Blackberry Bold 9650 Smartphone Battery Problem

There are a couple of small complaints about the new Blackberry Bold 9650 SmartPhone. The most common one I came across in my review of the blackberry 9650 was the short battery life. I've decide before I buy my new phone I'd investigate how to solve this issue.

Standard Battery Pack

As a way of quick review I'd say about 15% of the Con's in the reviews I read in researching this phone suggested it needed a better battery. While that's a pretty large number it is not out of line with similar SmartPhones. In other words, to some extent when a phone is also your pocket PC, MP3 Player, Camera etc, it will use lots of juice.

While I don't know the use profile of the persons complaining, it is a fairly high number of people making the same observation. The standard battery for the phone comes with a 1400 mAh Lithium Battery. The advertised specs for usage are 'Up to 300 minutes of talk time or standby: Up to 312 hours'.

That's about 5 hours of talking.  There is no indication how long it would last if you played music or ran applications on the desktop. Probably because it depends on which application you ran and how often it access the CPU or memory etc.

I don't know about you but 5 hours on the phone in a day does happen sometimes. I suspect if you are making multiple calls and text or using data along with media playing, it could quickly drop to some fraction of that quoted 5 hours.

I have found 2 possible solutions...

Extra Battery Solution

You could buy an extra battery, keep it charged and carry it around. For about $25 you can get a second battery. If you phone goes dead, just swap it out. Problem solved!

Extended Life Battery

The second option is to purchase an extended life battery. Seidio offers a 2600mAh extended life battery for the Blackberry 9650. (It is the same one that fits into the Blackberry 9630) That's almost 2x the capacity. The cost is like $60.

Extended Vs. Extra

While the extra battery is cheaper, there is one downside...to replace the battery you will need to power down the unit. This means rebooting the OS and swapping it out. Plus there is the wear and tear issue. Each time you open and disconnect/reconnect the battery there is potential for wear and breakage. For my money the $35 you save is not worth the risk to the unit and aggravation it would cause. I'm upgrading to the large battery.

If by chance you didn't find the right solution, you can check out our cell phone & accessories portal. Lots more ideas from other solutions to accessories. (If you find something you like...please let us know! Others may benefit from your experiences.) Thanks for visiting and check back soon.