Is there any hard info about what the battery issue is?
Some people think it's just Android being rubbish or written in Java or not made by Apple, but some people with the device seem to have no problems while others are writing articles like this.
I was under the impression that Android phones actually told you what had used up all the battery. I would have thought that might have been a good starting point for writing an actual journalistic article about this.
Depending on the item you can see things like time on, CPU total, data sent/received. For example in the last hour my display has been on for 5m46s and that is 61% of battery usage.
This may be like the HTC Incredible issue - something is wrong with Flickr account syncing and it eats the battery alive.
JavaME was a known battery hog, but maybe Dalvik is better. Going with Java is a risky decision because whatever you do you still lose: if you ramp up the CPU it will consume more power and drain the battery, if you don't the software will be too slow. Add JIT and you use more battery.
I found it particularly amusing how one commenter was bragging about how his HTC EVO made it through the day on one battery charge.
What device do you have? One busy day seems to be standard with iPhones as I understand it and based on my experience with an iPhone 3G, though iPhones are generally supposed to be worse than say Nokias or Blackberries.
Apple's figures suggest that if you browse the web on 3G or Wifi, make calls or watch video constantly then you'd get 5-6 hours on my 3G, but even that's a high estimate as it assumes that when you're talking on the phone or watching videos then you have the 3G and WiFi powered off.
That's enough for me as it's routine for me to charge my phone every night (though I've turned notifications right down and I do have a car charger because using the GPS for directions seems to really eat at the battery) but I can imagine many kinds of travelling businessman who would find that an annoyance.
But the braggart said that he almost didn't use the phone...
I have a Nokia E72 and recharge every ~4 days with heavy 2.5G internet use, ~20 minutes of talk time per day, use as a PDA, etc. Almost no wi-fi, no videos, no music.
If he's bragging about 8 hours of standby then he's either confused or a troll. On the other hand some people have, apparently genuinely, struggled to get 8 hours of standby from this particular model, so he may have been refuting this with personal experience and everyone's got confused.
I'm not sure we're any closer to any actual conclusions about how battery hungry the Evo actually is, what problems it might have and what kind of usage triggers them.
That's not entirely correct: the JIT will generate some CPU overhead (and usually quite a bit of memory overhead, probably one of the reasons why Google redefined the baseline at 512MB), but when it does kick in it should generate more efficient code leading to either lower levels of CPU or shorter CPU burst, allowing the CPU to go back to idling faster.
Therefore I'd say on average the JIT should either be neutral or should improve battery life a bit, when loading the CPU.
Some people think it's just Android being rubbish or written in Java or not made by Apple, but some people with the device seem to have no problems while others are writing articles like this.
I was under the impression that Android phones actually told you what had used up all the battery. I would have thought that might have been a good starting point for writing an actual journalistic article about this.