So Nextel’s phones have pathetic battery life

This discovery comes as news to me. I’ve been doing daily mobile phone news for a year and a half, but did not know that most of Nextel’s phones offer up a meager 2-3 day standby time. And this is the advertised standby… AKA exaggerated.

I got my hands on a couple of Motorola i830s today, but they only last 2 hours of talking or 2 days of not talking. For not having a huge screen or anything to really suck the juice, this is pretty lame. If you can live with the battery it’s a solid phone–very small and well built. Having a GPS in a phone is cool, but I couldn’t get it to see the satellites (to be fair I only tried about 3 minutes). I don’t know enough people with Nextel to make DirectConnect much fun but a lot of people seem to get use out of it.

I can’t rag on bad battery life too much though because FedEx is bringing me a Sony Ericsson K700 this week. It has better battery life than the i830, but it’s no champ. At least there is a large screen and camera to suck away the juice. I’ll be posting a full review of the K700 on MobileTracker, so if you have any questions about it please send them my way via the comments. The K700 is the successor to the T630 which is the successor to the T610 (still being sold in the US)… It will be awhile before a US carrier picks it up.