossible, but given the phone's mediocre call time score, we were surprised. The 8820 has remarkable browsing life.
| Cell Phone | Browsing Time | Score |
| BlackBerry 8820 | 10 hours, 43 minutes | 12.86 |
| Nokia E90 | 10 hours, 34 minutes | 12.68 |
| Nokia N95 | 6 hours, 8 minutes | 7.36 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 9 hours, 52 minutes | 11.84 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 3 hours, 3 minutes | 3.66 |
| Apple iPhone | 5 hours, 13 minutes | 6.26 |
Idle Time unscored
We don't test idle time in the interest of producing timely reviews. Most phones tend to have idle times of 14 days or more, so to run multiple tests to verify this means our reviews would be months later than they should be. As this is the case, we tend to believe whatever the carrier claims is the idle time. In this case, AT&T claims the 8820 can idle for 24 days without charging.
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