Blackberry Storm Cell Phone Review - Battery Life
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Marianne Schultz Published on December 08, 2008 Comment on this |
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| Business users should be pretty satisfied with the Storm's call time battery life. Music playback battery life is pretty good as well. Web browsing battery time is the only weak spot in the Storm's performance here. For more information about our battery tests see this article. | |
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Call Time (7.48)
To test call time battery life, we charge the phone fully and time how long the battery lasts on a simulated phone call using our testing equipment and a recorded conversation. The Storm's claimed talk time battery life is 6 hours on CDMA networks and 5.5 hours on GSM networks. We tested the Storm on Verizon's CDMA network - GSM networks can be selected and used only when your Verizon Wireless plan includes this option.
In this battery test, the Storm lasted 6 hours and 14 minutes, just beyond the claimed talk time of 6 hours, performance that nets it the second-best score among our comparison phones, behind only the Blackberry 8320. This is a decent amount of talk time that should be sufficient for hard-working business users.
Music Playback (8.39)
To test battery life during music playback, we charge the phone fully, load test music on to it, set it to play at the highest volume in repeat mode, and time how long the battery lasts. The Storm performed well here, lasting for 11 hours and 39 minutes. While this time is good enough to beat the T-Mobile G1 and the iPhone 3G, it's not quite up to one of its predecessors, the Blackberry Curve 8320, at 12 hours and 2 minutes, nor the Nokia E71 at 16 hours and 7 minutes.
Web Browsing (3.94)
To test battery life during web browsing, we charge the phone fully, set the display to its highest brightness level, navigate to test web site that refreshes automatically every 10 seconds, and time how long the battery lasts. Here, the Storm performed poorly relative to our comparison phones, posting the 2nd-shortest battery life in this test at 3 hours and 17 minutes, behind only the HTC Touch Diamond at 2 hours and 27 minutes.
Idle Time unscored
In order to complete our reviews in a timely manner, we don't test a phone's claimed idle time since this can take multiple days or even weeks. On either CDMA or GSM networks, the Storm can last up to a claimed 15 days. Idle time is largely influenced by cellular signal strength - the further away a phone is from a tower, the harder it works to maintain a connection, which drains the battery more quickly, and GSM phones generally expend more energy to do this than CDMA phones. Most users will see great variations in stand-by battery life since changing locations constantly affects what towers the phone can connect to and the energy required to do so.
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