Starting off… When I first got the Nexus One, I was fair in letting it get complete full charges every single night via the OEM wall charger that it came with. Knowing Lithium-ion batteries well, I knew I shouldn’t’ expect full battery life from a battery until it has been conditioned for at least 5 charges.
After 5 charges, the stock battery wasn’t lasting past 5PM forcing me to buy a standard car charger (which works on a Nexus One) and would also work on a blackberry or any other similar device. I actually bought that at Staples at 6PM one night. This lasting from 8am to 6pm was with very few phone calls, the display dimmed, a black background and only moderate email use.
I didn’t have the sync enabled… I didn’t yet have all 200 of my favorite RSS feeds loaded as I did on my Blackberry and I spent most of my time on 2G instead of 3G to try and limit my battery use. All this didn’t help the battery life at all.
Received the Seidio 3200mAh battery and on the day of receiving it.. I plugged it in for it’s first charge at 3PM on the first day. I wasn’t totally thinking about the fact that the package claimed it needed a full 8 hours on it’s first charge, and I would need my phone for my usual evening walk at 10PM… So, I waited till 10:30 and went for my usual walk meaning it only got 7 hours charge.. and I took it for a 30 min stroll. Then I put it back on the charger for the rest of the evening. That may one day impact battery life but it’s close enough I figured.. and I desperately needed something to read while walking that evening so I wouldn’t get too bored.
The next day I didn’t notice it to be that much better than my usual battery.. But in time, given a full weeks’ worth of charges and drains, it began to hold more of a charge each time. After a while, I stopped thinking about charging it during the day entirely.
Good things and bad things…
One of the sad things about Seidio producing pretty good batteries, but not so good cell phone covers, is their lack of attention to detail that Google and HTC had when they designed their battery cover. Click the image above to see the dust that’s developed (under the battery cover) after a month of having the extended life battery being in my pocket with me everywhere I go.
Pics of the front of both covers…
The back of the Seidio Battery Cover.
Back of the Google Battery Cover
One thing you’ll notice after taking a close look at the Google version verses the Seidio version is that Google has a plastic cover over the camera and a black plastic mesh screen over the audio sensor for the second mic on the left of their cover… Seidio has left both of these holes open!! That and the Seidio cover doesn’t line up FLAT with the phone at the bottom of the cover, but it does at the top.
Because of the extended size of the battery, naturally it’s larger… That’s why it requires this custom cover. Here’s a pic of the battery installed WITHOUT the cover on to give you an idea of how much bigger the battery really is.
Well… Why would you buy an extended battery if you can’t even put it into the docking base and charge it that way, right? That’s super annoying… just buy a ton of batteries and keep switching them, that seems reasonable.. Thing is… if you take the cover off, you CAN fit the Seidio in most standard USB Charging bases!
I tried a number of software titles that claimed they could accurately detect the battery drain of the battery itself, and i was going to run some charts, graphs and benchmarks against the original battery… But It ended up always taking up more time than I had…
I would run Youtube videos on it with full brightness on 3G and full blast audio… and it would do that for 3 hours and still have over 60% battery life left.
I have sync on, brightness on, bluetooth on, wifi, an animated background and it still lasts till the evening. In short I haven’t yet found a way to deliberately drain the whole battery before 10PM and since I use this as my primary phone I haven’t been able to run proper tests without going without it for a period of time and I don’t have that luxury at this time.
Leaving the display on and being on the phone a lot does cause the battery to get hot and that seems unavoidable but it seemed to do that with the original as well. Key thing is to do what you can to keep it cool because they obviously do drain faster when they’re warm than they do cool. I’ve also tried some forum battery hacks, and to be honest they don’t do what they promise so I wouldn’t bother.
Final Verdict:
While it does feel nice when it’s a smaller phone, I do find it feels less likely i’m going to drop it and more of a solid device with the cover on and the larger battery and I’ll trade the looks for more time on my device any day. It still fits in my phone holder in my car on the dash (not the google one though) and I don’t regret the buy for 10 seconds.
A few days ago, I wanted to go for a walk at midnight and my Seidio was at 14% so I thought I’d better charge it up, so I stuck it in the battery portion of the battery charger & dock that I recommend from Amazon… And put the original Google cover and battery in again…. I was able to loose 30% of a fully charged stock battery just browsing on 3G and watching Youtube videos in a 30 min walk. The slenderness of the phone made me continue to think i was going to drop it while briskly walking which of course scared me!
I’d strongly recommend the Seidio Battery from Amazon.
. They shipped it for me in 2 days and were the cheapest place by far to get it. Up to $10-15 cheaper depending on where you hunt for it online.
for the Google Nexus one.
and blow the cash? If you have it to spare and don’t care about an extra 20-50 depending on where you get it… Go ahead… But would you really benefit from that extra speed?