LIVE TEST: HTC Desire Mugen Extended Battery 3200mAh Review

It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for. Will the Mugen Power battery make much of a difference when compared to the stock HTC one? Will buying a non-phone-branded battery be the right choice?

As I have previously mentioned I am always very sceptical about non-branded or ‘generic’ batteries which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I was contacted by @MugenBatteries who wanted me to test drive their Desire extended battery. So sure they are of their battery they shipped one over for me to test out and review.

Now the battery is obviously slightly larger than the original battery. It sticks out 5mm from the back of the phone hence it comes with a new back to put on your Desire. This encloses the battery nicely and is the same material as the rest of your Desire – a ‘grippy’ plastic.

After 5 days of patient prepping, the battery is now ready to go through it’s test and I will see how long I can make it last with normal use of my HTC Desire. I have downgraded my Desire from Gingerbread 2.3 back to Froyo 2.2 to make this as fair a test as possible. You may recall in previous tests that I managed to get a full 14 hours out of the battery and still have 34% remaining. Will the 2x+ capacity of the Mugen Power battery really last twice as long?

Let’s find out.

Here’s the setup:

Fully charged at 9am.
Screen: Medium brightness (auto brightness off)
WiFi: ON (Wireless N enabled but will not be used at work as we currently only have 802.11b/g)
Syncing: ON (2 Gmail accounts and FriendStream – see below)
Bluetooth: OFF
GPS: OFF
FriendStream: ON (Twitter updating every 15 minutes and Facebook every 1 hour)
Wallpaper: Live – HTC default
All other settings have been left at the Froyo 2.2 default

To make things easy to compare I will put my previous results in square brackets so you can compare the ‘new’ to ‘old’ battery readings. Remember; the old battery is the stock HTC one.

9:00 – 100% As I put in my Mugen battery into the phone, sweat is pouring off my face. Will it last all day or will I be left stranded by mid-afternoon?

11:00 – 96% [92% in previous test] Already you can see the improvement. I do think however that the ‘initial rundown’ of the battery happens quicker during the first few hours of use so I think we should see it slow down over the rest of the day. The phone has just had general use, the usual music on the way to work, texts and e-mails.

12:00 – 95% [N/A in previous test] Well I’ve only lost a single percent in an hour! Not bad at all! A fair bit of usage too – WordPress and e-mails.

13:00 – 92% [88% in previous test] I’ve been using my phone quite heavily during my lunch hour and have only lost 3% battery which isn’t bad at all. When you compare this to my original battery test running Eclair (I was down to 80% battery at this point) you can already see the benefits of Froyo and the extended battery.

14:00 – 90% [78% in previous test] The battery is still looking pretty healthy. When compared to the stock battery I already have an extra 12% battery left. Go Mugen! Go!

15:00 – 88% [N/A in previous test] Only lost a couple of percent this hour. I must admit I’m getting quite used to the HTC Sense ROM again – I feel like I’m ‘home’. Don’t get me wrong, the Gingerbread ROM I had was nice and speedy but the HTC Sense just feels more ‘solid’.

16:00 – 88% [N/A in previous test] Wow, this isn’t a typo – an hour has passed and I still have 88% remaining in the battery! I’ve used it for a couple of e-mails but nothing else so that might explain it. It’s good that the standby usage is quite low.

17:00 – 86% [60% in previous test] Well this shows it all. I’m up 26% when compared with the original battery. This is looking great and shows you would quite easily survive ‘the day’ without worrying about charging your phone. It’ll be interesting to see the graph of results when I compare the two batteries. I’ll keep updating throughout the night (and more thank likely tomorrow) to keep you updated.

18:00 – 84% [N/A in previous test]

19:00 – 80% [46% in previous test] Well I have nearly 50% more battery with the Mugen in place which is fantastic news. Even though I’ve just done a 20 minute workout with the “Multi Reps” app (which keeps the screen on when in use) you can see I’ve still got plenty of juice left.

20:00 – 79%  [N/A in previous test]

21:00 – 77%  [N/A in previous test] Well, it’s been 12 hours now and my Mugen Extended Battery has only lost 23% of it’s charge. That’s less than a quarter! If my calculations are correct then that means the battery could last up to 48 hours of “constant” use. I say “constant” because obviously the phone has been used during this 12 hour shift. Overnight the phone will not be syncing or being used at all so the drainage should be very little. We’ll see how things are in 12 hours from now… PS – I actually had my GPS (location) active until about an hour ago. Although I hadn’t used Google Maps at all, the GPS may have kicked in from time to time – who knows but it doesn’t seemed to have caused too much of an issue battery-wise.

23:00 – 74% [34% in previous test] OK last update of the night. As you can tell, it’s been a huge success! I’m starting to wonder how long it’ll actually last without a charge. Most the weekend as well? Surely not?!

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DAY 2

14:00 - Nearly 30 hours online!

09:00 – 69% – Well, 24 hours on and I’ve still got nearly three quarters of the battery remaining. Overnight the phone was left on but all features were turned off. All that was active was the cellular network. So it looks like you’ll lose around 5% of the battery life if the phone is not being used for 9 hours or so – not bad at all.

14:00 – 54% Still more than half my battery remaining and the phone has been on and active for nearly 30 hours – not bad going at all!

23:00 – 34% Well after a fairly decent afternoon’s worth of usage I’ve lost 20% of the battery. I did some video recording, photography and also used the GPS a bit so it’s fair game. It looks like I’m going to get a good 48 hours out of this.

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DAY 3

09:00 28% – Well I didn’t think I’d see the battery last this long! Let’s see how far it can get me through Sunday. Bearing in mind Mugen recommend not to run the battery ’til it’s flat I will probably take it out at around 5% remaining.

18:08 – 5% – Well it’s time to call it a day (or 3?!). The battery has lasted so well today when I really though it would give in. A day spent texting e-mailing and even listening to music and it lasted until the early evening. If I had been anal I could have carried on with battery but used my battery saving tips to extend it as long as possible but no, I thought I’d give the Mugen battery a well earnt rest in my charging dock.

The only niggle I had with the extended battery over the 3 days was when I had the phone on a desk and tried to use the buttons on the bottom of the phone. As the protruding cover makes the phone slightly raised I found using the buttons a bit more difficult. Because they aren’t capacitive like the Nexus One, the phone would tip when I pressed one of them. I tend the use the phone like this if while I’m at work or eating my breakfast but this really isn’t an issue you should be worried of.

Oh and here’s the main proof that my phone was left unplugged and away from power for so long:

It goes to show that Mugen really do make damn-good batteries.

So, to sum up whether you should buy one of these or not: if you have an HTC Desire – you’d be stupid not to.

You can buy a Mugen Extended 3400mAh battery for your HTC Desire by clicking here.

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[Update] I thought I’d include my Battery Saving Tips video now you’ve read through this article. It’ll show you how to save even more power when using your phone

 

 

 

Tags: battery, Desire, extended, hands-on, hd, HTC, live, mugen, power, review, specs, test