Spotlight on the Photon’s Battery Life and Music Features

It has been just over two weeks since I’ve divulged my thoughts into written words here at the Spotlight but I’m finally seeing a crack of light from my hectic day job.   Now that I have a second to breath let’s get caught up.  With so many features and so little time my brain wrestled with which ones to focus on in this round and I eventually landed on the following, enjoy!

Battery Life

For those of you that had the opportunity to follow my posts on the EVO 3D you will recall that I was really impressed with how improved the battery life was over the previous generation of smartphones, so much so that it was the first device that I didn’t purchase an extended battery for.  The Photon doesn’t disappoint either and I’m actually finding that the battery life surpasses the EVO 3D.  For consistency sake here is the battery life view I provided for the 3D updated with what I’ve observed from the Photon:

Photon:

    1.  Consistent 3G/4G Data Use (Pandora, Twitter, Web, etc.)-     5-5 1/2 hours
    2.  Consistent Multimedia Content Use (Netflix, movies, etc. )-   4 hours
    3.  WiFi Data Use (Pandora, Twitter, Web, etc.)-                          Full Day
    4.  Avg Voice/Text use with Syncs set at 15 min intervals-           Full Day
    5.  Standby, minimal checks, with Syncs set at 15 min intervals-  Full Day (~70% battery life left)

EVO 3D:

    1.  Consistent 3G/4G Data Use (Pandora, Twitter, Web, etc.)-     4-5 hours
    2.  Consistent Multimedia Content Use (Including 3D content)-  2-3 hours
    3.  WiFi Data Use (Pandora, Twitter, Web, etc.)-                          Full Day
    4.  Avg Voice/Text use with Syncs set at 15 min intervals-           Full Day
    5.  Standby, minimal checks, with Syncs set at 15 min intervals-  Full Day (half battery life left)

Standby battery life is what I’m most impressed with, many nights I’ve left the Photon off the charger and battery levels are only slightly diminished from the previous night’s charge.   Another nice surprise is the lack of battery drain from a 4G data connection.  After several tests of leaving my 4G toggle on I’m getting roughly the same battery life performance as a 3G connection.  I would still recommend connecting to WiFi when you can as even greater battery performance can be expected but it isn’t a must like I’ve experienced with some of my other high res touch screen devices.

Music Features

Music is admittedly one of the main features that I leverage on a device.  Doubletwist to date is my best app friend and one of the reasons why I didn’t initially bother to fully vet out the native music features on the Photon.  With that said I will give you my Doubletwist plug and say if you are a convert from Apple to Android Doubletwist needs to be on your initial download list.  It provides all of the same music amenities that you are used to with iTunes without being subject to the overbearing fruit empire.  I can’t believe I’m saying this but once you are ready for a more feature loaded interface jump over to the native apps on the Photon:

Music- Not your usual music playing application, this thing is hopped up with the ability to not only play your music files but also access FM radio, internet radio, and a whole host of podcasts via podcast.com.   The music player has a ton of nice features under what Motorola is calling Live Music settings.  Live Music is accessible by clicking on a circled “i” icon located on the album artwork of the artist you are grooving to.  Selecting the icon brings you to a pop up screen where you can read the artist’s bio, related news, upcoming events, view photos, find similar artists, and search for the playing song’s music videos available on Youtube.  A feature that blew me away was the active lyric option.  Once selected in the Live Music settings lyrics for the playing track will appear under the title of the song or you can double tap the lyrics and a dedicate screen showing all the lyrics will appear.  Gone are the days of singing “Excuse while I kick this guy” when Jimmy Hendrix meant “Excuse me while I kiss the sky”. . . .

Zumocast-  Zumocast is Motorola answer to cloud based services allowing you to stream music, videos, and view documents from an associated desktop or laptop computer.  You will be required to download Zumocast through the Android Market place to your device and then to the computer of your choice through Zumocast’s website.   I would love to share more about the service but I can’t, my computer won’t let me.  I have to assume that my progress was blocked by Sprint’s friendly firewalls so I will have to bid adieu to the application. I probably wouldn’t have used it anyway because the Photon has so much fricken memory I simply store anything I would want to view directly on the device.

Well now that you have had your Spotlight fix you can sustain yourself for another week in your day to day life.   I’m getting pretty close to wrapping up my review of the Photon so if there are any areas of interest you would like to see highlighted voice your interest now or be doomed to keep your trap shut for eternity.    Until next time!