BlackBerry Curve review - Battery Life
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Mark Brezinski Published on August 10, 2007 Comment on this |
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Call Time (9.62)
The Curve lasted a decent 8 hours and 1 minute in our call time test. That's above average, but it's far from the longest talk time we've seen; that title belongs to the T-Mobile Wing, which only threw in towel after 14 hours and 15 minutes of calling. The eight hours of battery life is more than adequate for normal callers. You could go out for the weekend and leave your charger at home.
| Cell Phone | Talk Time | Score |
| BlackBerry Curve | 8 hours, 1 minute | 9.62 |
| BlackBerry 8800 | 8 hours, 50 minutes | 10.60 |
| HTC Mogul | 5 hours, 30 minutes | 4.58 |
| Motorola Q | 3 hours, 49 minutes | 5.48 |
| Palm Treo 700p | 4 hours, 15 minutes | 5.10 |
| Helio Ocean | 4 hours, 7 minutes | 4.94 |
Music Playback (6.97)
The Curve did pretty well on our music test, too; it kept on playing our test album for 9 hours and 41 minutes. Again, that's not the longest time we've seen (that honor lies with the Apple iPhone , which kept going for more than 10 hours 46 minutes on speakers and 31 hours on headphones), but it's a decent time that would keep the tunes flowing for a flight across the country.
| Cell Phone | Music Playback Time | Score |
| BlackBerry Curve | 9 hours, 41 minutes | 7.06 |
| BlackBerry 8800 | 9 hours, 47 minutes | 7.04 |
| HTC Mogul | 14 hours, 54 minutes | 8.08 |
| Motorola Q | 5 hours, 25 minutes | 3.90 |
| Palm Treo 700p | 8 hours, 8 minutes | 5.86 |
| Helio Ocean | 8 hours, 9 minutes | 5.87 |
Web Browsing (8.44)
Web browsing is a huge strain on a cell phone, especially devices that use power-hungry EVDO or HSDPA connections. The Curve doesn't have one of these; it has a slower ( and less power-hungry) EDGE data connection. We found the Curve lasted a decent 7 hours and 2 minutes in our rather intense browsing battery test (which involves series of websites that refresh every 10 seconds). That's longer than the claimed battery life of four hours, and a couple hours more than most of our results (at the time of writing, the average is a little more than five hours). Bear in mind this is very much dependent on the network and other factors; our testing lab has good signal strength, but the battery life will be much shorter if the Curve has to transmit a stronger signal to reach the cell tower.
| Cell Phone | Browsing Time | Score |
| BlackBerry Curve | 7 hours, 2 minutes | 8.44 |
| BlackBerry 8800 | 9 hours, 3 minutes | 10.86 |
| HTC Mogul | 2 hours, 32 minutes | 5.36 |
| Motorola Q | 2 hours, 42 minutes | 3.24 |
| Palm Treo 700p | 4 hours, 3 minutes | 4.86 |
| Helio Ocean | 4 hours, 19 minutes | 5.18 |
Idle Time (unscored)
We don't test idle time for cell phones, but RIM quotes a standby time of up to 17 days. Our impressions are this is on the optimistic side, but it should be good for a few days in your pocket without charging.
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