JoltVib

Verizon LTE

Verizon LTE performance has been a little spotty in the San Francisco Bay Area, so my results were all over the place, but speeds were pretty great nonetheless: I got anywhere from 6Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds all the way to 25Mbps down and 19Mbps up when the network felt like giving it to me. In reality, the extra speed came in handy all the time, with web pages often completely loaded by the time the browser finished rendering, the ability to zoom in on Google Maps satellite images without a delay, and push email that literally arrived over ten seconds before it hit my 3G devices, every single time.

Of course, as we've seen time and again, the Achilles' heel of a speedy LTE connection is substantially reduced battery life. I took a Droid 4 from 100 percent charge down to 20 percent with four hours of heavy use (GPS navigation, gaming, downloading and installing apps) and drained it dry three hours of casual use after that. On our Verge Battery Test, which loops a series of 100 popular websites and high-res images with the phone set to 65 percent brightness, the Droid 4 lasted only three hours and 56 minutes before giving up the ghost.

Interestingly, though, it's only active usage that drains the battery that quickly and the phone actually holds a charge pretty well: just sitting on my desk, receiving push email, a second Droid 4 lasted over two days on a charge.

You'll want an extra charger at work if you're a heavy user, for sure, but if you forget to plug the Droid 4 in at night you won't necessarily find it dead in the morning like some other phones. Don't count on swapping batteries, though: for some inexplicable reason, you'll need a pin and a Torx T-5 screwdriver to remove the cover and pull it out, and you'll also be voiding your warranty to do so. Interestingly, there's also a set of four golden pins beneath the cover which don't connect to anything yet: they're probably just for the inductive charging kit, but it'd be neat if case manufacturers figure out a way to build an external battery instead.

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