LG Venus Cell Phone Review - Battery Life
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Mark Brezinski Published on December 05, 2007 Comment on this |
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Call Time (3.98)
This test aims to see how many hours of talk time the phone can provide you with. This is a fairly important score, as calling is, after all, the main function of the phone. Testing is fairly simple. We call the phone with Skype, and use our test PC and our HATS rig to play audio over both sides of the call, in order to simulate a conversation. We then let the call continue until the battery dies.
The Venus lasted 3 hours 19 mins, a paltry showing indeed. Typically phones last between four and five hours with many lasting over six. With such a low talk time, daily charging is almost a necessity. Those who like to have long conversations will find they're only able to have two or three before their battery dies. This isn't too surprising given that the Venus uses the 3G EVDO network, but on the other hand so does the LG Chocolate and it did twice as well as the Venus in this test. We also surmise that the addition of the touch sensitive control screen probably adds to battery drain.
| Cell Phone | Talk Time | Score |
| LG Venus | 3 hours 19 mins | 3.98 |
| LG Chocolate Vx8550 | 6 hours, 43 minutes | 5.66 |
| Apple iPhone | 7 hours, 4 minutes | 8.48 |
| HTC Touch | 3 hours, 11 minutes | 3.82 |
| Razr2 V9m | 6 hours, 45 minutes | 5.70 |
| Samsung Juke | 3 hours, 30 minutes | 4.20 |
Music Playback (6.38)
Music playback is even easier to test than call time, and you kids at home can play along too! All we do is set a playlist to repeat and let it sit. We use an audio recording program to capture the playback just so we can find the exact minute it stops.
The Venus does well here, playing its heart out for 8 hours, 52 minutes. This is about an hour above average, as most phones tend to score 6-8 hours. With this sort of playback, the Venus could keep you occupied for a substantial plane ride, and still have enough juice left over to make a few calls once you land.
| Cell Phone | Music Playback Time | Score |
| LG Venus | 8 hours 52 minutes | 6.38 |
| LG Chocolate Vx8550 | 13 hours, 55 minutes | 10.02 |
| Apple iPhone | 10 hours, 46 minutes | 7.75 |
| HTC Touch | 4 hours, 45 minutes | 3.42 |
| Razr2 V9m | 5 hours, 35 minutes | 6.42 |
| Samsung Juke | 7 hours, 45 minutes | 5.58 |
Web Browsing (4.06)
We test a phone's web browsing endurance by tossing it into a ring of sites that redirect to each other every ten seconds. One of the stipulations is that the backlight has to stay on the whole time, at maximum brightness. Most phones have the option to keep the backlight on. For those that don't, typically the constant refreshing renews their timers so it isn't a problem. Then we have phones like the Venus, which make our quest for scientific results a bit harder. The Venus's backlight wouldn't stay on. There are four options for it: 7 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or always off. These are an obnoxious set of options; if you're browsing the web and it takes you more than 30 seconds to read a page, the screen will dim and you'll have to tap the screen.
Most of you probably know where this little diatribe is going. In order to perform the web browsing test, we had to tap it every 30 seconds to keep the backlight on. Sure, you've probably glanced on ahead and seen the phone only lasted 3 hours and 23 minutes, but we didn't know that beforehand. In this case the Venus actually did better than the LG Chocolate, surprising given that it's talk time was so much worse than the Chocolate's.
| Cell Phone | Browsing Time | Score |
| LG Venus | 3 hours, 23 minutes | 4.06 |
| LG Chocolate Vx8550 | 2 hours, 32 minutes | 3.04 |
| Apple iPhone | 5 hours, 13 minutes | 6.26 |
| HTC Touch | 3 hours, 17 minutes | 3.94 |
| Razr2 V9m | 4 hours, 51 minutes | 5.82 |
| Samsung Juke | N/A | 0.0 |
Idle Time unscored
We don't test idle time for the sake of getting our reviews out relatively fast. Most phones can last two weeks or longer idling, which means getting a reliable set of data points would require months. We therefore tend to blindly agree with whatever the carrier claims. In this case, it's 480 hours. This seems to be a little high, so we wouldn't suggest letting your phone sit for 20 days without charging it and still expecting to make a call.
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