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With a 1300mAh battery powering the Alcatel One Touch 990, we weren't expecting days on end of use from this Android smartphone. Nonetheless, we have to say we found the battery life on the poor side.
Let's qualify that a bit: you can go for about a day and a half with moderate use - browsing, listening to music and whatnot - if you haven't got the various data services enabled. What you can't do is use services such as AccuWeather or Twidroyd and expect to get more than a day out of the phone between charges.
We're not talking heavy, extravagant use here either – on one of our test days, we did just a little web browsing and made nine minutes of calls, and our battery was flat before the next morning.
A bout of thrashing the battery seems to indicate that the problem lies with an inability to manage the power consumption of certain tasks when the phone's on standby.
One thing you can do is use the Battery Saver app to kill off power-munching tasks before putting the phone to sleep, but that's a fiddle.
Still, many modern smartphones are similarly power hungry, so it's not a major downer. Just make sure you take the charge cable with you when you're travelling around.
