Testing the BlackBerry Bold 9700 battery has been an interesting experience. I always thought consumer electronics manufacturers embellished their battery life expectancies in order to impress the buyer. In this case, RIM has actually slightly under-stated the Bold 9700’s battery life, and really proved themselves to be an honest company when it comes to their battery life marketing. Could we say the same for Apple? I challenge TIPB to do the same with the iPhone, and see if it can play 39 hours of music off radio and last 29 hours with heavy usage. Speaking of Apple…the BlackBerry Bold 9700 lasts longer than the best iPod.
Just look for yourself, the BlackBerry Bold 9700’s battery, lasts longer than that of the best iPod available.
In Part 1 of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 battery stress test, we threw RIM a bone and checked out the music playback with the wireless connections off. For the second part, it was important to test how long the battery would last given very heavy usage. During the 29 hours that the BlackBerry was on, it went through the following:
- About an hour of voice over 8 phone calls.
- 10 SMS messages received, 7 sent.
- 13 Tweets from UberTwitter, 9 of which contained a pic.
- Google Maps running the whole time and updating Latitude.
- About 8 hours of music streaming and playing via Bluetooth.
- Received about 30 emails and replied to around 15.
- The remaining time spent with all connections on and pulling data.
This is the first BlackBerry that I have been able to run more than 1 full day of usage without charging. There are definitely updates and optimizations made to the OS that make music playback more efficient, as well as general improvements to the device that make the battery last longer than any other BlackBerry. If you’re interested, I could do similar experiments with other BlackBerry smartphones. Anyone want to know about the Storm2 battery?
This BlackBerry test proves that the Bold 9700 has a killer battery.
Special thanks goes out to Slacker for white listing my account so it can be played in Canada. Now if only the lazy bureaucrats can get their act together, Canadians would have an awesome music device.
© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009