HTC Thunderbolt: Why do I have serious text messaging and battery problems?

Question

I just bought a Verizon HTC Thunderbolt Android phone. My battery lasts just 3 or 4 hours... the phone has to basically be plugged all the time. Any suggestions on how to improve this situation? Also, I have problems receiving text messages... i only receive the first few words of each message. Have you experienced similar problems? Thanks

Answer 1

Regarding the battery, there's an LTE toggle on the market which might help. You can find a blog post about it here. This is a major culprit, and from what I've seen there's no native way to disable LTE as you can WiMAX on Sprint's phones (I don't own an Thunderbolt, I've just been reading about them so I'm not sure how accurate this is). That being said, battery life has been a pretty common complaint with the Thunderbolt thus far.

For text messages you could try a new SMS client and see if it helps. Handcent seems to be the popular choice (I'm a fan of it), but there's also some others like ChompSMS or Go SMS. It may be an issue you'd need to bring up with Verizon, though, if the problem persists across SMS clients.

Answer 2

To fix the SMS problems, rip out the battery for a few seconds, and put it back in. That should (usually) solve the problem. My Thunderbolt had some really weird issues with SMS when I first brought it home.

The Thunderbolt includes a toggle widget to turn automatic data sync on or off, which is very handy if you don't really need every single application checking constantly - that includes a bunch of HTC widgets that you can't remove, and is the primary reason the battery dies so quickly.

I ended up switching my phone to 3G mode most of the time, using an app called Phone Info, which does the same thing as the LTE toggle app. That really helps with battery life - and Verizon's 3G network is pretty fast, so when I'm on the go I don't really notice the difference.