T-Mobile Shadow Cell Phone Review - Battery Life
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Alfredo Padilla Published on November 21, 2007 Comment on this |
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Call Time (4.90)
To see how well the Shadow's battery holds up during a phone call we make a test call using Skype and pipe an audio book across the connection to simulate conversation. We then time how long it takes for the handset to run out of power. The T-Mobile Shadow lasted 4 hours 5 minutes in our test, which is right on the low end of what we could consider acceptable and almost a full hour shorter than what HTC claims. You can see from the table below that only the HTC Touch performed worse on this test than the Shadow, while some handsets like the BlackBerry Curve 8320 and T-Mobile Wing performed significantly better. The Shadow has a pretty small battery for a smart phone and we're not surprised to see it return a lower than average call time score.
| Cell Phone | Talk Time | Score |
| T-Mobile Shadow | 4 hours 5 mins | 4.90 |
| HTC Touch on Sprint | 3 hours 11 mins | 3.82 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 7 hours 24 mins | 8.88 |
| Razr2 V9m on Verizon | 4 hours 45 mins | 5.70 |
| Helio Ocean | 4 hours 7 mins | 4.94 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 14 hours 15 mins | 17.10 |
Music Playback (3.22)
To see how long the T-Mobile Shadow could play back music we set the phone to playing an album repeatedly with the volume turned up to maximum using the loud speaker. We leave all other settings on default and time how long it takes for the phone to run out of battery life. The T-Mobile Shadow lasted 4 hours 28 minutes in our web browsing test, which is once again pretty low. In this case you can see from our table of comparisons that it's shorter than any of our comparison phones. In fact several phones lasted two or three times as long as the Shadow. The Shadow definitely won't be able to hold up as your main music player if you listen to more than a couple of hours music in a day, and heaven forbid you try to use Bluetooth stereo headphones at the same time.
| Cell Phone | Music Playback Time | Score |
| T-Mobile Shadow | 4 hours 28 mins | 3.22 |
| HTC Touch on Sprint | 4 hours 45 mins | 3.42 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 12 hours 2 mins | 8.66 |
| Razr2 V9m on Verizon | 8 hours 55 mins | 6.42 |
| Helio Ocean | 8 hours 9 mins | 5.87 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 10 hours 26 mins | 7.51 |
Web Browsing (3.98)
To test how well the T-Mobile Shadow's battery handles web browsing we point the Shadow's browser at a web page that is set to refresh every ten seconds. We then ensure that the screen stays on and time how long the battery lasts. The Shadow completed its tri-fecta of poor battery results with a web browsing time of 3 hours 19 minutes. Once again this is near the bottom of our comparison phones, and this is despite the fact that the Shadow uses the less battery intensive EDGE network for web browsing rather than faster and more battery hungry 3G networks like some of our comparison phones. Basically, the Shadow isn't going to last very long no matter what you're doing, so you might want to keep a charger or spare battery close at hand if you're an intensive user of your mobile device.
| Cell Phone | Browsing Time | Score |
| T-Mobile Shadow | 3 hours 19 mins | 3.98 |
| HTC Touch on Sprint | 3 hours 17 mins | 3.94 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 9 hours 43 mins | 11.66 |
| Razr2 V9m on Verizon | 4 hours 51 mins | 5.82 |
| Helio Ocean | 4 hours 19 mins | 5.18 |
| T-Mobile Wing | 9 hours 52 mins | 11.84 |
Idle Time unscored
In order to ensure that we deliver reviews in a timely fashion we don't test idle time. According to HTC the Shadow should last 160 hours on standby.
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