HTC One (M8) with Windows Phone (WP) operating system has been leaked for a while now, but no one gave those leaks much credit. HTC surprised most of us by launching the device yesterday. They basically took HTC One (M8) and replaced Android OS with the Windows Phone OS. The device kept its specifications and those features which are not tied into their Sense UI, like BlinkFeed for example. DuoCamera is still on there as well, whether you like or hate it. So you still get that beautiful 5-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) LCD3 display, 2GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 801 along with the other specifications from the Android version of the device.
Interesting battery-related information popped up which indicates that the Windows Phone variant of the device has a significantly better battery life despite the fact they have the same battery capacity. Both of these devices are sporting a 2,600mAh battery and yet HTC (and Verizon) claim WP variant has up to 21 hours of usage time while the Android version’s listing says the battery can last (only) up to 12 hours of usage time. Similar data can be found if you look at the standby time, though the difference is not that noticeable. WP version of the phone is listed for up to 15.5 days of standby time compared to the 12.2 days listed for Android version. These are some significant differences, especially if you look at the usage time. We should wait for the devices to get a proper test in real life of course, but if the results are even nearly comparable to the listed numbers, we could say WP has a lot better battery management than Android. Of course, these are two completely different operating systems and Android is significantly more capable of the two, so if we consider everything it should suck more battery life than Windows Phone, but this is just too much of a difference.
As you probably already know, Google announced “Project Volta” at this year’s Google I/O. According to the Ars Technica’s test, Project Volta from the Android “L” Developer Preview increased Nexus 5’s battery life by 36%. Note that this is not the final version of Android “L” though, so these numbers might be eve better when Google launches the final version of the OS. Is it possible Windows Phone has so much better power management than Android at the moment? Either way, we eagerly expect Google to launch Android “L” and along with it all the power management improvements.
