I just picked up one of these things. In the 3 days I’ve had it I’ve probably convinced 15 people to move to it from their iPhones, or jump to it as their next phone on verizon. Expect this to be more or less a hackers review.
This is the charted battery usage over approximately 3 days. I learned very quickly that when you go to meetups and parties and pass around a brand new phone that very few people have everybody wants to try the same stuff on it over and over again – so the thing gets quite a workout and gets handed back to you with %20 battery left.
I’m using this app to monitor the battery and produce the data for the graph. So far it works out well – except when its not running it simply doesn’t record data, so the datapoints on the bottom of the chart make the graph look a little interesting. I’ve numbered some interesting behavior on the chart:
- I recorded the Lost Abbey brewery tour for ~25 minutes. It consumed approximately %25 of the battery life
- It took 3 hours and 45 minutes to charge from roughly %35 battery life to full.
- in 40 minutes of usage I went from %80 battery to roughly %35
- Leaving the phone overnight to cycle the battery
- Disregard – You can see at the bottom of the chart the time jumps from ~09oo hours to ~1800 hours in one step.
- I’d argue ‘standard’ daily usage
- a good solid charge via my macbook
- more standard usage
First impressions: This thing is *FAST*. I mean *FAST*. Clocked at 1ghz its very impressive. My G1 would chug and choke when opening the gallery as it tried to thumbnail all the pictures. I suspect the built-in 8 gig storage may have something to do with its I/O performance as I’m guessing the onboard flash is going to behave more quickly than an sdcard. One of the first things I love thinking about is ‘can this thing run nmap/metasploit/JtR/aircrack/etc’. As far as its ability to do that – I have every confidence that the thing could take the pepsi challenge should it arise – however I’ve almost immediately noticed I have to charge this thing 2x a day if I want to use it in any lengthy amount of time. I havent actually had it DIE on me yet, but it’ll get down to %20 or so battery before I start fiddling trying to find the charger.
Its fast, and very very capable. The camera beats the pants off the G1 camera hands down and this is a very appreciated breath of fresh air after having my G1. Only drawback is that it really does consume a lot of juice. I read in the forums that some users have been able to use batteries from other phones in the incredible successfully and extend their battery lives that way.
Interested in hacking the thing? We still don’t have root on it. What does having root mean? Tethering, overclocking, the possibility of all the wonderful linux-based tools we’re used to (nmap, metasploit, etc) and more.
Here are the forums if you want to throw your hat in the ring to get root and help the community expand the functionality of this phone.