I had the Samsung Galaxy S2 for three days but had to send it back because of unacceptable battery life, which only seems to affect some users. Below is a summary of my experience with the phone with its upsides and downsides.

Battery Life

Even with everything that makes the phone attractive turned off, the screen brightness kept down, 3G almost permanently off, WiFi only on when I was actively using it and all the battery saving options settings maxed out  (which are very extensive and helpful) I was still getting considerably less than a day on a full charge with normal light usage. I consciously did a full day with “normal” and not “excited new toy testing” usage and it was still unacceptably bad. I might have been just able to scrape by on this but I still can’t accept it — I want to be able to use the phone, and that means not constantly worrying about whether I can do something because of how much battery it might munch.

There seems to be a serious issue with battery life on the S2 for some users but not for others. Many are reporting outstanding battery performance, getting through nearly two days on a charge, others are having the same experience as I did. This may be related to the Android build. I had the KE2 Gingerbread build on mine, KE7 is supposed to be better. I couldn’t test that because O2 Germany had locked out updates on the handset and I didn’t want to root the phone within my narrow return window. I also didn’t want to risk waiting and no longer being able to return it. However, other users reporting the KE2-related problems were also reporting that Android System was accounting for over 40% of the battery drain and that definitely wasn’t the case for me, mine was just at around 14%, which sounds pretty normal.

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