First full day with Windows Phone 7 and only that

Despite Google Voice continual refusal to work with my AT&T pre-paid number, I decided that today will be a good day to try using my Windows Phone 7 exclusively for the day. My wife, Leah, is still in the UK and my parents who are visiting me here in NY will be with me all day. So no one in particular should be calling me, and I set the call forwarding on my iPhone to the LG.

Battery Life

I set out at 10AM with around 70% charge in the LG. By lunchtime, I knew things are not going to be good. I got the battery critically low warning around 1:45pm mark and I was expecting the phone to run out of juice before 3pm. Amazingly, it lasted till 3:30pm before it shut itself off. So that’s about 5.5 hours of usage with approximately 70% charge. Some quick maths will show you that if I have 100% charged battery at the beginning, it will only last around 8.5 hours in total. And how long I was out today? 12 hours, which even a child with basic maths skill can tell you is longer than 8.5.

Now, how much did I use my phone during that 5.5 hours? I checked Twitter, checked into Foursquare a few times, use the Bing map couple of times, took 2 pictures, read a few emails. Really, that was all. No phone calls. No text. I do have two emails accounts setup to check for new emails on interval. One at 15 minutes, another on 1 hour. All of these are extremely comparable to my day-to-day iPhone usage.

Someone tweeted me about Mango being better with battery life. I certainly hope so. My question is, how much improvement will it has? Percentages? Factors? Order of magnitude? Because to match my iPhone 4, the LG + WP7 combo must be at least 3-4X better using the battery.

So for the moment, I cannot use the LG as my day-to-day phone unless I know I can be within range of a charger every 4-5 hours.

Other weirdness/observations

Using my WP7 today as my sole phone, I noticed a few other things that escape me last week:

• Most apps don’t ‘tombstone’ well. For example, both Birdsong and 4th & Mayor take you back to the first screen instead of the screen you were at when switching out the app. Look, I don’t care for full multi-tasking like the Android users do, but I do care that faux-multitasking works for me.
• 4th & Mayor decides to lose my Foursquare login and needed me to re-login. Not a big deal until I realized my password is generated by 1Password so I don’t even know what it is. So I had to go through steps of resetting password with Foursquare, then login from within 4th & Mayor. And because I need to set a password that I can remember, it is far weaker than the old one. Thanks very much for that.
• Birdsong decided around lunch time to fail to post any tweets from me. No explanation apart from ‘Oopps, not working. Please trying again later.’ Ok, so is it because I hit Twitter’s rate limit? Or some other reasons?
• The phone, also around lunch time, decided to not able to browse any URL at all. Rebooting the phone fixed it. Great.
• Even though the setting for the camera button to wake the phone even in sleep is set to ‘On’, it didn’t work. Ever, at all. Fantastic.

Snarky comment: iPhone battery is non-replaceable. LG has a replaceable battery. Guess I do need a replaceable battery as I need a spare one to last my day!

Snarky comment #2: So the way Windows Phone 7 saves us from our phones is by… running out of battery before all the others smartphones and leave you with nothing to use.

Snarky comment #3: Microsoft and Windows Phone 7, thank you for making me unable to check into all these places I visited today on Foursquare, or unable to read tweets from my friends, or emailed my wife in the UK, or make notes in Evernote. I felt so connected and useful this afternoon, not.